Interview on Hermits
On the Hermit,
symposia in the Plasy monastery, refuges for artists, intensive and
extensive agriculture, openness and closedness
An interview with Miloš Vojtěchovský
Conducted by Lenka Dolanová, Anthology of texts catalogue Ostrovy odporu, 2012, NG v Praze
The monastery in Plasy was one of the first places in the then
Czechoslovakia to hold artist residencies – for a total of eight years
from 1992 – 1999. The project gradually developed into regular,
sometimes theme-based meetings of international groups of artists,
theoreticians and curators as part of various interdisciplinary symposia
and exhibitions. How did this concept come to light and why the monastery in Plasy of all places?
It came to be the right way – by chance. The painter Jiří
Kornatovský, who comes from Plasy, had an exhibition at the OKO Gallery
that I attempted to run from 1989-1991 in Amsterdam where I’d lived
since the 1980s. He mentioned that there was a chance to put on an exhibition in the monastery there. I’d been at the legendary exhibition 9 x 9 in Plasy organized in 1981 by Anna Fárová and had vivid memories of that place even though everything was different then in the 1990s. In the winter of 1991 I made trip there to take a look. With
the help of Jana Šikýřová, the monastery’s caretaker at that time,
Kornatovský wanted to hang something in the room next to the Saint
Benedict Chapel that served as a provisional exhibition space. I suggested changing the concept: it seemed a shame to me just to bring and exhibit pictures or sculptures there. I
borrowed a video camera, recorded what the spaces looked like and then
showed the film in Amsterdam to friends from a squat and from art
communities rather than to people from “high art”. My idea was that we
could do “something” in the monastery – maybe an installation or
concert. We didn’t have any money for this, but then the trip from Amsterdam to Prague wasn’t that expensive. As I was recording with the video camera, I noticed the space’s excellent acoustics. It seemed to me that it would also be good to consider a work with sound. I recalled that in 1981 accordnist Jim Čert – Horáček had played at the St. Benedict Chapel, and I’d been amazed how Santini had designed the convent’s acoustics so brilliantly. The
caretaker and I agreed in the end that guests could come starting in
the spring and that in June we’d organize something like a jamboree, a
symposium. The first year’s symposium proliferated through a chain reaction and there were some fifty or sixty people participating.
The idea for a “residency” was influenced by the fact that one of the participants, the sound artist Bram Cox, was blind and arrived with her friend Mathias Klein, who was disabled and in a wheelchair. They agreed with the filmmaker Joost Verhey who was shooting a documentary about them that they would go to Plasy and shoot the film there as well. The caretaker kindly arranged provisional accommodations for them in the prelature building that had just been abandoned by the Civil Defence of Ministery of Defence division and which offered several large empty rooms. So suddenly there was the chance for accommodations; others moved in and some guests even camped out inside the convent itself. The
degree of freedom was unbelievable; this very much surprised me even
though Czechoslovakia in the early 1990s was a country of unexpected
possibilities.
So the concept was created and developed quite spontaneously. Eventually large groups of artists from all over the world would make their way each year to Plasy for several months.
It was mainly during the first two years that it happened spontaneously. It ended up that, for instance, one of the attendees from Amsterdam remained in Plasy until the beginning of winter. Most of the guests were enchanted by the place, by the desolate beauty of the abandoned large monastery. This motivated me to begin preparing the next year. I managed to receive from the Mondrian Stichting, the Dutch foundation, a grant of 2,000 guldens (about CZK 40,000 at the time) which we used for a catalogue that Joska Skalník did the typographic work for. Thanks to the catalogue and word-of-mouth, the legend of Plasy spread and more people expressed their interest in coming. It
was a time of euphoria that stemmed from the reconnection of Europe and
a desire to take a look at what it looked like behind the Iron Curtain.
Were you inspired by any similar activities that you’d attended before?
I’d never had a similar experience
and never been to any residency, but I’d often visited events related to
residences or unofficial activities organized by the art community. Perhaps the greatest inspiration for me was the experience from Het Apollohuis space run by Paul and Helen Panhuysen in Eindhoven. Various art communities in squats in Amsterdam, such as Aorta or Silo, which had disappeared long ago, or Melkfabriek in Den Bosch and De Fabriek in Eindhoven, or a short visit to Christiania in Copenhagen, or the Polish Construction in Process network were also inspirational. People from similar communities began to come to Plasy.
Woody Vasulka, whom I met
about two years before that, declared that such refuges have to be
maintained all over the world for artists; a place to come and work at; a
place that is operated in a kind of non-monetary, post-capitalist
system based on an economy of donations, communication and friendship. I was quite taken by this idea at the time. It seemed like a great idea to me that I could take part in something similar in the istan. I
also felt that the right time had come to try connecting and gauging
experiences and ways of thinking between Western and Eastern Europe and
about which I still felt a certain resentment. Plasy was about a hundred kilometres from the western border, which seemed to me geographically appropriate as well. Recollections of some local unofficial actions also understandably played a role – such as the aforementioned 9 x 9 photography exhibition or the exhibitions at Čestmír Suška's symposia on a farm in Malechov near Klatovy.
Later the Hermit Foundation was founded as a kind of institutional anchoring of the entire project.
We founded the Hermit Foundation
for prosaic reasons in order to be able to apply for grants and so that
we could have some kind of sponsorship in negotiating with the State Heritage Institute, the keeper of the building at that time. I established the foundation with Jiří Kornatovský, later with his brother Ivo and with Jana Šikýřová.
