The Czech Republic is not a country of advanced artistic activism. No wonder, then, that one of this year’s most anticipated art events took local audiences by surprise. The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei displayed his 2011 Zodiac Heads in front of the National Gallery in Prague. Just before the opening on 6 February, though, the artist wrapped the animal heads in gold space-blankets, which are today most recognisable in connection with their use by refugees travelling through the European Union. This reference to current events provoked reactions of incomprehension and dissent. Without wishing to evaluate the quality of this gesture (plenty of others have), the specific context of the Czech Republic – which spent a substantial part of the second half of the twentieth century under a totalitarian regime – is one in which we might expect a more receptive attitude towards such a political intervention. But the negligible response evoked by the current humanitarian crisis in Czech art in general and the generally cautious relationship with artistic activism are, however, to some extent consequences of that history.
Before 1989, the majority of Czech art carried a latent political statement: every genuine expression was a call for freedom. The role of the artist was associated with the notion of revealing the truth about social issues. Paradoxically, however, many artists deliberately steered clear of explicitly political statements. Free creative work, liberated from politics, was regarded as the supreme value. Openly dissident or even activist art occurred only exceptionally within the Czech art scene, even though dissidents and activists were to be found among artists. After 1989, one of the expressions of the newly acquired freedom was the rejection of the role of public speaker: the majority of artists concentrated on private themes. It seemed, for the moment, as though the triumphant capitalist system and liberal democracy did not need criticism or alternatives.
Before 1989, the majority of Czech art carried a latent political statement: every genuine expression was a call for freedom. The role of the artist was associated with the notion of revealing the truth about social issues
Interest in public affairs did not return to the Czech environment in general until the beginning of the new millennium. During the International Monetary Fund meeting in 2000, Prague was shaken by massive anticapitalist protests. As a result, environmental issues, awareness of gender inequality and acknowledgement that deep-rooted racism was being directed against the Roma population increasingly came to the fore. The younger generation, with customary local irony, began to draw attention to the soulless consumerism of post-communist society, which was spotlighted, for example, in the 2004 documentary Český sen (Czech Dream). Its directors, Vít Klusák and Filip Remunda, perpetrated a large-scale hoax, creating a massive advertisement campaign for a fictional discount hypermarket. When thousands arrived for the grand opening, instead of a vast new shop they found only a canvas facade.
Around the same time, the connection between art and politics in the field of fine art in the Czech environment was stimulated by the example of personalities who came from abroad. In 2000, the Czech- American artist Jan Jakub Kotík, a pupil of Hans Haacke and a critic of rightwing ideology, moved to Prague. In his installations, he analysed the rhetoric of US foreign politics, blending it with heavy-metal aesthetics. ‘War on Terror’ or ‘Axis of Evil’ turn out to be great slogans for T-shirts (worn by models at the private view of a show by the artist at Prague’s Galerie Display in 2003), and in Hail to the Chief (2003), the American presidential seal, embroidered onto the meshes of a 3 × 3 stack of Marshall amplifiers, proved a fitting aesthetic complement to the opening riff from Black Sabbath’s Iron Man (1970), which blared out of the stack. Likewise the radical Russian artist Avdey Ter-Oganyan, who has lived in Prague since 1999. Ter-Oganyan fled Russia and sought political asylum in the Czech Republic after his 1998 performance Young Blasphemer, in which he defaced cheap religious icons with nails and fake excrement before totally destroying them with an axe. The artist has now become a demanding mentor in his adopted country, embodying a critical attitude towards art. Both Kotík and Ter-Oganyan, in their own way, shifted the local scene towards a greater social engagement.
The transformation of the Czech art scene was also influenced by global artistic trends. Participatory practices that are inextricably linked to the work of Brno-born Katerˇina Šedá demand the analysis of specific social conditions and a plan for their positive transformation. Šedá advocates a change in thinking via shared activities, binding together atomised individuals by means of joint journeys or synchronised tasks. She has, for example, convinced neighbours in a small village to let her take the direct route home from the bus stop, even if it meant climbing fences and crossing properties (Over and Over, 2008); made inhabitants of a large housing project wear identical shirts, designed by the artist (For Every Dog a Different Master, 2007); or relocated residents of a small South Moravian hamlet to London, where they carried out their habitual daily tasks (Bedrˇichovice Upon Thames, 2011–15). These activities in themselves do not solve the issues, but they do point to the possibility of a different perception of everyday life. Šedá focuses on precisely circumscribed communities, and her work is therefore closer to group therapy than political activism.
