ARTIFICIAL HELLS

the social under socialism
of the state more difficult. The introverted direction of Knížák’s work,
which had begun with Actions for the Mind and the ‘ceremonies’ in New
York, was now necessitated by a repressive political situation in which
gatherings in public space were forbidden. Accordingly, the work of
younger Czech artists of the 1970s – such as Petr Štembera, Jan Mlčoch and
Karel Miler – turned inwards, to body- art rituals in interior spaces,
performed for a handful of close friends. 30 In tune with this sober mood,
Knížák’s practice became more ritualistic, with collective actions such as
Stone Ceremony (1971) in which participants create a small circle of stones
and stand silently inside it; the photographs of this ritual show a bleak
pattern of isolated figures in a remote landscape. One of the participants in
A March (1973) – an action in which a crowd of around forty people were
tied together with a rope before marching silently through the landscape of
the Prokopské Valley – noted that they were unsure how many people
would show up as ‘word was out that the cops would show up’. 31 These
works stand in sharp contrast to the exuberant merriment of A Walk Around
Nový Svět, which was observed by the police but never halted, and to
Demonstration for J.M. (1965), in which the artist co- opted police instructions
to clear up the props for his action into part of the action itself. 32 In
this action, as Tomáš Pospiszyl points out, the police constituted a new
type of participant: ‘The police was an active third party – besides artists
and their audience – that had control over the whole action. Here we have
an example of secondary audience of a special kind: a state apparatus that
can interpret every strange activity as a threat to its security.’ 33
Milan Knížák, Stone Ceremony, 1971
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