There is no Czech artist or graphic designer who has so deeply influenced the appearance of music albums that have flashed their way around the globe. The collaboration between ECM Records and Jan Jedlička has been going on for thirty years and is featured in the Jedlička retrospective at the Municipal Library.
As a publicist, Pavel Klusák focuses mainly on music, sound and their social contexts. He also publishes articles on contemporary art. His programmes are regularly broadcast by Czech Radio Vltava. As a dramatic adviser, he leads festival projects for the Ji.hlava IDFF and GASK Kutná Hora. His latest book Uvnitř banánu [Inside of a Banana] (Fra, 2021) examines the relativity of values in music through both fictional and real stories. He is the editor-in-chief of Qartal.
There are music labels whose graphic design quickly makes it clear that they are not only concerned with music, that the publisher’s conception is informed by ideas, feelings and cultural societies which, along with the music, can be projected into the art form, into the accompanying texts; and even grow into a catalogue as a story of interrelated references. Such labels have the potential to affect the wider cultural public through their literary and film references and through their ties to traditional cultures as well as to avant-garde movements. Jan Jedlička became part of this enterprise when he met producer Manfred Eicher in the late 1980s.
The Most Beautiful Sound Next to Silence
Eicher has been managing ECM Records (Editions of Contemporary Music) since 1969. To briefly characterise this groundbreaking label is to say that it helped to find the identity of European jazz and very quickly went “above genres”, combining jazz improvisation with elements of chamber music and traditional cultures. It provided space to key American personalities (such as Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett), discovered for the world a number of great names (Jan Garbarek, Pat Metheny, Bill Frisell…). In the early 1980s, it added classical music to its portfolio: to this day, the great minimalists Meredith Monk and Arvo Pärt premiere their music in the classical music series called the ECM New Series.
It quickly became clear that the visual art side of the label’s music media would be both bold and connected, conceptual in fact. Designer Barbara Wojirsch made her mark on the label with her use of drawings and typeface, her exuberant style sometimes showing the inspiration of Cy Twombly; Dieter Rahm, another of their leading graphic artists, also contributes photographs that almost never have a direct connection with the musical content. “There’s always something mysterious about a landscape without a human,” Eicher says of the scenes he chooses for his covers.
The graphic side of ECM, with its decades of variation, also has its critics: the purity and aestheticism are said to distract from concrete reality. But the label, which has never lost its independence during the fifty years of its existence, takes care to move in the interspaces rather than at the poles. The exhibition projects and book monographs of ECM (Windfall Light: The Visual Language of ECM or Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM) draw on visuals easily, extensively and convincingly.
A Shark’s Fin of Light
When Jan Jedlička was working on his film Echo Vocis Imago in the late 1980s, he very much wanted Arvo Pärt’s music to be played in it. He actually made a trip to Berlin and rang the doorbell of this Estonian exile, who was experiencing the first decade of his global fame at the time. Pärt looked at Jedlička from behind his hermit’s beard and said after a while: “You can come in.”
Jan Jedlička showed him some of his work: photographs, paintings and drawings, which he would leave his Swiss home to create, mainly in Maremma, a region in southern Tuscany. Pärt studied them intently, but frowned at the mention of film music: Ich bin kein Stravinsky, I don’t write film music to order! He reportedly said. However, he declared that he had to think it over and with those words he parted from his Czech colleague. At his next meeting with Manfred Eicher, he showed the producer and moving spirit of ECM Jedlička’s books and reproductions. By doing so, he did more for Jedlička than if he had consented to compose the film music.
Eicher, who approves the artistic appearance of each ECM album, soon contacted Jedlička. First, he immediately ordered ten or fifteen copies of his books from him (which he then distributed to “his” musicians) and he was also interested in cooperating with Jedlička. On the first title they made jointly, there is a “Shark’s Fin of Light”, a triangular light shape on the shadowed wall of a house in Maremma: originally, it is a photodocumentary snapshot from the film Echo Vocis Imago in which Jedlička records the movement of light on a wall using time-lapse photography. The black- and-white scene, satisfactorily empty and referring to something outside itself, fits into Manfred Eicher’s vision: reduction, an abstract constellation that can refer to both micro- and macro-levels, the landscape as “the inner landscape” (this is Eicher’s own expression). The photo was used on the cover of viola concerts by Alfred Schnittke and a Georgian composer, Giya Kancheli, released in 1992.
Basilica
The cooperation had begun. It lasts to this day. Jan Jedlička and Manfred Eicher meet now and again; Eicher looks at his new work and makes his choice. It is characteristic of the ECM concept that photographs, paintings and drawings are equally usable. Exported stills from films are also used: for example, this is how the disturbing and solemn scene of grass-burning froze into a photo cover for the album From The Green Hill by trumpeter Tomasz Stańko.
Jan Jedlička himself, who is satisfied with the collaboration, does not influence which of his works Eicher chooses and with which music he connects it. For the Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM book monograph, he made this comment: “I came to realize and respect the fact that ECM is a creation of Manfred Eicher’s personality, his intuition. The way he looks at pictures and listens to music. This makes me always very curious to see what he has chosen.” Sometimes there is closer communication: during the publication of Leoš Janáček’s complete piano works, performed by András Schiff, the producer asked the artist to provide photographs of the Czech landscape. Inside the booklet, there is thus a series of pictures that Jan Jedlička took as a student in 1963, before emigrating. Photographs from another time and place resonate with the title of the whole album (after Janáček’s composition) A Recollection, i.e. a Memory.
The photo study of the architecture of St. George’s Basilica at Prague Castle, originating from Jedlička’s Basilica series, ended up on one of the few truly Czech ECM titles: on a recording by the Prague Philharmonic Choir with choir master Josef Pančík (the repertoire consisting of music by Dvořák, Suk and Eben). This painting evokes the mid-1990s, when Jan Jedlička was first being more widely discovered in the Czech Republic. In addition to exhibiting his works at Prague Castle (at that time seemingly self-evidently open to culture and the public) for his project he also photographed and filmed places where the light falls which are precisely oriented by the old architecture of St. George’s Basilica.
Winter Journey to an Intuitive View
In 1996, ECM started to publish books because of Jedlička. The first volume is his photographic series A Winter Journey to the Sea. Of this project, Jedlička writes: “I took the train from Basel to the Hague, with a few brief stopovers, between the 5th and 8th of February, 1995. At the time, I was reading some texts by Vilém Flusser on the philosophy of photography and the emergent age of technical images. Wishing to put certain theoretical assertions or insights to the test of personal experience, I brought along a Nikon AF automatic camera and a roll of black and white film. I was interested in exploring my own cursory ways of seeing during the journey, and the role played by the camera. The series of paintings is arranged chronologically in the book and no selection was made.”
The photo book, which represents a single exposed film from start to finish without any intervention by the author, is de facto a polemic with Flusser: it shows that the authorial style of experienced photographers, their personal view, does not disappear completely, even when they press the shutter instinctively. “I was testing,” the author recalls, “what’s left of me when I eliminate a number of variables: composition, for example – at the speed of the train you’re shooting from, it’s not possible to compose an image in the usual way.” When he reached the sea, Jan Jedlička took – no longer from the train – three pictures from the shore as the conclusion. The last of the pictures appeared on the cover of Jan Garbarek’s album Visible World. Of the albums with “Jedlička’s covers”, the four albums by the Norwegian saxophonist are among the most successful titles: they have spread the artist’s vision of the landscape in hundreds of thousands of multiples around the world.
Movement in Landscapes (of Beethoven)
The specific story is related to the use of cartographic drawings. Producer Manfred Eicher discovered at Jedlička’s extensive exhibition at the Josef Albers Museum in Bottrop, a series of outdoor drawings that Jedlička created while walking in the countryside. He walked about two kilometres and gradually drew “things that are not visible at a glance”. Since the individual drawings capture the changing state of a single place in time (and transformations, such as the temporary saturation of the countryside with water, can be observed well), Eicher read the drawings as a kind of score and suggested that they be used as a series. Eight cartographic drawings thus accompanied, in their movement, an edition in eight volumes of Beethoven’s piano sonatas performed by the world-class performer András Schiff (2005–2008).
Exile is a common theme for both András Schiff and Jan Jedlička. “I’m interested in the never-ending transformation,” says Jedlička of the processes in the countryside, and this is obviously a consequence of his travelling through the world, his departure from his original homeland. Schiff has experienced a number of departures: after emigrating from communist Hungary, he tried to get US citizenship but was not successful (due to long concert tours during which he was outside the United States). He later got Austrian citizenship and lived on and off in London and Salzburg.
However, he renounced his Austrian nationality in protest at the rise of the far right. Let us consider the fates of other exiles (Arvo Pärt), ECM’s support of American and post-Soviet artists suffering from poor conditions in their homelands, and also Eicher’s many years spent in Oslo and Italy where he recorded music: all of this is witness to the proximity of Jedlička’s lifelong observation of the world in motion and transformation to ECM’s ideas. When the recording of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier was being made, András Schiff proved he was not only a piano virtuoso: he wrote a short theory about colours for the recording and asked Jan Jedlička to accompany it with a visual. Jedlička – obligingly, though rather freely – provided the booklet with a polyphonic structure of vertical fields. The fifteen-colour constellation resembles Jedlička’s famous “colour swatches” – an overview of colour pigments that the artist obtains by crushing and leaching rocks found and dug up in the countryside. The whole process, essential for Jedlička and charming even after many years, is illustrated not only in Petr Záruba’s documentary Jan Jedlička: Traces of a Landscape (2020), but also in a short film made by the publishing company itself, which covered five decades of ECM’s activity with fifty portraits of the ECM50 series.
The Label as Concept and Gallery
This year is the thirtieth anniversary of ECM’s cooperative projects; the latest of their covers was published four months before the opening of the exhibition at the GHMP (with this title: András Schiff / Jörg Widmann: Johannes Brahms – Clarinet Sonatas). ECM Records, of course, collaborate with a number of original photographers, some of whom have their own distinctive features: Jean-Guy Lathuilière and his night shots featuring a thick, disorienting blue; in the images of Greek photographer, Fotini Potamia, tangles of branches and their shadows, falling impassively on the human world, repeatedly appear. Gérald Minkoff looks at landscapes that are somewhat empty: we expect something that is almost missing, something complementary to the whole, from the music inside the cover.
However, none of these artists relate to the landscape in such a continuous range of techniques as Jan Jedlička does: black-and- white photographs appear here alongside colour Polaroids, water colours and drawings. The pigment field can be as monochrome as the photographer’s view of a grey-blue sky. The direct documentary of a photograph and the author’s subjective testimony stand here side by side so self-evidently that we no longer perceive the boundary between one and the other.
In Jan Jedlička, Manfred Eicher found someone who helped him to express ECM’s identity. The Czech and European artist, on the other hand, gained a medium in ECM which, over the years, gradually, rather like the sedimentation of layers in the countryside, offers an interpretation: it explains what his work is.
Jiří Thýn’s exhibition in the House of Photography is loosely connected with an exhibition project created ten years ago, also for the GHMP, which was then on the premises of the Old Town Hall. Hana Buddeus went for a walk through time and space with an artist who, this time, is conducting a dialogue with the sculptural work of Hana Wichterlová.
Hana Buddeus is an art historian, focusing on photographs and reproductions of works of art. She works at the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences. In the last five years she has been researching photographs by Josef Sudek (sudekproject.cz). She is a member of the editorial board of Fotograf magazine and the curatorial staff of the gallery of the same name.
There was much more snow in Prague this winter than anyone can remember in recent years. Jiří was waiting for me at the metro station, not far from the former housing estate bookshop, which was transformed into a casino in the 1990s. Demolition work at the former Moskva cinema, later the Ládví multiplex cinema, took place last year, and a new supermarket is now rising up there. I wanted to find out something about it and I discovered a statement by a Penny Market spokesman for the CTK press agency from May 2020: “In the case of Ládví, as with all other Penny supermarkets, the architectural design will be prepared so that the new building fits into the surrounding environment.” OK.
A little further on, we stop at a little lake with a sculpture of pelicans, which was restored by the Ládví Group. At the beginning of the millennium, local patriots Jan Haubelt, Adéla Svobodová, Tomáš Severa and Jiří Thýn were behind the activities of this group, which brought art back to life on the housing estate. The list of their artistic achievements from the “zero” years includes, for example, Pruning Shrubs, which hid a socialist realist relief on a facade, making a Chalk Stand in the playground, and placing their original Postcards of Ládví on a local newsstand.
