The Ostrava Scene: There and Then, Which Do not Apply Martin Netočný
I was born and grew up in Ostrava. I left the city about ten years ago, right after graduating from my secondary school. Without feeling it too strongly at the time, the art scene was undergoing a change for which we do not yet have a stable name, but which can undoubtedly be framed by a partial inclination towards certain ideals of modern thinking. Faced with global crises, artists have decided to use the imaginative potential of their own practice to participate more actively than in recent decades in a search for solutions. Therefore, the chimera of the end of history and the arbitrary romp in a world without wars, suffering and totalitarianism has thus vanished in a part of the emerging generation.
The last ten years of my life (living in Prague) have been clearly marked by these trends, but this period paradoxically follows my childhood experience of seeing art in (Ostrava‘s) public space dressed in the garb of postmodern aesthetics at the turn of the millennium. This autobiographical line can also be considered a good metaphor for the state of the contemporary art scene. Although a part of the artistic activities today define themselves against the models of the nineties and the noughties, they (i.e., these models) are somehow causally contained in them not only due to a temporal succession. However, there are also art works, valid and successful from the point of view of the audience, that are overtly based on the previously dominant strategies. Be that as it may, postmodernism has become a living tradition which the contemporary artistic field must constantly grapple with.
In January 2024, I started working at Prague City Gallery and was put in charge of a project to present to a national audience, the art that was produced in the 1990s within the so-called ”Ostrava scene“. Together with the other curator of this exhibition, Tomáš Knoflíček, we faced a difficult question: to update or to historicise? Even though the latter was a tempting adventure, we were forced by the lack of methodological precedent, and above all by the lack of time to make the first decision and to update.
In my introductory text, of course, I have offered a slightly different and generally more acceptable interpretation, but in retrospect now I can clearly see how much my personal story has seeped into the character of the exhibition. For me, returning to the Ostrava terrain means returning to the values that influenced the first twenty years of my life, and that therefore have shaped my present. In doing so, I am not only returning to the idea of postmodernism’s continuity, which we have tried to establish in several intergenerational dialogues at the Municipal Library gallery, but also to a reassessment of the territoriality of artistic production.
By choosing this frame, we are not only trying to suggest that every ”now“ contains something of the ”then“, but we also problematise the relationship between the labels ”there“ and ”here“. Unlike the curators of the 1990s, we are therefore not primarily concerned with the fact that there is a distinct artistic production in the Northeast that needs to be presented in Prague, but rather with the overlaps that the ”Ostrava scene“ has always contained. Its original and hermetically sealed form has therefore crumbled in our hands, and much more than a solid formation, it has become, in our perspective, a collection of personalities and art works of the last thirty years, that can be associated with the postindustrial regional metropolis.
While this mode of reading describes spatio-temporal arcs that are very familiar to me, I am not alone in this. In addition to young artists for whom staying in Ostrava is rather exceptional, this bridging can also be found in personalities such as Pavel Šmíd,Petr Pastrňák and Petr Lysáček, who were in a sense indispensable to the cultural life there, but who also migrated across the country as well as between continents at different points in their lives. Considering the ”Ostrava scene“ from today‘s position is therefore, it seems, as convoluted a task as framing and examining postmodernism – the living tradition with which its emergence is integrally connected. Those who do so have no possibility of an analytical distance. ”There“ and ”then“ do not apply to them; there is only the ”here“ and ”now“.
The author is a curator at the GHMP
