ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
investigated An Event for the Post Office . . . for two months and Knížák
recorded an account of their meeting with the residents in a samizdat newspaper
of that year. 19 While offering an amusing and vivid description of the
discussion, Knížák provides no photographs, and offers no analysis of his
intervention, only a testimony to the diverse responses it solicited. He
reports that about half of the people are ‘not too much against us, and the
rest are totally against us’; infighting between the different factions in the
building (an army major, a mouthy blonde, a teacher, and so on) seems to
predominate. 20 His tone is rather distant and brusque, as if poking fun at the
protagonists. It is clear that the residents failed to understand the artistic
aim of his intervention, focusing on questions of time and money, the anxiety
caused by the packages (they could be bombs), and so on. The text
shows Knížák’s commitment to documenting participant feedback, but it
prompts more questions than it answers. What were his criteria of success
for such a piece? Since none of the participants actually went to the cinema,
did he consider this work to be a failure? Was the conceptual proposition
more important than its actual realisation and consequences? Bereft of
photographic documentation, the work nevertheless stands as an idiosyncratic
combination of aggression, generosity, absurdity, didactics and
provocation. It’s worth recalling that at the time of this performance,
Knížák was still only twenty- six years old.
Alongside these provocations of the anonymous public, Knížák founded a
social organisation in Prague between 1963 and 1971 called the A- Community,
which also had a branch in West Bohemia. ‘A’ stood for ‘Aktual’,
reiterating his Fluxus attachment to the everyday. Under Knížák’s charismatic
leadership, the group explored music, performances, mail art and other ‘necessary
activities’ not always framed as art, and which demanded a maximum
level of personal engagement from the participants. Knížák later described the
A- Community as a group of self- elected people who desired to be different,
and that this was the sole criterion for joining: its basic aspiration was to find
a more vivid, all- encompassing experience of everyday life. (Knížák reports
that ‘drunkenness, drug abuse and sex became burning elements of a wild
asceticism aiming towards the unveiling of the quintessence of experience’. 21 )
Photographs of the A- Community are typical of countercultural gatherings
anywhere in the mid to late 1960s: long hair, flowing clothes, beaming smiles
and musical instruments. The heightened consciousness sought by the A-
Community was not tied to political awakening but to the formation of an
alternative parallel community. Unlike Argentinian actions of the late 1960s
(discussed in Chapter 4), which intended to create a transitive link between
awareness of one’s situation and the desire to change it, Knížák’s primary
concerns were aesthetic rather than political: to change one’s life into art,
rather than changing the system under which you live. From his perspective,
capitalism or communism were irrelevant categories; what mattered was
one’s freedom of perception and experience of the world.
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