Tuning Comes from Within
The housing estate, consisting of blocks of prefab houses with large park areas, gradually segues into a residential development. We pass smaller blocks of flats and terraced houses, the path leading us to Ďáblice Grove. Cross-country ski tracks, frost, wind, whiteness all around. We talk about finding ways to capture a vivid gesture and thus rid the photograph of the assumption that the resulting image is always a pre-thought-out construction.
As in other interviews, Jiří returns to the photographic diptych: Composition No. 17 and Composition No. 27 from 2007. Over the course of a fortnight, he systematically photographed objects on his desk, trying to find the ideal composition. He came to the conclusion that the composition depends mainly on the current mood of the observer: “It depends on how you are positioned, not so much on the things.” Tuning in comes from within, not from outside. “Almost exactly ten years ago, Sandra Baborovská and I did an exhibition for the GHMP, which was at the Old Town Hall then. It was called Archetypes, Space, Abstraction.” At that time, I wrote this for Artlist about Jiří: “Jiří Thýn builds the photographic image, he does not enrich reality simply by choosing a different camera angle, but rather purposefully creates new reality.” Then, as a promising artist and a budding art historian, we sat in Café Indigo and smoked a packet of Start cigarettes out of nervousness at our meeting. We are ten years older; we walk through the woods and are a little bit less shy now. The topics of the conversation are identical and yet different, as are our views. Behind Jiří’s examination of the genre of photography, one feels the existential line of thought related to the limitations, to the given potential of this medium in a much clearer way today. Behind the systematicity and constructedness, we can suddenly see much more clearly the effort to find a way to work with photography with immediacy.
I’ll Borrow the Shape
In search of suitable shapes, Jiří repeatedly reaches into the history of sculpture. Although, according to him, these are random encounters, the way in which they are repeated suggests their meaning. Photographs of Spatial Composition by Katarzyna Kobro (1898–1951) reproduced in some book; a reproduction of the statue of Grands Ventres by Alina Sapocznikow (1926–1973) pinned to a notice board in his darkroom. Thýn anchors the black-and-white reproductions again in a physical space, supplementing them with coloured light, as was the case with Spatial Composition, a “simple geometric shape in shades of grey” which he reconstructed ten years ago for the exhibition at the Old Town Hall: “I liked it as a spatial solution and, at the same time, it referred to a photographic context.
I decided to do the thing there again, just to shift the scale and complement it with coloured space.” Or with direct physical action – like at the Shape, Work, and Two Fat Bellies exhibition two years ago at the Hunt Kastner Gallery –; “I developed into autonomous shapes and thematised both the abstraction and the work as such, as well as the objectivity and the site-specific installation themselves” based on a reproduction of the statue of Alina Sapocznikow’s fat bellies. We climb up to the Ďáblice Observatory. Here, we turn the dictaphone off for a while and look at the landscape.
On the way back, we talk about the upcoming exhibition at the House of Photography of the GHMP. It will probably be called Silence, Torso, Presence. The archetype for the shapes used this time is A Bud by Hana Wichterlová (1903–1990). The (non)accidental meeting of the artist with the statue took place at a recent exhibition of photographs by Josef Sudek. What fascinates us about Wichterlová today, her concentration and the fact that she produced only few works – something like slow art before it was cool – was perceived as a defect by art historian František Šmejkal even in the 1970s when he wrote about her “work unfortunately not too rich in terms of realisations” through which “she introduced the most topical problems of contemporary world sculpture into Czech art”. How will Jiří Thýn give her work space in his upcoming exhibition? “I’ll borrow the shape I get by taking photographs of her objects. Using a certain camera angle, the contours originate which I will adopt and use in my work, exposing them again.”
Beyond Thought
At that moment when we talk about the exhibition, everything is still in the process of creation. Jiří has a negotiated permit to photograph the works, he’s making sketches and thinks about three layers of the exhibition, which he calls his “modus operandi” and which he says he first used ten years ago in the exhibition Archetypes, Space, Abstraction. According to his current idea, the exhibition will consist of a massive ornamental surface – an installation of mortared plasterboard walls, photographs recording the various stages of painting on plasterboard and photograms… We return to finding a form that makes it possible to get emotions into photography. To a large extent, it is openness to chance and working with the unconscious: “I am now in a situation where the various currents are coming together, I am looking for a form that makes it possible to work with an image, whether digital or analogue, with some immediacy. I am not sure how it will work; it is largely open to some principle of chance, which will get you into something other than what you can imagine. That’s why a method associated with some kind of work with the unconscious is so important.”
Jiří ritually descends into the darkroom in the basement of his family house and plays the music of the French composer Éliane Radigue. The first synthesisers. “A strange noise, the presence of which you only realise when it is over and there is silence.” We resist diving into pathos with laughter.
František Skála, in his exhibition at the Stone Bell House, is presenting his illustrations, created since the early 1980s, for the first time. After his exhibitions at Galerie Rudolfinum and the Wallenstein Riding School of the National Gallery, which were a great success with the public, we have an opportunity to see another aspect of Skála’s poetic, mysterious work, deeply ingrained in the natural world and always unpretentiously humorous.
Zdeněk Freisleben is a curator of contemporary art and a theorist of book culture. Since 2008, he has been the director of the Museum of Czech Literature. He is the author of a number of exhibition projects dealing with text and visual art overlaps: Cosi jako kniha, Obrazy slov, Karel Teige, Písmo a znak [Something Like a Book, Word Images, Karel Teige, Typeface and Sign] etc. He is a member of the directorate of the Most Beautiful Czech Book of the Year competition and chair of the Graphics of the Year jury. He has published a number of texts on fine art and on book design.
The exhibition does not just feature about 20 books, most of them for children, illustrated by one of the best known Czech artists of recent decades. It also provides insight into how closely Skála’s profession as an illustrator is connected with his paintings, prints and sculptures, how it winds through his oeuvre like a submerged river, reflecting his various creative periods and interests. His work on the individual books, especially artist’s books, is always inextricably – and to a certain extent, inevitably – connected with the time of their inception. The illustrations reflect the artist’s view of the world, his carefully thought-out way of grasping a topic and the techniques to use, and his overall approach to creative work – being responsible, but at the same time having free rein. The exhibition begins with paintings created by Skála under his father’s guidance on the threshold between childhood and adulthood, goes through Skála’s search for himself during his studies and mature years, and ends with insight into his most recent work.
Z F Although you are presented and known primarily as a sculptor, painter, musician, dancer and the like, not much is known about your illustrations. They blend inconspicuously into your entire artistic output. Your first book illustrations, which are quite different from each other, came into being between 1983 and 1985. In 1984 you won the award for the Most Beautiful Czech Book of the Year. What did that mean for you as a stepping away from producing animated film?
F S Although I studied film, film is mostly teamwork. I prefer doing everything myself and accounting for my own work. Without compromise. At the same time, I had to support my family, and the opportunity to do it in this beautiful way, by creating illustrations, was like a dream. At that time, such work was well paid. Today I would probably opt for training as a plumber, or typing into a “puter” to eke out a living.
Z F As far as I know, you started with scientific illustrations.
F S Of course, at first I got small trial commissions, for example for the Korálky [Beads] series of fairy tales from the Albatros publishing house, or an unbearable Soviet novel for girls. The graphic designer Milan Kopřiva asked me to illustrate that book for the Mladá Fronta publishing house with small drawings of girls’ faces. It was really a “touchstone”. When I complained to him about the poor quality of the text, which I had dutifully read three times, he told me, “You weren’t supposed to read it, Mr. Skála.”
Later, I was tested on producing lifeless scientific illustrations, such as various tables and maps, and only later, on the basis of the skills demonstrated, was I able to develop my talent. The graphic designer saw to it that popular science books such as Planet Earth or Life were artistically interesting. There were always several illustrators working on them, and I later fell into a special category, which I have called “Humor in Scientific Illustration”. My images of key evolutionary moments, which had the character of old lithographs, were hard for “drier” scientists to swallow. In addition to showing the necessary “development of a more progressive mollusk species”, a dramatic scene also takes place on the coast in the background, when a convict has just been thrown down from a high pier into the sea, while a dispatch about his innocence, brought by a messenger from the ship who is rushing up the path, arrives too late.Z F In 1984, Kopřiva and you also jointly produced the book Forgotten Crafts. Among other things, he used collages with ornamentation and characteristic lettering. For those who remember those times, let us mention that Kopřiva also did the interesting graphic design of the magazine 100 + 1 zahraniční zajímavost [“A Hundred and One Interesting Things from Abroad”].
F S I must say I owe him a lot. At the crucial age when a man begins his career, he needs to get a chance to show what he can do, and if someone can appreciate it, that will encourage him to perform even better. Our collaboration was based on trust and responsibility. I think I was not under contract at first. Although I had only just completed my studies, Kopřiva treated me like a professional, and I always came away from meeting him with a sense of deep meaning. He was a kind of editor who conceived these visually attractive membership bonuses that were published in the astronomical number of 135,000 copies.
I worked on the first part of Forgotten Crafts for about seven months, three of which I spent studying in libraries. In the Museum of Czech Literature I browsed through Gothic books. The Songbook of Žlutice had just been brought there from Žlutice, where tourists had leafed through it and some of the pages were quite scuffed. I also visited old craftspeople and picked their brains, such as the saddler or the cooper in a brewery in Krušovice. I have fond memories of that. For your information, for each drawn figure of the craftsperson, of which there are about 140 in the book, I received CZK 600 in 1984.Z F What did illustrating fairy tales actually mean to you? In a way, it also means meeting a number of interesting authors. Was that your motivation?
F S It was not my motivation. At first I had no choice, but I was lucky that, with a few exceptions, I always illustrated excellent literature. When you look at the list, the books I have illustrated are really substantial works that have always resonated with my attitude toward life. As an old hippie and a “mop top” who was constantly being checked by the police, I truly enjoyed the Rootabaga Stories by Carl Sandburg, a forerunner of the Beat generation. Those fairy tales are full of various vagabonds and characters on the fringes of society, rag men, beggars like the Potato Face Blind Man, and they are very poetic – simply the best of American culture. Then there is Michael Ende’s book Momo: Or the Curious Story about the Time Thieves and the Child Who Returned the People’s Stolen Time, in which, as early as the 1970s, the author predicted the danger towards which society is heading. That should be compulsory reading at school. There is also The Brothers Lionheart by Astrid Lindgren – an adventure book in which the two child protagonists die at the beginning of the book and the rest takes place in a land beyond death, Nangijala.
Z F In 1989, your comic strip book The Great Travels of Hair and Chin was published, which has become legendary ever since. How did this happen?
F S It was the coincidence of several circumstances. In the circle of my friends, we adored the character of the Devil Doctor, a romantic villain who, as a character in comic strips or movies, existed a long time ago and still exists in many variations as the personification of evil. He lives in vampire castles, old factories, or sanatoriums like a mad scientist who wants to destroy the world, etc. Later, I realized that for us, he was also a likeable representative of supernatural forces that the comrades couldn’t compete with. I created a lithograph at school in which these devilish doctors, in an American, flashy car, are taking our “big cheeses” away in handcuffs. At the same time, however, I was fully into the deep forests, “old world creatures” and adventures with my good friends. It was at the time of the emergence of Postmodernism and the establishment of the art group Tvrdohlaví [The Stubborn Ones] that I returned to the basic sources of my inspiration in childhood. My freelance work had long since become separated from illustration, and the political situation within the framework of perestroika was ripe enough that, together with my classmate, who was an art editor at Albatros, I ventured to offer that hitherto forbidden “western” form of children’s book for publication.
The series featured creatures that I had previously created as freeform sculptures and presented at exhibitions (Big Woodpecker, Butterfly on a Flower – Škuran). The statue of Lesojan [Forest John], on the other hand, was created on the basis of his occurrence in the “Blue Forest”. In the mid-1990s, I worked for two years on its adaptation for a full-length animated film, but unfortunately it was not realized for financial reasons. The Great Travels of Hair and Chin, republished on the occasion of the exhibition, is a luxurious edition enriched with all the preparatory drawings for that film. There is a lot of new information and samples from the script.Z F You also illustrated Charles Perrault’s Tales of Mother Goose; before that, the Czech edition of this book had been illustrated by Jiří Trnka. How did that feel?