The Hermit’s activities in
Plasy are often presented by thematic circles and inspirations that
refer to the foundation’s title, i.e. to the hermitage and tradition of
hermeticism. The idea of a
certain exclusive, relatively closed community existing in a somewhat
separated space, adrift from the rest of the world, comes up repeatedly
in connection with Hermit. And it’s still written and spoken of in this way today. In what sense did these traditions actually form the Hermit project and activities in Plasy?
This is a myth that was created around Hermit. I
hope that I myself didn’t sustain it, although it is true that I was
playing with themes of hermeticism and alchemy at that time. And
the venue was indeed a former monastery, though it had been long –
roughly 200 years ago – shut down and abolished by Josef II. At the time the term “hermit” seemed to me to be the most appropriate. I
also played with the idea of hermeticism, since the Baroque spirit of
the architecture is still stronger there than the Metternich influence
from the 19th century (Klemens von
Metternich obtained Plasy in 1826) and was in my view a determining
factor for the entire framework of the programme. But the reputation of a closed community is an unfounded notion. Maybe it came from the fact Plasy was then practically unknown and few knew where it actually was. But I welcomed being able to do something outside of Prague, outside the tourist hustle and bustle that prevails there. It occurred to me that changes are slower in the countryside, hundred kilometre outside of Prague.
I considered it an open framework from the start in terms of what the event would consist of. Someone came to visit unannounced and stayed a month. Plasy
was not directly linked to any established cultural activities in
Prague or in Plzeň; it was therefore beyond the horizon of general art
society interest. It was far away and most distinguished curators didn’t go there. Actually hermeticism and “closedness” do not mean the same thing – and the hermitage tradition is something else altogether.
I was reading at that time an essays by Peter Lamborn Wilson aka Hakim Bey on
pirates and temporary autonomous zones, and I liked how he poetically
and amusingly links the context of the hermetic sciences and religious
Medieval heretics to today’s radical culture protest. In studying the
books of Johan Amos Comenius, about whom I started to prepare in 1992
the exhibition project Orbis Pictus Revised
for the ZKM Centre in Karlsruhe, I came across the fascinating figure
of the Jesuit priest Athanasius Kircher and was captivated by the
illustrations from his books. I also read a book about the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles founded by David Hildebrand Wilson. I maintained a friendship with Mr. Zadrobílek, who founded the Trigon publishing house that was geared toward, among other things, the publishing of books about hermeticism and occultism.
Soon we had to close down the Hermit Foundation
anyway, since the state passed a law that a foundation must have assets
of at least a million crowns to be considered a foundation. We therefore founded the civic association The Society of Friends of Art in Plasy. Around 1995 I also began to introduce the name The Centre for Metamedia; this was a somewhat enigmatic and pretentious term, but for poetic and strategic reasons something like that was useful. I
thought up the term and felt that it nicely captured the hybrid
situation that more or less is not based on instruments and disciplines,
but on access, content and openness. Something like the
antithesis of the entrenched professional symposia where sculptors
sculpt together in quarries, ceramists bake clay together in kilns or
landscape artists paint together landscape scenes, etc.
So the idea of a kind of closed society was created only retrospectively? Let me quote from something you wrote: “This initiative was an attempt to see how a community works within a secluded, closed system; a unit that was autonomous . What it was like before and what it could be like. The community is simply religious or artistic, but it’s still a community.” Perhaps
that idea comes from the fact that the Plasy project lacks a more
extensive reflection from the Czech environment at that time; in 2007
Radoslava Schmelzová wrote her thesis on it for the School of Applied Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, but otherwise not much has been written about it. And since there isn’t much, what has been written and said has been taken too literally. Consequently, Plasy is slightly made of myths and exists more or less only in the memories of people that attended it. Those people often speak of it as if what took place there is, to a large degree, incommunicable.
That’s true, but your quote reflects more the concept that I started from. At
any rate, the people attending the symposiums were for a certain time
outside the centre, in an unknown terrain; the bus trip to Plzeň was
nearly an hour, and it took two and a half hours to get to Prague. Most
people around there spoke only Czech, so the place really had a remote
feel to it. A kind of community consciousness and even friendship gradually had to develop there. On the other hand, many people were visiting; in the early 1990s there weren’t many of these types of events taking place. Visitors came from Prague, but as well from many places in western Bohemia and even from Moravia and abroad. Sometimes two to three hundred people attended the concerts, symposia and weekend activities. But
this was beyond the capacity: when so many people started coming and
attending it became a little unsettling. A different community feeling
started to develop in which people were approaching it as a party.
Which of the themes of the symposia do you consider to be important from today’s perspective? Their titles were: Letokruhy (Tree Rings, 1993), Průsvitný posel (Transparent Messenger, 1994), Fungus: průzkum místa (1145 - 1995) (Fungus: Exploring a Place (1145 – 1995) 1994), Hermit V - Křížení poledníků (Hermit V – Meridians Crossing, 1995), Subrosa (1996), O počátku (About the Beginning, 1997), Limbo 1 (1998) and Pohádky (Fairytales, 1999). They
focussed on, among other things, the Baroque heritage, on figures that
had lived in Plasy, and perhaps even in a certain ecological sense how
they had interpreted the given environment. Could you expand on some of these themes and, above all, on how the artists and other participants approached them?