On the other hand, protests – whose motivation is primarily political – can also acquire the character of unspectacular yet moving works of art. Since the autumn of 2014, a variable group of volunteers associated with Memorial, an international human-rights organisation, has been mounting a performance every Thursday at Prague International Airport with the title Waiting in Vain. When flights are arriving from Russia, the participants hold up banners with names of people who will never arrive, because they are either dead or have been incarcerated in Russian jails, among them journalist Anna Politkovskaya, Ukrainian soldier Nadezhda Savchenko and Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, Pussy Riot and the passengers of shot-down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17.
A work labelled as artistic activism, which last year attracted perhaps the biggest response so far in Czech mainstream media, was a happening staged in September 2015 by the group Ztohoven, whose members (in the guise of chimney sweeps) climbed the presidential palace of Miloš Zeman and replaced the Czech leader’s insignia with a pair of giant red shorts. The piece undoubtedly made an impression with its practical execution, but its impact is debatable. Those who do not care for Zeman were amused by the joke, but such an intervention is hardly likely to change the minds of his committed supporters. Crucially, Ztohoven’s piece does not depict Zeman’s populist politics nor reveal his support of Vladimir Putin.
As the artist and theorist Václav Magid pointed out, art should not play the role of a convenient cover for artists who defend bad work from criticism by appealing to freedom of expression
Artist Vladimír Turner has collaborated with the Ztohoven collective in the past, but soon abandoned similar media-friendly events. For him, the conduct of life and of his artistic work are inextricably inter- connected. He participates in the activities of the Prague community centre Klinika (Clinic), which, in addition to cultural programmes, organises aid for refugees. But only a small part of Turner’s artistic output can be found in galleries. He creates performances and installations in public spaces in which he often changes the function of commonplace infrastructure: he transforms rotating billboards into carousels and banners into improvised dwellings. Turner also shoots documentary films and film essays, in which he analyses wider global issues, including colonialism, perhaps the only Czech artist to do so. His White and Black Film (2014) captures his confrontation with the lives of Australian Aborigines, whose values have been disrupted by Western civilisation.
A 2013 project by Tomáš Rafa spurred a formative debate on artistic activism in the Czech Republic. For the Artwall Gallery in Prague, the artist organised a tender for a Czech-Roma flag, which some members of the artistic community ranked as a fruitless provocation. Rafa’s objectively artistically weak and, in terms of antiracism, toothless work provoked a debate about the conflict between the autonomy of art and its engagement. Perhaps, as the artist and theorist Václav Magid pointed out, art should not play the role of a convenient cover for artists who defend bad work from criticism by appealing to freedom of expression and the political seriousness of the topic. At the same time, Magid rejects activist art-projects in which politics is not a subject of active engagement, but becomes a mere pretext for contemplative observation.
Such reasoning explains why we find many artists in the Czech Republic who do not mix artworks with political activism. Many of the top representatives of contemporary Czech art, among them Pavel Sterec, Vasil Artamonov, Alexey Klyuykov and Barbora Kleinhamplová, participate in demonstrations, take part in the activities of autonomous associations or travel as volunteers to the Balkans to aid migrants. Their own artistic work is based on their political views, but does not take the form of overt activism. Rather, it represents an independent creative commentary on the world, which is not primarily focused on a direct transformation of the state of affairs.
To return to Ai Weiwei and his wrapped zodiac heads: for the politically conservative Prague public, unaccustomed to such artistic statements, this gesture constituted an obstacle to an unimpeded viewing of art, the essence of which the public still associates with the categories of beauty, skill or narrative inventiveness. For the local socially engaged artists, in turn, the gold blankets only highlighted the surface of an issue that must not only be depicted in art, but must also be actively dealt with.
This article first appeared in the April 2016 issue of ArtReview.