F S It is always hard to do something after someone has already done it beautifully and we like it. If one feels that it’s not possible because the illustrations are already an integral part of the work (for example, Adolf Kašpar’s illustrations of The Grandmother), then one should not do it at all. This is generally true. If the change is for the worse, then why bother? I illustrated Perrault with great gusto, though. His fairy tales may be set in history, but they leave space for one to be a bit inventive. In the case of Russian fairy tales, it’s more difficult. One has to study a lot of materials, contemporary life, institutions, and also to see the Russian illustrations. I should probably mention that my father was a painter and an illustrator in particular, and as a child I could see how much he cared in his work about the credibility of details, human types and the like. Japanese fairy tales cannot look like those from the Chodsko region [Chodenland]. When I was working on Jindřich Šimon Baar’s short stories, I went on a two-week hike to Chodsko. Some remnants of folk architecture were still to be found there.
Z F You once said that Karel Šiktanc considers you his “court artist”. How did your collaboration start?
F S I was assigned his first fairy tales, which he wrote during the totalitarian regime, by Albatros in about 1993. My fascination with Alén Diviš and Bohuslav Reynek at that time was probably reflected in the way I illustrated them. Karel Šiktanc is a living witness of the old world he experienced as a child. This means that what he writes about he knows firsthand, he does not fabricate things. He is a master of words and a guardian of the beautiful Czech language. After all, he is an outstanding poet. It is a delight to illustrate Šiktanc’s books because they are full of images that he presents so convincingly it’s possible to perceive them with all your senses, even hearing and smell. I always wonder why no director has yet made one of his fairy tales into a film. The thing is that they are almost screenplays already. Picture – dialogue – sound. Perhaps it’s easier just to shoot a hodgepodge because that pays more.
I prefer to illustrate strong atmospheres, and you have to know the situation from personal experience – to have been in the woods when the wind rises and branches fall, or to sit at night with friends around a campfire at a site of old ruins. That is something that cannot be googled.
Šiktanc’s language is sometimes difficult for young parents today, because they already speak differently. It sounds a bit outlandish to them. I’m not a supporter of “aggiornamento”, though – of adapting to the present at all cost. Children need to absorb beautiful words because then they will be able to coin their own. Z F In 2006, your extensive photographic comic strip The True Story of Cílek [Cecil] and Lída was published, photographed in a real forest environment, and it was preceded by a small book, How Cecil Found Lída [Cecil’s Quest]. As far as I know, this comic strip was the inspiration for Jan Svěrák’s film Kooky Returns [Kooky].F S Oh yes, Kooky is Pepion, who was made by my son František Antonín for his sister Alžběta to take with her to France, but we’d better not talk about it. It was an unpleasant but valuable experience of real capitalism. On the last page of Hair and Chin there are several photos taken by the penguin Michal. These are my sculptures in a real environment where I worked with the illusion of scale. From that moment I kept thinking that I should make such a story. As far as I know, no one had done anything like that until then, and afterward I understood why, because it is terrible work. I started with the Meander publishing house, but after half a year of work we could not reach an agreement, so a kind of prelude to the big book was created. As happened several times before, I was saved by Martin Souček from the Arbor vitae publishing house and was able to finish the job in due course, professionally. The book was also published in English and exhibitions of it took place in Prague, Tokyo, New York, Vienna and the Comics Museum in Brussels. I photographed the puppets in nature using an analog Nikon camera, and it was actually like making a film, with all the professions that entails, except for the fact that I did all the work myself.
I probably wouldn’t be able to do it again today because it was physically demanding, like Special Forces training. “To the bushes! Get down! Get up! Get down! Get up!” etc. I have never since experienced a season in the open air, from spring to the first frost of the fall, with such intensity, though.Z F Is there any one book that gave you extraordinary pleasure to make?
F S I’ve made each book with extraordinary pleasure. If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t do it. The important thing is that I’m not the type of artist who finds a signature style and then illustrates whatever comes that way. I approach each book as a new task. It takes me a long time to figure out how to do it, and the illustrations are always a little different. Because I’m doing a lot of other things in the meantime, I have to throw the switch and get on the right track. I set time aside for the first reading, during which I make notes about where to place illustrations, and it’s ideal to work on a book all in one go while in the countryside. One can’t go to the post office or have appointments in the meantime. When I was illustrating Baba Yaga Bony Legs, I was locked up in an isolated cottage in the snow. Just the work, some food, wood for the stove and my cat. Well, spending two years creating an artist’s book is a great pleasure, but I can only afford it because I make my living from my fine art.
Z F Vratislav Brabenec is the author of much of the lyrics for the group Plastic People of the Universe. He also edited, for example, texts from the Old and New Testaments and texts by Ladislav Klíma. He collaborated with you on his book Legends and Lines.
F S Vratislav’s writing is great. There is a lot of lived wisdom and humor in it. Vratislav and Richard Pecha, who publishes his texts at the Vršovice 2016 publishing house, wanted me to create eight drawings, but I made about 40 to choose from. In the end, they used almost all of them. Often they just touch on the text, forming a funny connection with it. This is how we proceeded, for example, in the poetry anthology Kaloty by the B. K. S. group (acronym for “The End of the World is Coming”), published in Revolver Revue. I made a bunch of proposals, which we then assigned to the poems as we saw fit. In the book The Great Guardian by the Commander of the Order of the Green Ladybird, Jiří Olič, I was just given defined thematic areas – about actors, jazz, firefighters, Native Americans, teachers, etc. Z F You have also participated in bibliophile editions.
F S The bibliophile editions are a continuation of the work on the original prints. A few years ago, I returned to this kind of graphic art after taking a break from it for 20 years, and I made 16 dry points in six months. I could have continued, but something else attracted my attention. Endless, enticing horizons open up everywhere.
Z F I will go back to Jostein Gaarder’s Frog Castle, which you created using unusual collages. Was that because of the nature of the book?
F S The Norwegian writer Jostein Gaarder wrote the bestseller Sophie’s World: A Novel about the History of Philosophy for teenagers, for which I made the cover. The Frog Castle is a surreal story with perfect knowledge of the child’s soul. The mixed media with collages was a suitable technique. At that time I was intensely involved in the beauty of autumn leaves, which were reflected both in my noncommissioned art and in this book. There is a scan of a frog’s real skin on the cover, and inside the book are the pancakes that are talked about there.
Z F From your illustrations it is obvious that you have read the books and subordinated the character of the illustrations accordingly.
F S Yes – for example, for The Borrowers by Mary Norton, a book set in Victorian England, I learned to do cross-hatching with a pen for black and white illustrations in order to approximate the techniques used in those days. It’s like when responsible actors prepare for their roles.
Z F I should probably have asked this question at the beginning, but I believe it has its place at the end as well. In your illustrations, you use a number of artistic techniques. Which are they? Which do you prefer?
F S I opt for a technique based on the topic and nature of the illustrations. The most common is probably watercolor in combination with crayons. Sometimes it’s totally mixed media, as in Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories, where I used everything – watercolor, oil, pencil, crayon and collage. In Šiktanc’s Candlestick Castle it’s watercolor, charcoal and oil. Or just the charcoal wash technique, such as for his Royal Fairy Tales. Black and white illustrations, on the other hand, can be done in pen and ink, pencil, or ink wash. Or maybe using frottage, like in Momo. The original technique of scurography, where the negative is drawn in pencil on tracing paper and subsequently developed like a photograph, was appropriate for The Brothers Lionheart.
Z F So far I have not mentioned your diaries, excerpts from which have also been published. In fact, they are contemporary illustrations of your life. Do you still keep a diary?
F S I started keeping diaries, of which there are currently at least 90, in the 1990s, starting with the Venetian Diary at the 1993 Venice Biennale. However, my very first diary is from 1992, when at the Expo in Seville, Michal Cihlář and I found a notebook that we divided in half between the two of us. He was constantly writing down something at the time, and because he got on my nerves by doing that, I started doing the same.
The travel diaries are, of course, more artistically attractive, full of collected materials and experiences. The everyday ones are practical, because by the end of the week you don’t remember what you were doing anymore, let alone 10 years afterwards. What I am working on is also reflected there. The enthusiasm and disappointment. If someone makes me angry, I give them a piece of my mind there. What I like the most, though, is how the cover of these little books becomes gradually decorated and patinated over the course of about a month.
Other illustrations of my life are the photos taken with my favorite little Lumix camera. However, I try not to take too many of them.Z F The exhibition begins with your early paintings, on the threshold between childhood and adulthood, and ends with examples of your current work. Have you ever published your beginning works before?
F S Most artists do not do this, so as not to “reveal themselves”. I, on the contrary, like best to see the marginal or the “pajama” drawings of the masters, not the artworks that just reproduce their “brand”, which can be recognized by any yokel. Of course, I have selected the palatable ones. Under the motto “the master is searching for himself”, I needed to deal with different styles. These works were exhibited in the 1970s at the exhibitions in our back room at home, and there are hand-made samizdat catalogues accompanying them. I have to say that it is only when I see them together that I realize the connections between them.
My current work represents my passion of the last three years – paintings made mostly using natural pigments that I collected in the countryside. It will be interesting to see my different approach in comparison with that of Jan Jedlička, who is exhibiting in the Municipal Library and has been intensively involved in this since the 1970s.Translated by Vladimíra Šefranka Žáková
The first issue of Qartal brought an extensive text by Marek Pokorný in the Q Focus section. We now bring three reactions to the text. Curator Michal Novotný from the National Gallery in Prague and Leoš Válka, director of the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, express themselves from the position of the institutions mentioned by Pokorný in the original text. František Zachoval, curator and director of the Gallery of Modern Art in Hradec Králové, then formulates specific proposals from the parties to the future professional code of ethics, especially as regards the relations between public institutions and private stakeholders in art.
A Small Gallery and a Great Nation
Michal Novotný
Director of the Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art National Gallery in PragueIn his book Malý český člověk a skvělý český národ (The Little Czech and the Great Czech Nation), the social anthropologist, Ladislav Holý, shows how the idealized humanism of the representatives of Czech statehood forms a functional connection with the intolerance, rudeness, selfishness and other generally accepted petty dishonesties of everyday Czech life. Undoubtedly, much has changed since the book was first published in 1996. Even so, for me, a characteristic feature of Czech society remains a kind of jumping between an arrogant patting on the shoulders and the passive aggression of self-deprecation. This feature is also reflected in the perception and functioning of the National Gallery.
The word “National” already carries with it a number of unclear but almost always idealized projections of a small nation. Thus, there is a very unrealistic idea held by the public and politicians, and sometimes seen in the National Gallery’s relationship with itself, about what the NGP is and, at the same time, what it should have been a long time ago. On the one hand, Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou, etc. are typically presented as the goal, with the usual “we want the West”, on the other hand, some of the recent Ministers of Culture have publicly stated that the National Gallery “does not work”. Hopes are then traditionally placed in an almighty director as the only one who can save the situation.
The reality is rather that, taking into account its given limits, the National Gallery works at a maximum – to the very extremes of those limits. It is an organization with 250 employees and most of those I have met work in it because they believe in it in some way. It is an organization that manages seven buildings with a state subsidy that has not changed for at least twenty years and is able to earn forty percent of its total budget itself each (non-pandemic) year. These baseline figures have not changed in the last three years and under the four directors that I remember. Nevertheless, the grey mass of National Gallery employees, invisible from media and political points of view, (with the vast majority of them receiving a salary amounting to two-thirds of that of a supermarket assistant) have been capable of implementing both ambitious projects (beyond compare in terms of production and funding within the context of our country) as well as dozens of smaller ones in the gallery’s infinite spaces.
The National Gallery is perceived as having to be at the absolute top level in all areas. At the same time, almost nobody has any problem telling the National Gallery, with unshakable confidence, how it should actually do better (and the case of the works owned by Vladimír Železný that were withdrawn from the Medek exhibition and the attitude of the media, absolutely uncritically publishing Železný’s statements, is symptomatic in this regard). Again, this shows the contradiction between the institution as a revered ideal, and the reality, when no one has any problem putting the boot into the actual National Gallery, with neither reverence nor respect. This is also why, as Marek Pokorný correctly writes, the symbolic capital of state-owned cultural institutions in the Czech Republic is so small that it is not even worth investing in them.
As Marek Pokorný stated in the discussion on the National Gallery in March last year, the political support that the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra has always had is crucial when comparing the successes of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra with those of the National Gallery. Of course, there is always a question of what should come first: results or respect and consequent support. However, if there is a border that separates us from a mythologized Europe, it is precisely the border of respect for institutions, including the institution of art which, in the Czech Republic, is still largely viewed as a right that is completely subjective.
Undoubtedly, institutions themselves must work on their own image. However, it remains unclear to me whether it is precisely thanks to the socio-political setting that we are moving in a rather vicious circle when it comes to these national institutions. A symptom of this is the expectation nowadays that ‘messianic- dictatorial’ directors should not only save this or that institution but also society, when they often rather undermine it, as Pokorný writes, all without public reaction.