Chino Shuichi, Caressing Insects, Interactive performance, PC, sound,video tracking system, 1997
Each year it was a little different and depended on various circumstances. I think that subjectively and objectively, the most interesting and the most successful was the Meridian Crossings
in 1995. This one actually didn’t have any theme, only a kind of vague
cosmological metaphor on the antithesis of elements in terms of the
north and south, of heat and cold. To tell you the truth, I no longer remember what I precisely had in mind. Though
we didn’t have much money for the symposium, the synergy of the diverse
community that came together there was incredibly harmonic. At
that time we were still able to work in all the spaces of the monastery
complex, which seemed to be instilled and animated with new life. We
were able, intuitively, to set up a situation in which those who came
there – from sculptors to musicians – did not remain stuck in
stereotypes, but complemented one another as well as the whole
environment. In the evenings a visitor could wander in the
ambits of the convent, sometimes disappearing into hidden rooms,
listening to the eerie underground sounds or sit in the elysian
courtyard, watch the inflatable white swans in the cellars under the
granary, or climb up the bell tower and look out over the countryside. Maybe the autumn symposium Fungus was so magical because barely anyone came to the exhibition. The
ecological idea of that symposium was not my idea, but arose from a
discussion with curators from Belgium, Holland and Germany.
How do you perceive now, looking back, your role in Plasy as a main organizer of sorts who in a way directed the whole event? The chances are that not everyone who wanted to come was allowed to come – wasn’t there some kind of selection process?
In the beginning, especially the first two years, I, or the others did invite people and others signed up. In time I looked for an assistant to help with the preparations. Since
nobody similar was available actually in Plasy, I approached Jiří
Zemánek, who worked as a curator in the National Gallery and who was
quite active at the time. He helped me to find other people whom I didn’t personally know. In time, a selection had to be made since the amount of work and responsibilities began to be unmanageable. At
the beginning of 1995, after the first three years of the event, we
sent out a call for projects to be submitted for the next year. We rejected a few local projects on the grounds of being unrealistic or too feeble. Perhaps that rejection caused unfriendly reactions. I knew that there were whispers that we were putting on the event “just for ourselves”. But I don’t think that was true. I
wasn’t there as a curator with a vision, dictating who and what would
be there and who wouldn’t, but more as a mediator and catalyser trying
to arrange with the caretaker and heritage staff what was feasible and
possible. If people were just a little flexible and
accommodating, then they could have taken part in exhibitions. The
diversity of music genres was also broad: from Slovak folklore to Baroque music and contemporary electro-acoustic styles . Quickly I
began to realize that personal taste is limiting – at least here where
something more than purely an art project was taking place. We
had to think of the local people as well – that it’s not possible to
frighten them off with “avant-garde” art, which was obviously frequently
there, sometimes quite harsh and radical. The space at that time was still very dilapidated, quite different from the Plasy monastery site today. Actually, it was bit more apocalyptic then… Especially
combined with the regular pop-rock concerts that were held in the
fields and where several thousands of fans of the local group Brutus gathered and occupied the little town.
Is it possible to explain how the selection of artists was profiled? From
the catalogues it’s apparent that you focused on site-specific projects
situated directly in the monastery’s space, as well as on the
aforementioned acoustic art. Was there a clearer concept behind it? And how did it or did it not succeed in being carried out?
The “production” was done without a plan and more through natural selection. Sometimes
I liked it when a certain person came there, even if in the end I
wasn’t convinced that what he’d done had completely worked out. My task was to provide assistance for this work. We
tried to convince everyone who came there not to just launch into their
work and not to realise an idea and project that they’d originally come
to Hermit with. That’s against all laws of professionalism as cultivated at the academies. But most of them turned out poorly when the guest just started in on his/her work without taking a look around. On the other hand, the “interventions” of those who were willing to wait a few days were more sensitive and successful. In retrospect, I see that the project’s greatest asset was the ability to improvise. Well-established
artists took part, which was in such an environment an ephemeral value,
as did beginners, students and amateurs. Nevertheless it
usually worked out all together, and if you had the sentiment and
ability to seek content instead of well-known names, it was an
interesting experience. The concept consisted mainly of the
art of suppressing one’s ego and, even if it sounds awkward today, “to
establish a dialogue” with the whole environment, including the
architecture, social context, other people….
The artists usually stayed there for a longer time…
Whoever could, but from the start,
the accommodations were quite primitive – there was no shower, we didn’t
have beds, no facilities such as a kitchen. Guests stayed in nearby tourist cottages or at a scout camp. Everything gradually developed as long as we had funding for it. But we didn’t receive such money until 1996 when the Pro Helvetia foundation provided a three-year grant thanks to the kind help of the local director Iren Stehli. When someone came who required higher standards, they were able to stay at the school that was empty during the summer. Some stayed three months, some a week. From
the biggest names, I think Roman Signer stayed for only four days,
Jimmie Durham ten days, Fred Frith four days; Ulay for two weeks, Paul
Panhuysen, Paul DeMarinis, Alistair McLennan – they all stayed as long
as they felt necessary. A regular residency was set for a month, over the winter up to three months. From
1996 we had a secured budget, and could even pay for things for our
guests – before that the guests paid for everything including travel
expenses. Only then could we officially call it an artist
residence; we were paying for the invited guests’ accommodations,
meaning a shared bedroom, shared kitchen, two showers, darkroom and
equipped workshop. We were able to provide pocket money to some and others had to come up with their own money. Food was usually included in the overhead costs and sometimes the guests themselves took care of the rest. The
residency was officially held during 1995 - 1999. During the summer
when the symposium was held, some up to sixty “hermits” stayed on the
premises in the new and old building of the prelature.
Was it assumed that
everyone would create something that would be presentable for visitors,
or did it depend wholly on the individual artists how they’d interpret
and make use of their residency?
