Is Isolation the End of Art?

113 A Overleat: Closer to Clouds, Karel Miler. Czechoslovakia is a relatively small country in Central Europe, separated from the West by ideological and cultural barriers. In fact, if we consider all the difficulties which one has to overcome in Czechoslovakia in order to keep in touch with recent developments in the Western avantgarde , it might be surprising for a Westerner to find that there are nevertheless some people whose way of making art can be compared to current trends in America and in Western Europe. The magazines Vytvarne umeni (Plastic Art) and Vytvarna prace (Plastic Work), which reported recent developments in modern art quickly and accurately until the beginning of the '70s, have been abolished. Since then, artists, theoreticians, and art lovers interested in Western art have been able only to consult hard-to-find foreign publications (Avalanche, Flash Art, Artitudes, Studio -International,Art in America, and Artforum , etc.). The first personal contacts with Western performers (excluding Fluxus artists, namely Ben Vautier, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles and George Maciunas in the '60s) took- place in 1975, when Tom Marioni visited Prague during his tour of Eastern Europe. He immediately found connections and similarities between certain Czech performers and their California AcousticDrawing, Milan Grygar 114 counterparts. To demonstrate this similari- Mike Parr, who visited Prague between ty he and Petr Stembera executed a piece 1976 and 1978, limited themselves to called Connection, in which both performers discussions and comparisons of documendrew semicircles in milk and cocoa on their tation of previously produced pieces. All chests, forming a full circle when they stood these meetings took place before a selected next to each other. During the perfor- audience. Live art became the patrimony mance, the material on the artists' bodies, of a small group of people without the was slowly eaten by ants. Marina possibility of communicating with a wider Abramovic, Ulay, Chris Burden, and audience. At the end of the '60s artists lost direct contact with the cultural centers of the West, retaining only a vague notion of the atmosphere that generated Western art during the '70s. Only a few of the many expressive possibilities which conceptualism and post-conceptualism had to offer were accepted in Czechoslovakia, namely those which Czech artists felt were still relevant even in circumstances vastly different from those under which they had arisen. We may find a lot of objective and personal reasons why only meditative and ascetic performances were felt to be important, and why spectacular and entertaining performances met with no success. And it is not surprising that Mail Art became quite popular during the '70s among artists wishing to communicate; it was one of the few ways of overcoming isolation. If we search for the roots of the '70s performances in Czechoslovakia, we find that they do not lie in minimalism and post-minimalism, as in America. The performances and actions of Petr Stembera and Karel Miler date from the same years as the objects of lyrical minimalist Stanislav Kolibal and Milan Grygar's audio-spatial drawings. The first action of a conceptual nature, Transportationof Two Stones, was executed by Stembera in 1971; Karel Miler's Bud'a nebo ("Either-Or"), in 1972. Hence it is not Czech minimalism, but the action art of the '60s, and other forms grounded in pop art and new realism that provide the basis for '70s performance. Particularly important in this connection are the happenings of Milan Knizak's group Aktual, the acoustical drawings and minihappenings of Milan Grygar, the actions of Zorka Saglova, the formally ambivalent objects of Eva Kmentova, and the happenings and land art projects of Eugen Brikcius. Knizak's happenings in particular foreshadow, by virtue of their physical and moral exigencies, some of Stembera's ascetic pieces. Knizak's activities always required that the audience carry out the action . In Tezkytobrad (''Difficult Ceremony,'" 1969), the artist asked his audience not to eat or drink for twenty-four hours. However, the early performances and actions of Petr Stembera, Karel Miler and Jan Mlcoch applied a fundamentally different approach: they were chiefly intended for the artists themselves. Indeed, many artists stopped trying to communicate with others for some time. Petr Stembera, for instance, executed...