In other words, it could be said that the Czech Republic actually has a better National Gallery than it deserves. And that the image of the National Gallery, including its self-perception, is actually a pretty good image of Czech society itself.
Marek Pokorný’s Moral Shotgun
Leoš Válka
Director of the DOX Centre for Contemporary ArtThe first issue of Qartal magazine published a long article by Marek Pokorný, The Long Path to a Code of Ethics. This extensive text (a total of five pages) is a kind of carpet bombing of the ethically malnourished, sad landscape of cultural institutions and their functioning in the Czech Republic.
Its dramatic vocabulary, strong criticism and overall tone imply the author’s moral sovereignty (the intellectual purview is somehow, perhaps as a joke, clear from the individual subtitles, such as Fear and Trembling or The World as Will and Representation). The call for a code of ethics, the non-existence of which is leading us into a state of “uncertainty and aimlessness” is concluded with a challenge: “…Every large institution should incorporate its positions on these issues into a kind of constitution or code of ethics so that it can be predictable and consequent in future negotiations.”
The overall language of the article evokes a strange aftertaste of the world of cultural managers and their desire for clear rules, whereby “the written letter remains”, and correct, ethically regulated behaviour will automatically follow.
The main motive for my comment on this article is a short, yet substantial passage about the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art of which I am the director. For clarity, I’ll quote it here: “In the early days of the existence of a private institution such as DOX, there was a need to support certain values. To this day, DOX perfectly fills the role of a venue that nurtures a certain type of audience (such as the middle class), gives its needs a certain direction, and meets certain ideas regarding quality of life. But the moment we ask whether everything truly is as this private institution proclaims, we encounter a very ill-tempered response. Several years ago, DOX failed in the first round of a grant process to receive the large amount it had requested because the members of the committee did not recommend the gallery’s project. Soon, the media were full of interviews with this private institution’s representatives about the injustice they had suffered. A perfectly ordinary situation that has happened to more than a few people, but not everyone has the prime minister’s telephone number. It is a model case: a private institution asks for support from the public purse but is taken aback when not everybody appreciates the quality of its public service.”
A seemingly kind introduction is followed by the revelation of a truly “abominable state of affairs”.
I quote: “DOX […] nurtures a certain type of audience (such as the middle class)…”
DOX definitely does not nurture anyone, nor does it want to. It seems that Mr Pokorný still has a weapon or two from the years before 1989. I would really like to know what is meant by the middle class in relation to visitors to cultural institutions. Socio-economic category according to income? Social status? A Marxist point of view leaking through?
I further quote: “[…] gives its needs a certain direction, and meets certain ideas regarding quality of life.”
Probably an echo of a cultivating, educational, patronizing view of the role of exhibition institutions.
The second part, concerning the grant proceedings of the Prague Municipal Office in 2017, ends with a reminder that the denial of a grant is a common situation, but only DOX is taken aback “when not everybody appreciates the quality of its public service”. What Mr. Pokorný does not say is this: He was a member of the grant committee in the year in question. The committee that declined to support DOX. Unfortunately for Marek Pokorný, it turned out that he had a conflict of interest. A transparent summary is offered in a text by Jan H. Vitvar published on the website of the Respekt weekly on 17 March 2017: “This week, Marek Pokorný resigned from Prague City Council’s committee for awarding grants in the field of culture and the arts. The art manager of the Gallery of the City of Ostrava, PLATO, did so shortly after it became clear that, as the chairman of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award jury this year, he had decided to substantially increase support for the company organizing the competition. The rules of the grant committee, on the contrary, make it clear that its members must not be associated in any way with the projects they are assessing and, if this happens, they must notify the committee and abstain from voting. Pokorný did not do that. I would like to point out that, in addition to Marek Pokorný, there was another expert in the committee: Helena Musilová, curator of Museum Kampa. The committee granted a subsidy to three institutions in the field of fine arts: CZK 1.6 million to the Czechdesign company and the rest of the subsidy, worth almost CZK 13 million, was divided between the Jindřich Chalupecký Award and Museum Kampa.
What is striking about it, however, is that with the exception of designers, the committee divided the subsidy only between two institutions, in the programme of which both of the above members participate. The head of the Chalupecký Award jury, Pokorný, does not see a conflict of interest in this. ‘The world is simply complicated. However, this does not mean that we have to be paranoid,’ he reacted.“ Marek Pokorný had to resign, but in order to simplify the bureaucratic proceedings, all the decisions of the committee remained in force. DOX did not receive any support, the Jindřich Chalupecký Award received a significant financial amount. It is a pity that at the time of the morally demanding decision-making of the grant committee, Mr. Pokorný did not have an approved code of ethics at hand which would have made his decision-making easier. Maybe next time.
Update of the Code of Ethics
František Zachoval
Director of the Gallery of Modern Art in Hradec KrálovéThe current Czech Professional Code of Ethics for Czech Museums of Art, based on the ICOM Professional Code of Ethics for Museums, is not necessary for the operation and regulation of public exhibiting institutions in several respects since many aspects of gallery operation are addressed by current legislation. On the other hand, in the thirteen years since the last update of the Code, the cultural scene has changed significantly. Thus, there are significant gaps in the ethics of running galleries that we should address.
Prologue
The Gallery of Modern Art in Hradec Králové, which I represent, is a public exhibiting institution. Many similar institutions in the CR permanently preserve, register, professionally process, scientifically research and make accessible works of art for all citizens in a way that guarantees equal access. The standardized public benefit service also means that the gallery provides information on collections on an ongoing basis, has strict administration of depositories, ensures that acquisition activities are supervised by an expert board, strictly supervises the export of collections abroad, has a strict regime governing the management of its collections as well as a sophisticated security regime, but above all, it retains its professional credibility. At the same time, being an employee of the gallery is a responsible commitment to the public, i.e. a commitment to build and maintain the highest degree of objectivity. In short, a gallery is an institution serving society; it develops the education of society, bringing it benefits.
Over the last thirty years, the museums sector has undergone significant restructuring, and some public services have been transferred to the private and commercial sectors in the legal forms of foundations, limited liability companies, funds, agencies, etc. Fine art has become a profitable business item and investment for the private sector, i.e. a form of depositing money and protecting it from unforeseen economic crises (inflation, recession, weakening of the economy, etc.). There is also art and its creators, or even forgeries, that the private sector needs to appraise in order to increase their price. Often, the behaviour of stakeholders in private exhibiting institutions is masked by seemingly altruistic goals such as concern for public space, education, and the cultivation of society. But we also find here political (power) objectives and the related strengthening of the social status.
Owners of private exhibiting institutions pose as patrons, altruists and philanthropists.
The private sector simply cannot do without public exhibiting institutions. Credibility, tradition, research and the interpretation of the acquired knowledge provide the basis for trust even for the private sector. In addition, public institutions systematically invest in their own resources, which can no longer be said about the private sector.
The update of the code of ethics should define the relationship to the activities of privately-owned exhibiting institutions, collectors (actively trading in their collections), art foundations, private galleries and limited liability companies in the field of art, joint-stock companies in the field of art, investment funds in the field of art (all collectively referred to below as “private stakeholders in art”) that also have, in addition to a declared public interest, the art trade as the subject of their business along with other activities that sometimes are rather odd. It is certain that in many cases relations and cooperation between the private and public spheres are beneficial for both parties. Under no circumstances is it possible to generalise and apply particular controversial cases to the whole environment. Numerous private galleries, foundations and collectors selflessly help artists, which I appreciate and support.
Update – Private Stakeholders in Art
The update should refer in a substantive way to several pressing issues. It is obvious that we will always have to tackle the criteria when evaluating specific points. The update primarily aims to see the given area of phenomena in real terms, i.e. to name unethical cases in a non-directive way.
(a) We should be cautious to borrow works of art from “private stakeholders in art” to exhibit them, as the presentation of their works of art creates an appreciation, that is, an advantage in the art market.
(b) If a “private stakeholder in art” offers exhibitions/exhibits for which public institutions do not have experts in the given field, works of art with questionable authorship can quite easily appear in the exhibition (consciously but also unconsciously).
(c) We should be cautious to cooperate with persons who are in employment relations or have a property relationship with a “private stakeholder in art” or their representatives because of a conflict of interest. Thus, if such a person has some interest in, is paid or otherwise motivated by a “private stakeholder”, they certainly do not represent the public interest even if they themselves get the impression that they must all of a sudden act in the public interest.
(d) We should be cautious to use the services of “private stakeholders in art” who offer to ensure communication with other, often unknown and sensitive, collectors who think that direct dialogue with a public institution will jeopardize their anonymity and privacy. The public institution will then not have fully verifiable information about the owner (hence the provenance) of the work of art in question.
Borrowing works for an exhibition in this way is extremely problematic. If it is later proven that the borrowed work is a forgery, the public institution also becomes, through its lax approach and lack of scrutiny, a partaker in the fraud, i.e., an accomplice.
(e) We should be cautious to borrow works of art from the owners of collections who have their collections primarily because they provide a kind of cleansing of past or even current socially problematic business activities.
(f) We should be cautious in respect of curators and historians of art, self-appointed curators, who are, at the same time, analysts, investors, private gallerists, financial partners of private collections or shareholders of private galleries, investment funds and similar market investment activities. Their professional or curatorial activities may again represent a conflict of interest and do not give a transparent and credible impression in the space of public institutions.
Epilogue
Institutional criticism, self-regulatory tendencies and defining the public and private spheres have been developing in the context of public exhibiting galleries in the international environment over the last sixty years. The text is a probe into the issues associated with relations between public exhibiting institutions and the private sector. Hidden mechanisms that accompany the interaction between the public and private spheres were presented in such a way as to make these relationships transparent to the general public.
The local collection-creating institutions after 1989 (apart from replacements of directors and other staff adjustments) have not undergone a fundamental self-reflection, without which, unfortunately, we cannot currently establish a strong position for these public institutions in the 21st century.
A partial institutionally critical, artistic and research project, examining the state of public collection-creating institutions, was the Representation of the Nation project (Isabela Grosseová, Jesper Alvaer, 2008). However, it did not provoke an adequate professional and public discussion. I can see no defensible argument as to why a standardized public benefit service should legitimize the activities of “private stakeholders in art” and increase their utility. The stereotypes regarding cooperation with the private sector from the 1990s are still present, so it cannot be assumed that tomorrow everything will be ideal, and above all transparent, for the public. If an appropriate phase of self-regulation or clarification of the positions of the involved players does not appear in the near future, then we are heading for a situation whereby, as Jürgen Habermas put it, the public has been replaced by a pseudo-public and sham-private world of culture consumption.
Jan Jedlička has explored the landscape since the 1970s. His diverse range of forms and unique approach are now reflected in a retrospective exhibition at the Municipal Library that takes you on a journey through the space-time of Jedlička’s life. After years exploring the landscape of the Maremma region in southern Tuscany, this painter, printmaker, photographer, and conqueror of pigments has turned his gaze on the Czech landscape.
P K Your first works with pigments were made on Elba. How did they come about?
J J There are abandoned mines there, all related to iron. Besides the iron ore that was mined there, Elba also had red chalk: colored compacted earth in a natural state, that was processed on the island into red chalk for drawing. So there were red pieces of earth left over in the mines, but surprisingly also shades of blue and purple. That fascinated me. And I began to turn them into paints.
P K Did you use your own method or an old recipe?
J J It’s a process as old as humankind. Before, colors were taken exclusively from – where else? – nature. Of course, leaching colors is something you have to experience: Some pigments are heavy and sink to the bottom, while other float to the top…
P K How did you discover “your” landscape, the Maremma of southern Tuscany?
J J The geological layer stretches from Elba to the mainland – hence my first impulse to set out for the Maremma, the Italian region that I first visited in 1977 and where I return again and again to this day. It is where I would visit my friend Mikuláš Rachlík, whom I knew from the academy. In the 1970s, we went on trips in search of Etruscan interventions in the landscape. I was always immensely interested in what time and nature had done to ancient alterations to the landscape. And so I began to systematically work in the landscape of the Maremma.
P K Which technique was your first?
J J It’s important that I began to do them all together. I would walk around decorated like a Christmas tree: camera, folders with papers, carrying case. I “documented” my pigment expeditions in pencil drawings and photographs – back in the day with Polaroids.
P K The Prague exhibition also includes your mezzotints.