It depended on the situation. Some people merely came to help with the organization. We offered them a place to sleep and food – there was always plenty of work to do in the monastery. Other activities, similar to workshops, were held that were not necessarily accessible to the public. Starting
in 1996, after having hosted a range of guests, I began to consider
opening the programme in Plasy to other professions, to those not
necessarily belonging to the community of artists. I also tried to involve social projects or to invite researchers from the natural sciences and humanities. It slowly began to work. Some came for a lecture, others stayed a week. Performers, those involved in theatre, dancers, musicians, painters, sculptors and audio artists all came. Even
writers came – for instance from Greece, the United States or through
the Soros Foundation from Eastern Europe – who worked here on
publications and had often their own support from other sources. For some, Plasy literally became a refuge. Avdej
Ter Oganian, for instance, who had just escaped trial in Russia, spent
his first two months in Plasy as he had nowhere else to live.
The project came to an end mainly due to disagreements with the Plzeň Heritage Institute.
This had more complex causes and various circumstances played a role in this. Essentially, I devoted several years of full time work to Hermit. I
wasn’t able to make a living or provide for my family, and I didn’t
feel right about making this the main source of my livelihood. I needed to find different work elsewhere in the Czech Republic, and so I accepted the offer of a job as a curator at the National Gallery in Veletržní Palace. I worked there for about three years, starting in 1996 or 1997.
At the same time, I was hoping to gradually involve other, mainly local people, in Hermit and who would take up the initiative and part of the responsibility. But I wasn’t able to do this. Paradoxically, a more stifling atmosphere set in starting in 1996 when we received money from Pro Helvetia. It was a decent budget considering the local conditions. The former director of the Heritage Institute was unpleasant from the start. Since we had support from the Ministry of Culture where then, the kind Mrs. Věra Jirousová worked, and who from the beginning very much helped Hermit, I guess he was worried that if he threw us out or was too hard on us the Ministry would get upset with him. He dictated the conditions as such that we paid an annual rent of CZK 250,000 to the National Heritage Institute of Western Bohemia in Plzeň, and on top of that paid for the accommodations of everyone who spent the night in the prelature. The
director’s supervision of the new caretakers caused the original
openness and open-mindedness of the space to disappear and a kind of
bitterness reigned. While Plasy received quite a positive response from abroad I felt we didn’t find real support in our own country. Perhaps it was also because the political structure and personnel changed at the Ministry of Culture. We
always had to provide very complicated reports on costs for the grant.
Once we had to return money because someone at the Ministry of Culture
didn’t like the accounting statement on costs, as it didn’t correspond
to the given accounting columns. It was an unpleasant
feeling since we had to pay so much to a state institution, which I felt
increasingly at odds with, with the money designed for the project’s
development, money that the project development was to be financed with.
In 1999 I decided to give up and withdraw from the project. But the civic association still exits. The programme in Plasy had the momentum to continue on for some time. Students from the Applied Arts School in Prague, from the Fine Art Academy in Prague or the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Brno University of Technology were used to going there with their teachers for workshops. On
the other hand, during the last two or three years before our operation
came to an end, regional artists and sculptors were cramming in there
and using chainsaws and welding for two weeks and placing their iron
constructions everywhere. This was done under the patronage and with the blessing of the Heritage Institute as a counter action against Hermit. When
I looked around I saw the result of the sculpting or painting symposia
in which gaudy paintings were hanging in the cloisters and we were no
longer were able to put anything since it supposedly marred the convent,
while they hammered hooks and placed scrap iron all round the convent,
I’d had enough.
The fact of the matter is that the
space itself was getting drained of its energy and overrun with art, and
so I though it was time to back out. It was a personal
failure with an enterprise that I felt bound to. I’d tried to fool
myself into thinking that we’d build something positive both locally and
even perhaps globally. These were naïve and utopian ideas.
Utopian ideas are necessary. So you felt that the residential project in Plasy could be long-term. How do you rate the importance of Plasy now looking back over more than ten years?
I personally believed that it was an important event. Particulary at
the beginning of the 1990s I at least considered it was great that
people from different cultures and with different views could meet
somewhere in peace. I assumed that now, when the wall
finally collapsed and the divided communities had rejoined that new
times would arrive with a change of spirit that would lead to a
cross-empowerment of qualities and which were positive in both the West
and East. I was somewhat critical from my experiences of
living in the West and I hoped that when the political borders fell a
mutually based catharsis would take place. The establishing
and maintaining of locations like Plasy could at least contribute to
the kind of spiritual transformation that Fritjof Capra, Rupert
Sheldrake or David Bohm spoke of.
I didn’t see this as some kind of fishy new age futurology, but, instead, a kind of retrospection – a glimpse to the past. In
a certain way I also considered Hermit as a chance for feedback, a
vehicle for general revision of modernism, an attempt to understand the
monastery’s old meaning and significance for the location, that the
Cistercians had once built here as a spiritual and economic base in the
wilderness. It should be said, however, that from today’s perspective this sometimes consists of a quite forced colonisation. I
thought that such a network of “enlightened” places could be created
and after a half century of a massive destruction and militarism, could
serve as a base of something positive - both for people and nature. What’s more, the Plasy Monastery possesses remarkable energy.
But if Hermit had not been
smothered by the pressure from the Heritage Institute, do you think that
it would have somehow been transformed: What did you think it would be like if it continued?
I saw two possible alternatives. One consisted of an attempt to preserve the original degree of openness and spontaneity. That would require a group of people that together could develop the project’s idea and share a common vision of its direction. Or
to shift towards professionalism, to establish an institution and thus
integrate the project into a kind of framework that would have to have
relations to local structures, to the Plzeň Region, to West Bohemia. All this obviously would require management, diplomacy and lobbying abilities. And that’s not my strong point.
Could it be said that the community network that was created there still works in some ways today? Did other institutions take up the Plasy idea? Were any of the themes advanced?