J J Mezzotint was the first reproduction technique: It was used in the seventeenth century to reproduce paintings. Its association with photography was important for me: It is I who brings out the light in them. The original plates aren’t completely black, but have a fine structure. Before you is a pure velvet black. I polish the places that are supposed to be light in the print, and thus bring light into the picture. There is nothing haptic in photography. The process of printing returns the body, a physical element, into the picture. Some of the mezzotints are up to two meters tall. They are not small-format pieces, sketches, anecdotes. Mezzotint has the kind of dignity found in the landscape itself.
P K What draws you to this region? You have now spent five decades engaged in dialogue with its unceasing transformation.
J J The Maremma is forty kilometers wide on average. When you come there, an immense space with a strange light opens up before you. You cannot encompass it all at once: The landscape invites you to walk it, to explore its various segments on foot. It has almost American proportions. The Medici started draining this land because it was covered in marshes, uninhabitable. Entire cities would empty out in the summer because of the mosquitoes. There are songs like Maremma amara – Bitter Maremma. People spoke of this land as a poisoned land. During the reign of the Medici, they diverted the flow of two rivers. Large ponds were built for the sedimentation of silt, and the process of draining the marshes began. Over time, this wasteland was transformed into fertile soil.
P K So you saw that creative work with land, with the rolling surface of the Earth, has a long history in the Maremma.
J J I tried to bring it all together. The bright colors that I took from there come from the region’s hills and mines. Oxides of iron, manganese, copper. Uncolored pigments – meaning with less distinct colors – come from sediments.
P K You have put together a surprisingly diverse catalogue of colors that reminds us of the rich scale of colors found in non-living nature…
J J It requires an entire lifetime. It takes a long time before you find something. Things also happen by chance. I would go to construction sites, along the road, or when they cut through a hillside. The layers of earth were like a cake – all you had to do was take a slice. But I had to go right away. With the first rains, the layers on the surface blend together into one single neutral mass.
P K What cannot be found in nature?
J J Shades of blue are relatively rare. Azurites can be found only in bits and pieces – unless you know where to go and dig.
P K Is it solo work?
J J Yes, because you have to be patient. Sometimes I go with my family, with my son, and it’s a nice trip. But for the most part I would explore the landscape on my own. There’s a documentary film in which I look like a pilgrim, but you can also see a car, without it which it would be impossible. If you gather five kilos of stones somewhere and have all kinds of equipment hanging off you, you need some way of transporting it all.
P K What does your working rhythm in the Maremma look like?
J J I first decided to work in the Maremma in 1977. Since then, I return there several times a year. But I also need to take breaks: Once the landscape becomes an everyday affair, you begin to lose your sensitivity. You stop seeing differences. Whenever I have spent some time working there, I always begin to feel – after about a month, let’s say – that I no longer differentiate as much. That’s when it is time to disappear. And after some time, to come again: Things change in the landscape in the meantime. The landscape is always changing: Places change enough just with the seasons. You can see photographs from the same place over the course of a year in the book The Circle / Il Cerchio.
P K The world has changed so much since the late 1970s, in ways that nobody could have predicted: society, politics, technology, the environment, the climate. What specific changes do you see in “your” landscape?
J J Mainly: I could not do all those things there today. The Maremma has been fundamentally changed. In the 1970s it was still wild. Nature ruled by its own laws: Everywhere lots of insects and birds. It was alive. Today, all those places are sprayed – because of the tourists. You won’t encounter a single mosquito, but that also means the birds are gone. Everything is organized. Before, I could walk the countryside freely, but today everything is closed off and protected by cameras. There’s a national park. Today, I could not go on such long hikes along footpaths and dikes.
P K This situation produced your recent book of photographs, 200 m.
J J Yes. I discovered that today I can move freely along just 200 meters of shoreline – that’s all that is left, unclaimed. I photographed a sandy beach, the sea, and the sky from just this one segregated place. Every photograph is square and done in black-and-white, since even the area where I took them was a square measuring 200 by 200 meters.
P K You work with pigments in the Czech Republic as well. You were even contacted by a UNESCO committee that wanted to promote the use of natural “Prague” pigments in new buildings and renovation projects.
J J They borrowed my catalogue of Prague colors, which I had collected in Prokop Valley, at White Mountain, in Divoká Šárka, and near Kbely – wherever some original nature had been preserved. The committee wanted to implement some rule that these “natural” colors would be used in Prague. I don’t actually know what happened with their proposal. But when I walk through Prague today, I can see those colors on buildings.
P K Does Bohemia have its own specific color?
J J Bohemian Green Earth! The Italian Gothic worked with a color by this name. The Sienese school used it with carnation, the tincture for skin color. It may have been the Venetians who imported Bohemian Green as a valuable commodity. As late as the 1980s, they would buy it from Czech art restorers in West Germany, who sometimes imported it there. Today, you won’t Bohemian Green Earth anymore. I have a few pieces left.
Twenty-five years ago, when I first landed at the Beijing airport, I found myself on the stage set of Xiao Quan’s photographs. Traveling with me were Topol’s Sister and a youthful yearning to explore the exponential post-revolutionary euphoria of the early nineties. We had just opened up to the world, and I was determined to take proper advantage of this opportunity.
Zuzana Li is a sinologist and literary translator (Yan Lianke, Liu Zhenyun, Ning Ken, Liao Yiwu, Su Tong, Eileen Chang, Fang Fang, Jidi Majia, and others). Many of her translations have been published as part of Verzone publisher’s Xin series, including her most recent work – a translation of Dong Xi’s novel Life Without Language.
Understandably, I espcially wanted to discover the things that they didn’t talk about at school, the poetry that, just like back home, was certainly hiding in dark, out-of-the-way alleys and abandoned, forgotten corners, the pulsating life in places where the the firm hand of state power could not reach. While on my first scholarship, my classmates and I bought ourselves Flying Pigeon bicycles and set out on our journeys of exploration. Parallels are a tricky thing. There was no Chinese equivalent to [the Czech punk band] Psí vojáci. Besides, as everyone knows, it is a big country, so try finding a needle in a haystack. Similarly, everybody knows that a foreign and anonymous observer will always see what they know, what their powers of perception are capable of identifying.
At the legendary artists’ colony of the Old Summer Palace, we found only shadows of its bygone fame. Some construction was being planned, the place attracted far too many gawkers and adventurers, and the painters had long ago moved elsewhere. On the out-of- the-way sidestreets, we passed plain-looking villagers with bags over their shoulders, who shouted at us the entire time we walked down the street: foreigner, foreigner! The guaranteed authentic Beijing opera performance at the tea house was upon first glance an overpriced tourist attraction. Every trip was an adventure, but each ended differently than we had imagined.
The world around us continued to let us know that it was high time to take off our rose-tinted glasses. You can pretend all you like, but a green light really does not mean that you can cross the street without being hit by a car, motorcycle, speeding tuk-tuk, or aggressive bicyclist. Despite all its outward otherness, however, we still stubbornly felt a strange sense of belonging to this world. Back then, “China” was definitely not an enemy in the public space. After all, Chinese students had only recently been protesting for the same ideals as us, had gone on hunger strike, had risked and sometimes lost their lives in the name of freedom. The streets were abuzz with day-to-day life, and the rest we find in books, films, music. At the time, director Zhang Yimou and others celebrated success at European festivals. Even Czech Television’s “nighttime film club” showed a series of Chinese films. Out occasional little discoveries sometimes took on unexpected form, but that just made them all the more interesting. In the end, I didn’t fulfil my dream of seeing a rock concert by Cui Jian until ten years later. By then, it was a new millennium and a new ruling class. The arena was filled to the last place. All the tickets were for seating. An impermeable line of police stood tight together between the stage and the audience, all around the bottom, in the middle, and up in the galleries. And yet, when the rocker took to the stage the arena roared and never calmed down. He played songs from his new album, but towards the end of the concert, when he hit the strings and launched into A Piece of Red Cloth, the audience jumped from their seats and absolutely everybody sang along.
In the end, I even met those underground poets. Not in the underground, but at an event with a red fabric across the entire stage, with a lot of applause. Some young guy stuck a poorly printed publication in my hand, told me there was a contact in it, and disappeared. Later, my friend and I met with three poets and read their poems from this samizdat collection. We also translated a few into Czech. One of them continues to write poetry and to encourage young people to be creative, another is still publishing poetry collection and also makes documentaries, most of them on social issues. However, due to the large competition, his documentary about rural children who have to choose between a basic education and life with their parents in the city, and about the activities who try to help these families, did not make it to the One World festival in Prague. The same thing happened with his documentary about orphans. This year, he didn’t submit any film. In the spring, he suddenly disappeared and nobody heard from him for about two months. Then he reappeared, but not his manuscripts and film material. He has to stay home for a year and is not allowed to go anywhere. But he is writing again.
The further removed we are from our nineties, the more painful it is to return. Today, it feels as if everything has been swept away by time. The observers took off their rose-tinted glasses long ago, and “China” is again being talked about as an enemy. Foreigners see supermodern buildings – the dirty, out-of-the-way alleys have been demolished or redeveloped. Red banners in the streets and slogans everywhere are ever more aggressive reminders of who is in charge. And yet the country lives. For those who want to see and hear, that earlier time still resounds in the undercurrents. Its ideals may have officially fallen with the coming of the tanks, but they did not die, at least not as long as there are people who lived these ideals and continue to pass them on.
The generation that Xiao Quan capture on his photographs as a young man is growing older, but they can still be heard. This year the author Fang Fang, a lady of retirement age, proudly stood up to a mob of zealous ultra-left patriots. The famous author Jia Pingwa has just published a new novel about how, during the student protests, the young Jia Pingwa was banned from publishing his novel about the western city of Xijing and how he was nearly corrupted by fame. And even today, young guitarists will, if asked, play Cui Jian’s songs with all their heart and get half the bar to dance alone. In fact, Cui Jian supposedly said, “Don’t you tell me that you’re a different generation. As long as Mao’s portrait continues to hang over the Gate of Heavenly Peace, we are all one and the same generation.”
In China, the photographic camera had long been an instrument wielded primarily by emissaries of the colonial powers, after which it became a tool of propaganda. But this situation couldn’t last forever. Photographer Xiao Quan has been presenting his unique insider view of Chinese society since the 1980s. His large-scale exhibition at the House of Photography also traces the evolution of the photographic medium in China from documentary photography to conceptual works and staged images.
Emma Hanzlíková is an art theorist and sinologist. From 2016 to 2020, she was the main curator for the 8smička “cultural zone” in Humpolec. She has a long interest in bringing together European and Asian art and in Asian art here in the Czech Republic. She spent 2014 on an exchange to the Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou, and in 2015–2016 participated in a postgraduate program in the field of Asian art at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. She has curated several photographic exhibitions at the Josef Sudek Studio on Prague’s Újezd Street, and is the author of three books for children.
How to become a photographer in China and what subjects to focus on? Anonymity is a central theme in a society with a billion people. In such an overpopulated country, the norm is to overlook outsiders, as the author Liao Yiwu captured in his raw style in Interviews with People from the Bottom Rung of Society. But even in this highly individualistic society there exist sensitive loners who, in the spirit of the humanist tradition, view the China around them from a different point of view. These authors and photographers are capable of seeing what others do not, of capturing things that, in a just a moment, become the past. One such person is Xiao Quan (肖全).
A Chinese Cartier-Bresson
The photographer Xiao Quan was born in 1959 in Chengdu, the capital of southwestern China’s Sichuan province, and the city is the setting for several of his images – for instance, on the main square in front of the statue of Mao (which still stands there today) or in the bamboo forest of Wangjianglou Park. Contrasted with the communist backdrop, his photograph of a group of young poets, a reference to the tradition of Tang poetry, makes an especially strong impression. This style of poetry was born here in the seventh century, and this is where the poets Xue Tao and Du Fu had modest, isolated shacks, in the middle of what would later become a great metropolis. Their literary creations are well known to Czech readers thanks to Bohumil Mathesius’s poetic interpretations from the 1930s, published in the collection The Songs of Ancient China.
Although Xiao Quan looks at the world through the viewfinder of a camera, he could just as well be standing in front of the lens, among the group of poets he captured on film. His poetry of light and shadow – a metaphorical description of his photographs based on a literal translation of the Chinese characters for the word “photography,” possesses strong ties to the written poetry tradition known as shi. Although Xiao Quan is usually labeled a documentary photographer, his approach to his subject differs from documentary work and is not purely journalistic. The linguistic aspects of his photographs are perhaps incomprehensible across cultural boundaries, hidden as they are by Chinese characters. As ideograms, Chinese characters function in the same way as photographs – we must first fully read them in order to decipher their meaning. According to exhibition curator Lü Peng, Xiao Quan is the “Henri Cartier-Bresson of China”. While serving with the Chinese navy, Xiao would spend all his savings on the photography books that were available at the time, and also subscribed to a monthly photography magazine through which he learned about the work of American and French photographers. He openly admits Cartier-Bresson’s influence, and his connections to this icon of modern photojournalism are not insignificant. In a book on his work published in China in 1995, Cartier- Bresson even wrote a personal dedication to the young Xiao Quan, thanking him for his gift of a knife.
Bresson had visited China in 1948 while working on a reportage for Life. He stayed for ten months, and returned ten years later in order to show the ongoing or already completed changes in the newly established People’s Republic. But Cartier-Bresson was not the only photographer or documentarian to capture the Middle Kingdom’s transformation during this period. Bresson’s student and member of Magnum Photos Marc Riboud made his first visit to China in 1957, before Xiao was even born. In the late 1950s, the People’s Republic of China was slowly ending its reciprocal cultural cooperation with the socialist Eastern Bloc countries, when China was visited by cultural delegations either acting as independent observers or seeking to spread the doctrine of socialist realism.
Riboud’s assignment was to capture society’s rebirth during the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) – i.e., at a time when the country was experiencing the worst famine in the history of humankind. For similar reasons, in the spring of 1972 Mao Zedong himself invited the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni to spend five weeks in China filming Chung Kuo, Cina, a three-hour documentary about the working class, just six years after completing Blowup, perhaps the most famous work of international cinema, shot for entirely different reasons and with the exact opposite connotations. When Riboud returned to China in the 1990s, Xiao Quan worked as his assistant during his repeated visits over the next four years. Riboud advised the young photographer to start to document the unprecedented changes that had been set into motion after 1989. The role of master and apprentice is an unassailable fixture within Chinese culture, and for Xiao Quan Marc Riboud was a true shifu.
Cyclists in Marlboro Country
If we compare the photographs of Chinese life by Xiao Quan and those by his idol Cartier-Bresson or by his teacher Riboud, we see that each takes a different point of view, regardless of the fact that each also recorded China at a different phase in its history. Bresson’s images are shot according to the principles of European avant-garde photography, using diagonal composition, and show the enduring influence of Surrealism. Riboud’s photographs, however strong their emotional impact, nevertheless cannot shake their sense of having been created by an outside observer. We must remember that the photographs’ subjects must surely have noticed the white face of the laowai (a foreigner) behind the camera, which in the early 1990s was still an uncommon sight in China.
Xiao Quan had the advantage that he could blend in with the crowd. He observed China as it was, and was less interested in creating an aesthetic image than in capturing the essence of his country. At the same time, he was able to look with the eye of an unbiased observer. Only in this way could he capture situations that locals would find ordinary, situations that they would think of paying attention to. This is why Xiao Quan’s photographs are so unique. This dual viewpoint becomes clear if we look at his iconic photograph showing a group of cyclists and a large billboard of Marlboro cowboys. Western marketing is slowly enveloping the entire country. The country was becoming standardized and modernized, was losing the magic of the Middle Kingdom that had endured for millennia, surviving even the horrors of the 1950s and 1960s.
Although Xiao Quan’s photographs already capture the demolition of Beijing’s old hutong neighborhoods, the construction of walls of prefabricated high-rises, and rural day laborers crisscrossing the country with all their belongings in a sack slung over their shoulders, his young protagonists have entirely different expressions on their faces, full of hope and expectations, and the side streets are imbued with the atmosphere of the Qing dynasty, the time of the last emperor. The atmosphere on Chinese streets today would by far not be as enthusiastic.
Although many of the scenes could still be found in China today – for instance, sleeping children in a plastic tub on the rear of a rickshaw – it would be against an entirely different backdrop and with many new attributes. They would be shrouded in the visual smog of Western brands and global chains, brought to China by the much praised and only seemingly free capitalistic socialism.
I saw the best minds of my generation…
Besides being introduced to his craft by the greatest authorities of the European photographic school, one specific moment in Xiao Quan’s life formed an important initial impulse to begin photographing. Xiao Quan recalls how strongly he was influenced by the portrait of the American poet Ezra Pound, shot in 1963 in Venice by the Armenian photographer Yousuf Karsh and reproduced in the late 1980s in China’s literary magazine Image Puzzle (象罔, Xiangwang). Coincidentally, Pound was an important linguist and expert in Chinese poetry. If a photograph of Pound was Xiao Quan’s punctum in the Barthesian sense, a true trigger moment, we may consider the possibility that Pound himself unconsciously took on this role as catalyst. Pound is, among other things, the author of Cathay (1915), a collection of loosely translated ancient Chinese poetry, and also the editor and co-author of Ernest F. Fenollosa’s theoretical essay The Chinese Written Character As a Medium for Poetry (1920), written in 1908 but not published until after its author’s death. In this essay, Fenollosa, curator of the Asian collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, understood Chinese poetry and its graphic poetics as a calligraphic ideogram.
In this way, we return to the thesis that a photograph is an encoded message from its creator that must deciphered just as we do with written texts, which in Chinese are additionally written using symbols. This configuration of verbal and visual expression in photography recalls Pound’s ideogrammic method founded on the arrangement of images into a single expression. But back to the photograph of Pound. When he saw this photograph of the elegant-looking Ezra Pound with a hat and walking cane, the young Xiao Quan decided that he is going to capture “the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.”
From the ashes of the Cultural Revolution There followed the series Our Generation (我们这一代), first published in the aforementioned Image Puzzle and later, in 1991, in book form, thanks to which Xiao Quan became known at home. This series depicts members of the avant-garde culture scene that emerged from the ashes of the Cultural Revolution. The photographs were taken between 1986 and 1996, often before many of their subjects became famous. In 1986, Xiao Quan photographed poets energetically reciting their works during the China Star Poetry Festival in his hometown of Chengdu. In 1990, he recorded a rock concert by the musician Cui Jian, whose songs were a source of optimism and excitement and a driving force in the life of the country’s younger generations. An important milestone for Chinese culture was the year 1992, when the first art biennial was held in Canton (Guangdong Art Biennale), thus opening the door for Chinese art to enter the international art market. When, soon thereafter, Wang Guangyi’s painting Great Criticism appeared on the cover of Flash Art, the existence of contemporary art in the People’s Republic of China was legitimized.
In 1994, Xiao Quan covered another area of culture outside of art and literature when he photographed the actress Gong Li while she was shooting the film Shanghai Triad with the internationally acclaimed director Zhang Yimou. Czech viewers may recall some of his photographs of the painters Wang Guangyi and Zhang Xiaogang from the exhibition The Reunion of Poetry and Philosophy, organized in 2018 at Prague City Gallery’s Stone Bell House by Xiao Quan’s friend, the renowned curator Lü Peng, who is also behind the upcoming exhibition in Prague. Peng has a long history of presenting underground Chinese art through exhibitions and by compiling a new and previously lacking canon of twentieth- century Chinese art.
Opening to the world – Throwing back the curtain
Like Lü Nan (呂楠, 1962), Zhang Haier (张海儿, 1957), and Han Lei (韩磊, 1967), Xiao Quan is a pioneer who helped Chinese photography undergo rapid development from documentary to conceptual and staged photography. This form of photography is very popular in China today, and along with digital post-production it is one of the most used media on the art scene, as Czech audiences may have noted thanks to Petr Nedoma’s 2003 exhibition A Strange Heaven.
Photography was an important tool for the emerging conceptualists and performance artists who in the early 1990s experimented in artists’ colonies with what for them were new or recently discovered forms of 20th- century modern art imported from the West. These artists did not want to be primarily photographers, however, and used the medium only as a tool. The photographic act was always more important than the photograph itself, which does not have as long a tradition as it does in Europe or America. Truly modern Chinese photography first appeared in the late 1970s, when documentary photography, despite continuing to bow to political demands, also took on a critical tone. Up until this point, the medium had been used by the political power structures to manipulate society and had functioned as a historical resource (though one subject to frequent censorship). The turning point came in 1979, when Beijing’s Zhongshan Park hosted the exhibition Nature, Society, and Man. This first-ever group exhibition of amateur photographers was organized by the April Photography Society (四月影会, Siyue ying hui), an independent art group active in the capital in 1979–1981 that sought to move away from socialistic realism and to return to autonomous photography. Social criticism in photography was slowly transformed into a search for new traditions that went hand in hand with the arrival of humanistic and existential works of literature from the West.
In 1979, Deng Xiaoping announced the reform known as the Four Modernizations, with its emphasis on opening up to the world. These changes enabled China to transform itself into a modern economic power in which shortages were replaced by opulence. The 1980s were a decade of rebirth, a time when society (not just in political circles) worked to lift up a country that had been ravaged by the earlier Maoist experiments. For intellectuals, this period was a renaissance, as they emerged from isolation and began to find inspiration from European and American art, literature, and above all existentialist philosophy.
Artistic experimentation, though still in the form of underground (dixia) art, flourished in music, film, literature, and visual art. For a brief period, China was home to freedom of expression and extravagant subcultures. The atmosphere differed significantly from that of the previous decade, when the entire country was still recovering from the dire consequences of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1967). Although many active participants in cultural life were inspired by Western artists and thinkers, it was not always easy to get one’s hands on the source material. In the period from 1970 to 1980, when Xiao Quan was beginning to take an interest in photography, it was extremely difficult to find any reference works on photographic theory or to learn anything about the Western art world. In this context, an important role was played by underground magazines and mimeographed, hand-bound samizdat editions of just a dozen or so copies passed from person to person – examples include the literary magazine Image Puzzle, Today (今天, Jintian) and many others.
Somewhat later, a similar role was played in China’s underground art scene by Ai Weiwei’s trilogy Black Cover Book (1994), White Cover Book (1995), and Grey Cover Book (1998). Thanks to their author’s American experience, Weiwei’s publications could introduce their readers to books and critical texts by important international representatives of conceptual and performance art.
The Image That China Forgot
The Chinese Communist Party consistently uses censorship as a tool against the internet, freedom of speech, and specific individuals. In recent years, there have been regular reports of people detained by the Chinese government – for instance, the literary critic and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo (刘晓波), the artist Ai Weiwei (艾未未 ), and more recently the independent photographer Lu Guang (卢广), who is known for his images of people on the margins of society and his coverage of horrific examples of environmental degradation. News of his detention came in the fall of 2018, after he had traveled to Ürümqi, the capital of Xinjiang province, to meet with a group of local Uighur photographers. Xinjiang, located on China’s western border, is known as an autonomous region of the country’s Uighur minority. Over the past two years, there has been much talk about mass reeducation efforts or even the extermination of the local Muslim population in labor camps. A year after Lu Guang was detained, the Chinese government announced his release.
The communist leadership fears photography’s potential to document the country’s human rights violations, a possibility that it is working hard to prevent. Of course, even evidence of groundbreaking historical events can be manipulated or forgotten, as shown by a brief BBC video shot last year on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. The report called attention to the eternal question of photography – i.e., whether the fact of something being photographed necessarily means that the given moment or object ever existed. In the video, a reporter shows random passers-by the iconic photograph known as “Tank Man”, taken by the American photographer Jeff Widener on 5 July 1989, during the unrest of Tiananmen Square. Most of the people asked, however, had no idea of what the photograph depicted or the context in which it was taken.
Xiao Quan’s photographs, which have recorded fleeting moments in Chinese history, are only now finding their way outside China. In 2019, Italy’s prestigious Rizzoli publishing house printed Xiao Quan: In China When It All Began, which marked the Western public’s first introduction to his work as a whole. This event is now followed by the exhibition Xiao Quan: Our Generation – Portraits of K. at Prague City Gallery. We hope that the exhibited photographs will help to preserve a part of the history of the Middle Kingdom and thus ensure that it will be neither ignored nor forgotten.
Every one of us probably experiences some break in our lives, a turning point that fundamentally alters our direction, that moves us forward, if we are in the right place at the right time. Every one of us probably experiences some break in our lives, a turning point that fundamentally alters our direction, that moves us forward, if we are in the right place at the right time. For Antonín Kratochvíl (1947), this fundamental turning point in his life and his career came in 1970, when his wanderings after fleeing from communist Czechoslovakia brought him to Amsterdam. There, professor of photography Jaap d’Oliveira recognized Antonín’s visual and artistic talent and admitted him to the photography program at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Another important milestone in his life was in 1972 when Hans Albers, the artistic director of the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, offered him the position of his assistant – thus opening the doors to the world of international photojournalism. Antonín immediately transformed this opportunity into his own professional success, engaging in a valuable photographic and historical exploration of the state of mankind and human nature at the turn of the millennium across the continents and reflecting the world’s diverse ways of life.