I’m not so sure about the community. People forged friendships that often still endure. They
met in an unusual situation in which they were forced to cooperate,
whereas the art business demands competitiveness, self-promotion and
self-centredness. You had to speak with people, let something about
yourself be known; it wasn’t the kind of communication you find at an
exhibition opening where masks and social games prevail. When
you live in a single building and not in a hotel, and you have to clean
up and wash the dishes, or to cook for others, you’re in a slightly
different situation. A community in the sense of a kind of
ideologically kindred commune or organized network was certainly not
cultivated there – it was more of a kind of network of friendships and
long-term collaboration that stabilised over those few years. A
few kindred events and projects assumed, adapted and implemented our
system of organization elsewhere – in other countries and situations.
From today’s perspective, what is
Plasy’s legacy: what theme that was opened there has proved to be
important or essential, inspiring for further development and for your
work?
One thing that was created at about the time and I feel was influenced by the Plasy spirit was the Cesta : the cultural centre in Tábor. One
of the centre’s founders, the American Chris Rankin, came to Plasy – I
think it was in 1993 or 1994. At that time he and Hillary Binder founded
their own art project in an old mill. In Plasy we also organized once a workshop on autonomous cultural projects initiated by artists. A number of people from all over the Czech Republic – Kadaň, Brno, Ostrava – came there at that time (1995 or 1996) and tried to establish something similar. Later
an art centre in Broumov was established by Petr Bergman, but after few
years that also fell apart; just like the annual summer symposia in the
monastery in Bechyně or the Mecca - Central European Art Colony in Terezín.
The Klatovy/Klenová Gallery project was also influenced by Hermit. Helena Hrdličková, who was a curator there in the 1990s, regularly attended the symposia and festivals at Plasy. Klenová
is a model in which they were able to infuse a state institution with a
similar atmosphere while preserving the feeling of a free space. They also started to organize student residencies, concerts, and opened the granary as an exhibition space. That’s a good example of how something was at least temporarily carried out successfully. Something like that still exists during the summer in Mnichovo Hradiště and certainly elsewhere.
Perhaps the greatest benefit for me
was encountering the sovereign architecture of Santini’s monastery and
meeting with many rare and interesting people who had the chance to attend.
Was the different approach
by people from abroad (initially mainly from the Netherlands)
noticeable, and did people from Czechoslovakia perceive and approach the
space and communication in a completely different way?
This was undoubtedly the case in the beginning. Yet it wasn’t by any means just the Dutch who attended; people from all over the world came. I
tried to get guests and artists from exotic far-away countries such as
Japan, India, guests from Australia, Latin America, even an African
came, which created quite a stir at Plasy. In the early
1990s, many Czechs lacked confidence to a certain degree; they often
didn’t speak English, but at the same time wanted to meet foreigners.
Until 1989 the opportunity in our country to make international contacts
was more a rare privilege – otherwise a mono-culture prevailed here. In
the beginning the people of Plasy were curious since foreigners hadn’t
travelled there before, and so they’d invite them over and even offered
them a place to sleep. But that wore off in a few years and
it became something normal. Otherwise, I think the exchange of
experience was enriching for both sides and that Czech could adjust
their naïve and exaggerated ideas of a free society and the important
role of culture in the West.
It’s apparent from the
catalogue that foreign visitors vastly prevailed during the first years,
and then gradually more people from Czechoslovakia appear – including
Petr Nikl, Jan Svoboda, Pavel Fajt, Martin Janíček and Martin Zet – all of whom you were, incidentally, often working with. Was this because it was hard to find someone who wanted to take part or due to some other reason?
It wasn’t easy for me to arrange
something in the Czech Republic. Because of my job and family, I had a
limited amount of time for organization, limited funds and a limited
period of time that I could spend outside Amsterdam. We were just at the dawn of the luxury of immediate email communication and it was expensive to use the phone. That’s one reason. Another
thing is that the way of working in a very specific environment and in
shared living arrangements is certainly not for everyone. Not everyone could afford to take a trip somewhere for an extended period of time, to go to a fourteen-day symposium. Even today’s artists usually have some kind of job – the privilege of free time wasn’t and isn’t a given. Though
in the beginning I felt that the living costs weren’t so high in our
country, in 1995 a change occurred and we all became more
cost-conscious. If there wasn’t support for an activity in the form of a contribution, not everyone could afford it. Moreover, the residencies were still an unknown concept, so it first had to be somehow shaped and experienced. The
Czechs that attended were simply those, who were intrigued by the event
and who were interested in or felt the need to participate. Petr Nikl took the principle from Plasy and transformed it in the Rudolfinum Gallery into the Nest of Games exhibition; Pavel Fajt and Václav Cílek organized serie of site specific concerts in Santini’s architecture to name a few. The
Plasy context accommodate a different type of creation than that of the
gallery or museum, and this probably also influenced the makeup of the
kindred circle.
The residencies continued for a certain time at the chateau in Čimelice, there was some cooperation with the Soros Center for Contemporary Arts at that time. The development of the Soros Center for Contemporary Arts (SCCA) that operated in Prague since September 1992 (first at the Olšanka hotel building), and that of Hermit was concurrent, but contacts were made later, not in the early 1990s. Why?
We worked with the Soros Center for Contemporary Art right from the beginning, since it was the only specialised organization, aside from the Ministry of Culture, whose door we could knock on. At that time the SCCA did not have a residential programme.