Pavlína Vogelová is the curator of film and photography at the National Museum’s Historical Museum and also a doctoral candidate at the Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design’s Department the Theory and History of Art. In the past, she also worked at the Moravian Gallery in Brno. Her research is focused on documentary and experimental film and photography’s intermedia relationship with science, art, and education. As a curator, she has put together the exhibitions Antonín Kratochvíl: Persona (Brussels, 2019), Karel Kuklík: A Photographic Dialogue with the Landscape (Prague, 2017), Milena Dopitová: My Body Is a Temple (Taipei, 2016), Viktor Kolář (Bratislava, 2011; Prague, 2013) and Jan Calábek: Science, Film, and Art to the Delight of Bees, Poets, and Botanists (Brno, 2013).
Antonín Kratochvíl is a reportage, portrait, and war photographer, a world traveler possessing an immensely sensitive ability to perceive and depict the world around him. The predominant, highly authentic, characteristics of Kratochvíl’s photographs are the visual resonance of this sensitivity and the magical use of light and expression. These elements are found in his portraits of international celebrities as well as in his photographs from war zones. The drama and rawness of the image produces a strange reflection of the human soul, of its essence. Photography has helped Antonín to process the personal situations and traumas that he himself experienced in the past. He is a former refugee who subsequently drew on his status as outcast to produce an authentic photographic testimony about other people’s life stories. The subjects of his photographs represent a broad range of social strata and situations. The circumstances of their lives are positive, negative, extreme, and tragic. The human stories that Kratochvíl tells take place in many places across the globe.
The exhibition’s broader perspective enables a clear report on the confused state of human value systems. Where previously, in primitive societies, it was enough to give one’s word and shake hands, today’s society is drowning in a sea of broken relationships, in conflicts, wars, and an unsustainable approach to nature and the landscape. You will believe Kratochvíl’s photographs; they share the atmosphere of real experiences through their distinctive style, looseness, tension. But they also contain a carefully targeted critique, for they call attention to serious questions of human troubles and catastrophes.
The exhibition is symbolically divided into four areas: people’s relationship to nature, human conflict, and the individual in the midst of war, but also people with all their dreams, hopes, and fulfilled meaning of life. Like an underground river, these themes disappear, reappear, and become intermingled, just like real human problems, actions, or situations in various parts of the world. Relationships, conflicts, and dreams are something shared by us all.
The photographs of people’s relationship to nature paint a picture of the current state of the Earth: In some places, social and environmental degradation is truly extreme. We can compare and contrast: In the 1970s in the Galápagos, Antonín photographed the last remains of the rich symbiosis of nature and a holistic ecosystem. By comparison, his images from Ecuador taken just twenty years later show the devastation and logging of the country’s rainforests, black lagoons of oil and
contaminated rivers, and the helplessness and poverty of the local people. Guyana in 1997 was suffering from the long-term effects of rapacious gold mining; the terrifying shadows of an isolated tree paint a suggestive picture of a landscape suffering from malaria and contaminated by cyanide. That same year saw the plundering of blood diamonds in Angola’s recently opened Catoca mine, where the luxury of diamonds and giant prawns contrasts sharply with the helpless locals in an otherwise pillaged land with no birds or other animals. A similar situation can be found in the Congo in 2002, where poachers run wild, engaging in illegal hunting and trading in ivory.
Antonín’s photographs show humankind’s harsh impact on nature, the conquest-like expansion of human society, and a devastated and disappearing countryside, but also nature’s strength and its ability to resist human influences. Nature confirmed its dominance through the tsunami that hit Sri Lanka at Christmas 2004. Another important subject is Chernobyl, where political conflict is mixed with people’s lack of sensitivity towards the landscape as embodied by the construction of a nuclear power plant and the subsequent environmental catastrophe resulting from the 1986 accident that affected a large number of people. Antonín Kratochvíl first photographed the region in 1996, by which time the dead urban landscape of Pripyat had been conquered by a wild, irradiated nature and an invisible danger still lurked at every step.
Antonín’s photographs capture scenes from local, European, and world history and conflicts. His images from Central and Eastern Europe in the 1980s and ’90s, which offer a unique and comprehensive photographic overview of this region, were published in his first book, Broken Dream: 20 Years of War in Eastern Europe (1997). They reflect Antonín’s subtle sense of nostalgia and the scars that opened up when he, as an émigré with an American passport, began making repeated visits to his original home after 1976. Above all, however, these visits produced an indelible photographic record of the atmosphere of and life in the neighboring communist states. His images from Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and the Soviet Union are dominated by two subjects: the impact of industrialization on the landscape and life in the poverty-stricken, forgotten countryside. Antonín was strongly attracted to the question of people’s roots, moral codices, religious ceremonies, weddings, and funerals, and so he explored and documented in depth the rituals that people had maintained despite poverty and communism – in Poland, Hungary, and especially Romania. These places never lost that munificence of humanity and the sense of pride one feels from being a part of it.
Another of Kratochvíl’s grand themes is the question of endangered children. In Mongolia, Guatemala, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Pakistan, the urban labyrinth of sewers belongs to gangs of children. Abandoned and orphaned, left to fend for themselves on the streets, they easily fall into the machinery of crime and brutality. Hunger, drugs, money, prostitution, prison, and death are the specters of the uncontrollable roulette of their lives, often with no possibility for change. In 1988, Antonín’s photographs of this immense problem made as part of a reportage about children in Mongolia earned him the prestigious Alfred Eisenstaedt Award.
Antonín’s photographic adrenalin has also offered us insight into some of the world’s worst prisons. In 1997, he photographed Venezuela’s El Dorado prison, which is ruled by drug gangs and gold. Ten years later, he visited an unguarded prison in Guinea-Bissau from which there is no escape, and in 2002 he took a famous photograph from a prison in Myanmar located at the center of the opium triangle on the border between Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand. This picture showing dozens of drug dealers sitting cross-legged in wooden cages won first place in the most prestigious category, General News, at the 2003 World Press Photo competition.
War represents the escalation of human conflicts. Antonín Kratochvíl has documented numerous modern wars and genocides in Rwanda/Zaire, Guatemala, Congo, Haiti, the Philippines, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and the former Yugoslavia. His records of reality are a source of information on and direct witness of the current state of civilization. The desacralization of all areas of human existence has taken on genocidal dimensions, leaving behind a trail of death, slavery, environmental devastation, and subverted and deformed moral principles and values.
What, then, is the outlook for the future? We will probably have to dream up a new, different, better world. This change can be realized once we are sure about what we want and how we want it. For now, we can find inspiration in the last section of Antonín Kratochvíl’s exhibition, which looks at human dreams, hopes, and prospects. Come and see how the stars are turning! By mixing portraits of completely unknown and anonymous people with photographs of celebrities such as Jean Reno, David Bowie, Billy Bob Thornton, Willem Dafoe, Debbie Harry, Patricia Arquette, Amanda Lear, Mejla Hlavsa, and Pavel Landovský, the exhibition offers an allegorical celebration of humankind. Antonín captures their state of mind: His photography is his way of understanding people, his non-verbal witness of empathy and the relative nature of beauty, fame, and success.
We have grown accustomed to viewing public museums and galleries through the prism of individual details: exhibitions, publications, projects. But we forget to ask about their more universal social responsibility, and thus also about whether they follow any kinds of ethical rules. Constantly putting off and ignoring the discussion of what ethical principles public cultural institutions follow in their day-to-day operations leads us into a state of uncertainty and aimlessness characterized by reproaches, misunderstandings, and weakened trust. The need to discuss (among other things) the ethical framework of the functioning of public cultural institutions is thus more acute than ever.
Marek Pokorný is a critic and curator of contemporary fine art, and has been the director of the Plato Ostrava gallery since 2016. He is also the former director of the Moravian Gallery in Brno and in 2020 he was a candidate for the position of director of the National Gallery in Prague. In 1995, he founded Detail, a magazine focused on the art of the post-1989 art scene. He is a member of the board of Czech Radio.
The only formal ethical framework that most public museums and galleries work with is the professional code of ethics of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), which defines certain areas of these institutions behavior but provides no specific guidelines. Museums and galleries that own and manage collections – museums of natural science, local history, ethnography, and art – usually refer to this code in their charter documents. Nevertheless, none of them have any mechanisms in place for identifying ethical risks and making practical decisions in conflict situations, nor have they articulated a position regarding potential conflicts of interest and the defense of their own autonomy against economic and political pressures that might influence their activities.
The subject of the ethical questions associated with a museum’s operations was first addressed more intensely around the world around twenty years ago. The 1980s and 1990s were dominated by the neoliberal logic that museums and galleries should become increasingly efficient and effective, and so, partly out of necessity, public institutions focused their operations on the sale of services and on injections of private money – from sponsors all the way to an increasingly more intense love affair with the art market – until their behavior began to resemble that of classical companies or (to use a popular term among ordoliberals) enterprises.
At the time, it looked as if we had found the one true path (i.e., that of business). Perhaps the most monstrous example is the reign of Thomas Krens as director of New York’s Guggenheim Museum, who promoted the museum’s expansion along the model of transnational corporations and franchises, profit-oriented investments, and a policy of aggressively pushing a global product into ever newer markets. In fact, most Czech cultural institutions still dream of something similar.
Nevertheless, over the past twenty years the museum scene in Germany, Great Britain, France, and the United States has also recognized the danger of public cultural institutions’ increasing dependence on revenues and on the interests of the public sector. Private entities support public institutions not just out of a sense of altruism; generally speaking, they are not enlightened philanthropists but have their own economic, political, status, and symbolic interests. In addition, their support for or symbiosis with museums is often done at the expense of the museum’s public function. The rising level of economization, pressures on a higher share of self-financing, and the tendency towards the “multi-source” financing of cultural institutions are other aspects of the same danger – things are done not because they have meaning, but because they pay.
Another danger is the growing dependence on elected officials and political support, not to mention direct interventions into and demands placed on the functioning of public cultural institutions like the kind that have unfortunately become a regular part of social life in neighboring Poland or in Hungary. Similarly, some of the economic or personnel decisions affecting museums and galleries that in recent years have been made in the Netherlands and France are a form of ideological or political pressure as well.
What Is to Be Done?
On the other hand, some areas of this debate, which we have been following for the past decade, seem to be headed toward a conclusion, often with positive input from political elites. This applies in particular to ethical questions related to the origin of museum collections – a problem that is not generally present in public discourse in the Czech Republic. Instead, it is discussed by a small circle of curators, critics, and people at universities, or it appears in professional journals such as Artalk. In other countries, this debate has led to often radical changes in the presentation, interpretation, and contextualization of works acquired over the past roughly two hundred years from colonized or plundered countries, and has even led to the return of some items and collections to their places of origin.
We, too, should ask ourselves whether our collections might contain items that should be returned or at least exhibited in a different light. Our memory institutions already have experience with, for instance, the restitution of Jewish property, meaning art and other items stolen during the Second World War. Unlike the current debate in other countries, however, the Czech museum scene only responded when it was forced to from the outside – by politics. The social consensus of the 1990s enabled an extensive coming-to-terms with that part of museum and gallery collections that had been acquired as a result of the repression and murder of a large group of citizens. At the same time, these institutions produced thorough reports and publications about collection items that came from confiscated property.
But – and this is important – Czech museums did not see restitution as a call for internal discussion of the ethics of their collecting activities: The only subject that was discussed was the political coming-to-terms with the regimes of the 20th century. Like the rest of society, museums were dominated by a general consensus that it was “they” who were to blame, meaning someone else, and that the museums and galleries that had such items in their collections were victims as well. Museums simply did not understand that the issue is just one of many far more fundamental questions related to memory institutions’ ethical and political responsibility. Efforts went no further than the minimum required by law, and nobody ever thought of identifying the mechanisms that consistently place museums as public institutions into ethically problematic situations.
Despite their unwillingness, cultural institutions must nevertheless explore the question of their own responsibility; they must engage in internal debate without someone telling them to, so that they may actively formulate their own position with a view to the future. If they don’t respond until asked to do so by societal or political pressure, they will not fulfil their basic function and we can hold them co-responsible for the miserable state of society at large. In this sense, our public cultural institutions have spent the past thirty years growing accustomed to ethical passivity and are in a similarly defensive position as before 1989. The social, political, and personal roots of today’s state of affairs, and the unwillingness to change it, reach all the way back to the 1990s.