We tried to convince the director Mr. Ludvík Hlaváček that it was a
good idea to join the existing infrastructure, providing accommodations,
studio spaces and facilities for foreign artists that were created in
Plasy with the project of a strong international network for Central and
Eastern Europe and that the SCCA could oversee and manage. Although the
Soros Center was created in 1992, the residencies weren’t organized
until 1997 when the Center moved to its Jelení headquarters in Prague 6. Indirect residency exchange activities were happening even before that. Just like the Hermit Foundation,
the SCCA became a member of the international association Res Artis and
artists from Central and Eastern Europe came to Plasy several times
thanks to the grants from the Soros network. In the end,
however, we were unable to achieve some kind of connection that could
have ensured the continuation of the Plasy project. The SCCA received in 1998 an offer to use the Schwarzenberg chateau in Čimelice. Martina Smeykalová, who worked with me in Plasy, went over to Čimelice and started to work there. We also moved some of the old furniture from Plasy to Čimelice. The residency programme in Čimelice then lasted until 2002.
It’s strange that there
wasn’t tighter cooperation with the SCCA, since the focus would have
been quite similar: international, interdisciplinary, in Soros’s case
perhaps more new media and political, in Plasy’s case more focus on
audio art. You yourself later worked directly at the Soros Center.
The SCCA’s dramaturgy was governed by the projects that fit into the entire programme of the Soros network. New media and the political art were exhibition concepts. Ludvík
Hlaváček was more interested in creating the center’s own residency
programme and had at that time the possibility to get funding and
managed to invest it into the Schwarzenberg chateau. I
worked in the SCCA at Jelení for some time after I left the National
Gallery – i.e. from the end of 1999. I took over the program of Artlab, a
media lab, and also helped a little with the residencies. We
had four employees altogether, Dana Recmanová took it over from
Kateřina Pavlíčková the residency programme up and oversaw it. The
only continuity with Hermit was through Martina Smeykalová who worked
for a year as an assistant of the SCCA residencies program in Čimelice.
Let’s move over to your work at the National Gallery. The Dawn of the Magicians
was an extensive, several-months-long exhibition at the Veletržní
Palace in 1996-97. At that time it surpassed the normal exhibition
concept in that it expanded it through different connected projects. There also isn’t that much information on this exhibition, or at least it’s quite difficult to get it. The response was quite ambivalent; some people didn’t even bother to see the exhibition or didn’t understand it.
Some came, some didn’t. At the time a few somewhat spiteful reviews were published. I’m
not sure whether they were aimed at the exhibition itself or at
Jaroslav Anděl, who was at that time the new director of the Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art. He
was the one who offered me the position at the National Gallery and who
came up with the idea for the exhibition and the theme of the
millennium’s end, the convergence of art and science. Even though I was sceptical toward the National Gallery, I accepted the invitation as a challenge. I
told myself that since I tried out what it’s like to survive outside
the structure, I could try out what it’s like inside Behemoth belly.
In retrospect, I guess at least part of the exhibition was quite interesting. We’d barely had any experience with something like that. The project’s aim was, first and foremost, to animate the building and the programme of the Veletržní Palace and make it more open for the public at large. At
that time barely anything was happening there; this could be because it
was a large state organisation focused on modern, not on contemporary
art. They didn’t have in stock a single monitor; it was an
enormous building without a library or café, very few accompanying
programmes were organized. The exhibition project The Dawn of the Magicians set somehow a pilot model how such a public art institution could be carried out. In addition to the exhibition itself, there was created the temporary bookshop-publishing house Votobia,
various concert serie were prepared, discussions and a newspaper was
published for the exhibition that supposed to be issued and distributed
quarterly. The resistance to the environment was certainly
stronger than Mr Anděl, who left after the conflicts with the National
Gallery’s general director, Mr. Martin Zlatohlávek. Funding fell through for the second part of the exhibition, so we were unable to complete it. The project’s lifespan was about eleven months. There’s
photo documentation in the NG archive and there are or were some
Youtube videos, so traces of what the exhibition looked like can be
found.
Could you describe a little more the concept and realisation of the exhibition?
Anděl’s concept was somewhat
sketchy, the infrastructure of the exhibition was on shaky ground, the
production team improvised – the whole thing was simply “magical”. Overall, The Dawn of the Magicians exhibition
was based on a few general theories on the onset of the New Millennium;
the National Gallery’s depositories had to be opened and we had to
combine them with installations and loans from other Czech museums and
foreign partners. Beside myself, the curatorial team consisted of Ivona
Raimanová and Jiří Zemánek. The result was logically an
unusual assembly and hybrid: for instance, Cindy Sherman exhibited with
anthropological masks from the Hrdlička Museum of Anthropology,
a parabolic reflector from the observatory next to a Nan Hoover
installation, the AI robot Adalbert in the form of a black ball that
moves and speaks for itself next to a projection of a video found from
the channel of Fischli & Weiss, a painting by František Kupka next
to a sculpture by Jiří Černický, Jan Švankmajer and surrealists, an
installation by Barbara Benisch, Jiří Příhoda, a huge tree sculpture by
František Skála, new media installations of George Legrady, Michael
Bielický, Steina Vasulka, Joan Jonas, painting of Beneš Knüpfer, medium
drawings from the collection in Nová Paka, glass paintings by Rudolf
Dzurko, etc…
The exhibition was fitted into a specific set design in the space of the entire second floor. Objects
in the individual cubicles could be switched during the course of the
exhibition so that they achieved a certain dynamic and modularity. As far as I recall, the exhibition was quite successful with viewers. But it was demanding; I was physically drained from it. The production and operation were based on something similar. The installation team sometimes went home at three-thirty p.m. even though the next day was to be the opening. We’d run kilometres during the installation, the spaces were huge and inhuman. But at the same time it was challenging and inspiring. I ultimately resigned from my post before Milan Knížak became the general director of NG. As an externalist I later curated at the Veletržní Palace Martin Kippenberger’s large exhibition The Happy End of Franz Kafka's Amerika and the exhibition The Second: Time Based Art from the Netherlands, prepared by the curator René Coelho from the Montevideo -Netherlands Media Art Institute.
How did the idea arise to put on the Martin Kippenberger exhibition? An
exhibition of his work had previously been held in 1993 at the Old Town
Hall; other exhibitions were also held later and his visits to Prague
received considerable attention by the Czech press.
It was an offer by Zdeněk Felix, who was then still the director of the Deichtorhallen an exhibition space in Hamburg. Kippenberger apparently wanted Kafka’s America exhibited in Prague. The
installation at the small vestibule was linked to an exhibition of
Kippengerger's prints and oil paintings prepared by Tomáš Pospiszyl. Zdeněk
Felix, Gisela Capitain (the gallery owner who administrates
Kippenberger’s estate). The curators Felix, Peter Pakesh and Daniel
Baumann (from the Adolf Wölfli Foundation) offered excellent cooperation and ideal conditions that enabled the exhibition to be loaned to Prague. They
even brought from Hamburg a torn green carpet that they would have
normally thrown away after the exhibition; we obviously didn’t have
money in the budget for it at the National Gallery.
How did you begin teaching at the Film and Television Academy of Performance Arts in Prague (FAMU)?
After the National Gallery I
received an offer at the SCCA, and then, when it ended there too, I
welcomed the offer that Vít Janeček and Michal Bregant proposed for a
part-time position at FAMU. Even if in the beginning it was only a symbolic job.
What year was that in?
I think it was 2005.
So you have the possibility of comparing how things work within institutions and outside them, what is involved in organizing projects and various activities, and especially how individuals work…
Each of these types of work has its own logistics and strategy and requires different conditions for survival. It’s like the relationship between intensive and extensive agriculture. An
institution is a state or private farm, a company where everything is
controlled, ensured and protected, but you have to accept the fact that
it’s somewhat stifling in a greenhouse. Working for
yourself, outside the institution, is like working on your own (or on
someone else’s) garden, in the park, perhaps even permaculture
gardening. You feel good doing this. But you
have to accept that the slugs will come and eat everything in the garden
or that the hens will peck everything up, or that the hail will come
and beat down the crop. You have to count on the temporality and being unprotected…
This can even happen in intensive agriculture…
In the institution you’re like a
privileged employee, but you’re under the whip of the entire apparatus,
unless you climb to the peak. Then you have to apply pressure to those under you. In
a garden you’re relatively your own boss; you have to make do with what
you have at your disposal, what you can or cannot do, how you
understand the surrounding terrain, your ability with customers and
business partners; it all depends on your decisions. In
essence, I’m not against the first or second possibility, but I know
that if a person starts to act unexpectedly in an institution, if he
acts spuriously, the results are more unpleasant than if this happens in
the garden…
The worst for me was in 2000 when I realised that I’d have to abandon the Hermit project, which I’d felt personally responsible for. It would have to move over to the institution platform if it were to survive. In the end I decided not to do it, even though that would have kept it going at that time. On the other hand, when you’re so bound to something, ten years is the limit, after that it consumes you. Though there are exceptions.
Naturally , I can’t say that I did it all on my own. I would never have been able to manage it without the others around the project. But I wasn’t able to find at least one or two people who were willing to assume the responsibility from me. If
there had been one other person, such as Joe Williams, who had worked
with me in Plasy and later in the National Gallery, then we may have
been able to overcome the crisis.
Along with your work at FAMU you’ve also developed non-institutional activities such as the radio project Lemurie TAZ – which, incidentally, bore the subtitle “temporary autonomous zones” previously mentioned. The
Communication Space Školská 28, where you now work as a curator, is an
important space for audio and audiovisual art, which isn’t getting too
much attention elsewhere. How
do you perceive this existence of temporary autonomous zones in
connection with support for contemporary art experimentation?
Lemurie TAZ and its predecessor Radio Jeleni are an excellent example of transience. So I’m actually not developing them at all, at least not in the form in which both Internet radio stations were created – Radio Jelení
in 2000, when Internet broadcasting in the Czech Republic was quite
rare, and the SCCA enabled them to be operated for a certain period
along with Derek Holzer and others. Lemurie TAZ was the posthumous child and continuation of Radio Jeleni, which even landed on the Ministry of the Interior’s list of extremist organizations. The group that oversaw the regular broadcasting and international projects fell apart after a while and Lemurie TAZ is currently in a state of hibernation. But
I would say that, similar or other “community” artist projects making
use of the Internet are still lacking in our country – the online video
portal Artyčok is, after all, something different.
The situation today is slightly different with regard to the institutions’ approach to the operation of cultural organizations. At
the same time I think that there is still a need to create autonomous
zones that would be independent of both institutions and the state. This
is especially true regarding the current situation in the cultural
sphere, in which there is a threat of a radical reduction in support for
culture, art and education and a more practical and managerial approach
is starting to prevail. Where are the independent groups today, and do they have a chance to survive? It’s
also difficult to exist outside the institution since most art
associations and organizations are more or less dependent on state
support…
Unfortunately that’s the situation
in general that correlates to a weakening of the tradition and ideas of a
civic society and a political culture. If in each town or
village the locals operated their own pub, their own football club,
cultivated theatre, church, organized, for instance, farmer markets,
there is gradually (re)-created a network of economic, psychological and
social relations that would be less dependent on state subsidies, or on
the commercial interests of capital… As soon as it depends
only on the fact that the mayor or a local entrepreneur gets hold of
subsidy money and pumps the money somewhere, we get used to padding our
own pockets as a reward for our “philanthropy” or “creativity”. It’s only under this condition of remuneration that we’re willing to do something for others, to be active in the community. The
feeling that I’m part of something is disappearing, that I’m part of
something that goes beyond me and that I bear some responsibility for
something happening outside of my property.