Fortunately, we are at a turning point: The younger generation of curators or theorists in particular is beginning to vocally call for museums’ and galleries’ social responsibility. To some extent, of course, they do so because it’s fashionable or they make a virtue out of necessity (after all, what we have here is a vacant professional niche that, thanks to the established foreign discourse, can be easily occupied), but we are also dealing here with fundamental questions as to the societal relevance and trustworthiness of public cultural institutions.
No Longer at Ease
But let us return to the question of decolonization. Although we did not have any colonies, decolonization is not an entirely distant or abstract matter for the Czech museum scene. It relates to us intensely through the Náprstek Museum (today a part of the National Museum) and may also affect the National Gallery’s collections of non-European art. And what of the Aleš Hrdlička Museum in Humpolec or the Emil Holub Museum in Holice? We are ostentatiously proud of the legacy of Hanzelka and Zikmund, whose wild travels around the world were nevertheless a kind of post-1948 mental colonialism. The Baťa company’s expansion into India and South America shows all the traits of economic colonization. And so on. All of these questions are ones that our society has to come to terms with through its cultural institutions, which possess – or should possess – the intellectual and material tools for their critical assessment.
In my vision for the National Gallery, I first proposed – some ten years ago – combining its collections of art from non-European civilizations and cultures with similar collections from the National Museum to create a new and independent institution. The National Gallery “reads” these collections from the perspective of art and aesthetics, while the National Museum (or more specifically, the Náprstek Museum) understands them from the perspective of anthropology, ethnography, and cultural history. Bringing the two together would create a platform for a far more sophisticated approach to interpreting and exhibiting these collections and would thus help to clarify the post-colonial situation of Czech society. The public debate associated with the planned renovation of the Náprstek Museum, which the museum only agreed to after pressure from the professional community, may perhaps mark the beginning of long-term changes.
Secluded, Near Woods
I am especially interested in the question of self-reflection, which should have practical consequences for cultural institutions. In putting off this task, I see a weak link in the Czech museum scene. I understand that any discussion that involves addressing certain ingrained approaches and established solutions will be uncomfortable – all the more so if you consider the conservative audience and unprepared or dismissive founding bodies (i.e., political entities) – as recently exemplified by the rapid firing of the director of the Lidice Memorial, who had sought to defend the autonomy of this memory institution against political motivated denunciations. Nobody from the museum scene raised their voice.
It is to their own harm that museum representatives consistently avoid engaging publicly as museums workers; as a result, nobody counts on their participation in societal or political debates as natural and respected partners.
The value of museums and galleries rests not only in their collections and exhibitions; they also possess a certain symbolic weight as institutions. But what we see is the weakness of the entire discipline, its marginal position. The public simply does not feel that memory institutions are actively and uniquely involved in defining cultural identity or actively shaping debate in society. This is not only because large institution have failed to take an active position on issues in society, but also because, after spending years renovating their buildings, they have been incapable of presenting long-term exhibitions reflecting today’s professional and visitor standards. The National Museum is failing, the Museum of Decorative Arts has taken a highly cautious approach to social questions, and the Museum of Czech Literature has been similarly silent. Yes, museums with a long tradition will probably never be radical leaders of debate, but it is they who have the strength, the means, and the people to explore these questions at the appropriate level. But they don’t.
Fear and Trembling
I have already mentioned that Czech museums and galleries do have customized codes defining the ethical dimension of their behavior. Everybody is aware of the dangers involved in formulating an institution’s standpoint on certain things, so they choose the path of cautious opportunism. After all, declarations of one’s values are logically perceived as a de facto political act, and, additionally, clearly formulated ethical rules might weaken an institution economically. Such rules create obligations that limit the institution’s ability to gain (financial as well as material) support from stronger actors: private collectors, corporate sponsors, and – in the case of art museums – art dealers and auction houses. Paradoxically, these sources of income are almost negligible in the Czech Republic, or at least weaker than they are in the surrounding countries. And once you anger potential sponsors, you lose further political support from your founder (local, regional, or state government), who generally does not understand the importance of public cultural institutions’ autonomy.
Over the past thirty years, the museum community simply has failed to build up a sufficiently strong self-awareness or presence as a social actor despite the fact that it has the tools to do so, such as the Association of Museums and Galleries, ICOM, or the Council of Galleries.
Representatives of cultural institutions avoid expressing their positions and viewpoints out of fear that they might harm themselves and their organization. Everybody prefers to play a defensive positional game and nobody wants to be the one to lead the debate.
So who should be leading the debate? One natural candidate in the field of fine art is the National Gallery, side by side with Prague City Gallery, the Moravian Gallery in Brno, the Olomouc Museum of Art, or the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague. But they require support from others such as the National Museum, the Moravian Museum in Brno, or the Silesian Museum in Opava.
But I find it hard to imagine that someone like the National Museum would discuss the ethics of museum operations. What kind of code of ethics could allow a museum to host an election debate of party leaders? The presence of party politics on the grounds of an institution that should by its very nature be autonomous is a rare phenomenon, unthinkable in a civilized country.
The World as Will and Representation
What is more, museums and galleries of fine art have one specific characteristic, and that is that they are constantly aware of the threat posed by the art market and by the interests of large collectors and private individuals, who in recent years have begun establishing their own private institutions, with some of them quite logically vying for public support.
The ease with which such private undertakings manage to gain public attention distorts the weight and importance of public galleries and art museums. Public cultural institutions cannot and should not compete with this pressure for easy solutions, nor should they try to fight for economic dominance or submit to populism.
Their disadvantage – i.e., their complicated rules for managing public resources and the requirement that they discuss their planned activities – is also a declaration of a specific type of social responsibility that simply is not in private enterprises’ DNA by the very nature of these enterprises.
Public institutions’ somewhat cumbersome nature and their need to defend their decisions should, however, go hand in hand with responsibility and trustworthiness. If we are going to consider that a weakness, the private sector will certainly notice. In recent years, the private sector has indeed realized that it can easily play a more significant role on the art scene. One result has been a wave of newly founded private galleries that don’t have to follow the rules of the game when it comes to the use of public money. These new organizations are more efficient and don’t have to negotiate with curators, curators’ principles, or other participants in the public discourse. They deal with private money, and it is solely up to the investor to choose what to do with it.
If, among other things because of these reasons, public museums and galleries have failed to convince their partners from the private sector that it is advantageous and appropriate for them to support public institutions, they will pay for it in the end. Because for people who invest in art there is no point in dealing with public institutions if it is better to found your own. The symbolic capital of public cultural institutions has sunk below a level where it pays to invest in them.
In the early days of the existence of a private institution such as DOX, there was a need to support certain values. To this day, DOX perfectly fills the role of a venue that nurtures a certain type of audience (such as the middle class), gives its needs a certain direction, and meets certain ideas regarding quality of life. But the moment we ask whether everything truly is as this private institution proclaims, we encounter a very ill-tempered response. Several years ago, DOX failed in the first round of a grant process to receive the large amount it had requested, because the members of the committee did not recommend the gallery’s project. Soon, the media were full of interviews with this private institution’s representatives about the injustice they had suffered. A perfectly ordinary situation that has happened to more than a few people, but not everyone has the prime minister’s telephone number. It is a model case: a private institution asks for support from the public purse but is taken aback when not everybody appreciates the quality of its public service.
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
The strength of public cultural institutions must rest in their symbolic and social weight, which compensates for their lack of economic strength and political connections, even at the price of some conflict. A public museum of art, meaning an institutions engaged in collecting activities, can never be financially competitive on the art market. On the other hand, it possesses all the prerequisites for building a strong and symbolic position and convincing the artist or seller that the context of its collection and the tradition it represents can make up for any financial “loss” they might incur. This means first and foremost investing into knowledge, interpretational skills, the mediation of an artwork’s significance, and so on.
So far, we have primarily been witness to the opposite case, when the lending of an artwork is dependent on the good will or even promotion and accommodation of a private entity that, in this way, looks after its own interests above all else. And here we find ourselves in a ethically problematic area. Private entities can lend a work for an exhibition or, under certain conditions, deposit it with a museum under the presupposition that its market value will increase thanks to the “symbolic investment” resulting from its placement into a qualitative or historical context that increases its value and significance. Precisely for this reason, some institutions (for instance in the United Kingdom) ask lenders to commit to not placing a work on the market for a specific period of time.
By comparison, Czech public museums and galleries put on exhibitions that act like a kind of golden goose for increasing a work’s value. Very simply, it works like this: I finance your catalogue but you put a painting on the cover that I will soon sell for tens of millions… Such simplistic and denigrating forms of reciprocal cooperation, in which the public sector
subjugates itself to private interests, is unacceptable within a European context. In return for a small gift, a museum will exhibit a “work of the month” that soon thereafter appears at an auction.I will admit that, fifteen years ago, even I did not find such actions unacceptable. Entire monographic exhibitions are held at public cultural institutions, paid in large part by those who stand to earn from selling the particular artist’s works – and without any rules regulating the subsequent marketability of the exhibition’s content. Yes, audiences were satisfied, but what did they actually receive? Was it an experience underscored by a professional artistic assessment, or did they visit an art dealer’s showroom?
Naked in the Thorns
The most recent scandal involved the Mikuláš Medek retrospective at the National Gallery, from which a private collector pulled a large number of artworks – supposedly because the gallery had failed to indicate the name of the collection for one of them. It was a mistake that could be rectified in a matter of hours for the exhibition, and in several days for the catalogue. The media provided the collector with an unprecedented amount of space, which he used to not only express certain suspicions that the form of the exhibition may have been influenced by the interests of other players on the art market – he even questioned the form of and concept behind the entire exhibition.
Now that is a scandal.
It is almost unbelievable that person with an immediate collecting and economic interest in the exhibit works of art should question the symbolic framework of the country’s most important museum of art, including its autonomous decisions regarding the form of its exhibitions. What such a retrospective should look like can be a legitimate subject of professional debate and criticism, but a collector assailing the competence of the National Gallery is simply unconscionable. In this case, however, the institution itself failed as well, or at least its then director, Anna-Marie Nedoma, who refused to discuss the matter and accepted the collector’s demands without discussion or explanation. In so doing, she undermined her own institution and contributed to the further serious weakening of its social importance. You are speechless; we are speechless.
There is no doubt that the public and private spheres must work together – all the more reason to find a common modus vivendi. I don’t question the interests and often even the good intentions of private investors and collectors. But we cannot ignore the fact that these do not necessarily overlap with the public interest – which must be guaranteed by public cultural institutions. However, they must not under-mine their authority by their own excesses and cowardice.
Our neighbors have not ignored this debate. Today, when the Slovak National Gallery takes in a large, high-quality private collection of modern Slovak art, it does so within a carefully discussed and detailed contractual framework and without any conditions that might interfere with the museum’s public functioning. The important thing is to establish a transparent maneuvering space in which both parties’ interests can be met under certain conditions. Public cultural institutions must stand by their positions even at the risk that there will be a time when they will not have access to the desired works of art necessary for them to properly function.
The Philosophy of Money
For some time, Western Europe and the United States have been engaged in a lively debate regarding the origin of money. These discussions have sometimes been called post-Marxist, but the questions and arguments that they raise cannot be generally ignored. Is it right that the money for a gallery’s operations comes from the business of poverty, from the exploitation of vulnerable groups and workers in countries with low wages, or from the profits of environmentally undesirable business activities? The British trend of leading museums cutting ties with British Petroleum, which for decades was one of the country’s largest sponsors of arts and culture, is just one consequence of this debate about the origin of money. The boycott of companies that produce addictive medicines in the United States, coupled with calls for the Metropolitan Museum to reject sponsorships from these companies and to remove company representatives from the museum’s board of directors, is another example.
In any case, it is a debate we cannot avoid. And at the same time, I myself am not entirely clear as to my position towards the question of codes of ethics. I am a pragmatic person, but I also believe that my institution is still capable of making positive and proper use of resources, no matter where they come from. Such money must be invested in the right things and should not be used to atone for the sins committed in the process of making it. But here, too, there exists a certain limit that cannot be crossed: money made from debt collection and repossession, child labor, gambling, the systematic destruction of the environment.
At the Top of My Voice
Every large institution should incorporate its positions on these issues into a kind of constitution or code of ethics so that it can be predictable and consequent in future negotiations. In the end, a debate regarding the conditions under which we can properly fulfill our function in society could benefit everyone. It may even help to create a balance of power, strengthen the symbolic value of public cultural institutions, and thus compensate for their relative “weakness” vis-à-vis economically and politically powerful actors. For cultural and symbolic capital is all that our institutions have to offer.
This text is the result of a conversation initiated by Pavel Klusák, whom I would like to thank for his input and for the effort he put into transcribing the spoken word into a draft written form.