A welfare state should perform a
stabilising function, but I think that a civic society should at least
be a strong partner, ideally even stronger. If culture
lives from the grants of the Ministry of Education or Culture,
Agriculture, Education, or European grants from Brussels, the Czech
Electric Power Company ČEZ or the Škoda automobile manufacturer, then
it’s only survival and the decline of creative freedom. The awareness that I am partially responsible for that which is happening around me is still negligible here.
If I go back to my own experiences from Plasy: If
an outsider comes to the town and brings there something new,
incomprehensible and foreign with which the locals don’t have any prior
experience and it doesn’t fit there, doesn’t relate to the area, it has
no chance for survival, even if there is lot of money for it. And yet, it could have been something very similar to what they themselves are thinking of. If a connection to this does not occur, art remains a luxury, an outsider, something fragile, expendable and superfluous.
Now we’re getting to an
interesting question on the role of art and the artists that perhaps
become a more relevant topic when the artistic activity shifts outside
to the traditional centre and institution to, for instance, smaller
towns and villages. Here
we see more projects of the “dialogic art” types – i.e. art forms that
also have a clear social or community function, and in which aesthetics
and ethics mix to various degrees. In a certain sense this can entail art permaculture. Were these questions relevant for Plasy?
This was a fairly excruciating question that I was dealing with practically the entire time I was working in Plasy. Even
though most of the activities that went on there and that we initiated
there, most of which could be seen as positive or enriching for the
town, or at least only slightly detrimental, both in confrontation with
reality, with everyday life and misery, whose symptoms were and are
visible all around. I was often left wondering why I’m engaged in such
triviality, as is “contemporary art”. I don’t exactly
know what you mean by “dialogic art”, but it’s probably the consequence
of a paradoxical position in which the “artist” is systematised, and
thus partially tamed and partially excluded – manipulated into the
isolation of an “extraordinary position”. Maybe sometimes its “splendid isolation” but it is still just isolation. To
find or to rediscover a common language (probably) means to give up the
feeling of exclusivity of the art profession and to expose oneself to
the inquiries and interest of the lay public. The problem
is that, due to the influence of mass media and the state of our
education system, most of the lay public are kept in an infantile
development stage in terms of cultural matters. The dialogue is therefore somewhat precarious for both sides. But
since Czech contemporary art can be so ambiguously accepted, or even
rejected there exists a negligible “discourse” on its nature, quality
and meaning. The domestication of thought and perception
that (sometimes) appears in galleries, in a public space or in an
academic context, in practices of a “public” life and space, and
especially in such a deprived environment as is the situation in Czech
small towns and villages and the periphery of cities is, in my view,
extremely important for our future.
So the solution is the
creation of a network of civic initiatives that would grow from the
ground up, from a local environment and context, or at least in harmony
with it, but also internationally and interdisciplinary in range?
I’d say that a much deeper and
complex problem is that of the concept of education – that is the
combination of family background and school. When there is a good
teacher at a basic school, the students leaving that school are used to
taking trips, going to scouts, to the library, playing football, they
have their own initiative, are curious, playful and more tolerant. When
the teacher is dumb, or, even worse, when he doesn’t act as a counter
balance to the family, the school produces sociopaths. Paradoxically, it’s also a problem of the process of privatising life and the town. If
everything is gradually privatised, it’s difficult to imagine any place
at all that will be open, accessible, shared, not subject to some
market mechanism of control and profit. Doing business from
art and culture and the drug addiction of art on subsidies creates a
system in which those involved compete in culture – all solidarity is
lost, for instance among galleries, theatres, exhibition spaces. An
interesting aspect is that assessing the phenomenon that we call
“internationality” – the multicultural imperative that used to be in our
country a shared objective, a powerful weapon against totalitarianism,
has proven to be problematic over the 20 years in which neo-liberalism
established its globalisation concepts. Internationality, or supra-nationality, is becoming the target of attacks from supporters of nationalism and conservatism. Yet
Czech society still hasn’t begun to come to terms even with the
multicultural mode of coexisting with the Romany population for example
A certain type of
individualism is also embedded in the art sphere, with individuals and
institutions who don’t want to relinquish power over their own projects
and don’t want to take part in joint projects. Various
curators also support this when they hunt for students directly from
schools and tend to include them in one exhibition after another without
allowing the students a chance to look around and see what direction
they want to go with their work. They are quickly influenced by the curators’ choices that are often quite personal and restricted…
It appears that the type of new artist – entrepreneur / manager/clown is a prevailing trend toward rapid profiling. In short, the situation is set and there’s a need to talk about it, to seek different possibilities.
Back to Plasy: It
seemed to me that a “class structure” did not prevail there – this is
important: this is the curator, this is the assistant and this is the
cleaning lady. Everyone sat at the same table.
Do you think that that could work in a similar way even now?
I think it can. Perhaps
not as easily in fine arts where there’s a lot of competition and
representation, but perhaps in theatre, or in a kind of genre
non-mainstream music, in the art of improvisation. That’s why so many people wanted to come back to Plasy. I wrote to them that they could come and have a look, but that they could no longer be among the participants. If the same people came for three years, it would start to feel like the closed community
that we were talking about in the beginning and, though this can be
pleasant, it’s essentially a symptom of seclusion and solitude.
Milos Vojtechovsky, reviewed the translation
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