ARTIFICIAL HELLS

the social under socialism
We can see a reference here to secret- police interrogations, although it is
important to note that Mlčoch, like Peter Štembera, protested against the
inclusion of their work in the ‘Dissident Art’ exhibition in Venice (1977)
– not because they were afraid of the reaction of the authorities at home,
but because they didn’t agree with such a reading of their work. These
artists continue to assert their disinterest in being considered as ‘political’,
even though it seems hard not to read their actions as operating in critical
relationship to the social reality of its time, especially actions such as
Mlčoch’s Classic Escape (1977): ‘I threw out everyone present from an
empty room of a borrowed flat into the corridor and nailed the door down
from the inside. With the help of a rope, I climbed down to the courtyard
and left.’ 62 This action could be regarded as the inverse of Graciela
Carnevale’s proposition for the Cycle of Experimental Art (discussed in
Chapter 4): if the Argentinian artist used a locked room in order to catalyse
a collective reaction from the public, Mlčoch used similar artistic
means to find a space not for a shared political project but for personal
deviance and non- compliancy.
Mlčoch’s work took place in domestic interiors or on the outskirts of
the city; Jiří Kovanda, by contrast, used Prague and its public as the
backdrop to his subtle social actions. His quietly abbreviated documentation
– black and white photographs with accompanying text, often
replete with ellipses – amount to a form of invisible theatre, albeit one
aimed at a secondary audience of viewers, rather than the primary audience
who witnessed and collaborated in the work’s production (Kovanda
has stated that these ‘friends are not observers, they’re fellow participants’).
63 Kovanda frequently staged these actions in Wenceslas Square,
where he was photographed by his friend Pavel Tuč, producing images
which resemble the furtive quality of secret police photos of that era. 64
In his final action, Untitled (I arranged to meet a few friends . . . we were
standing in a small group on the square, talking . . . suddenly, I started
running; I raced across the square and disappeared into Melantrich Street . . . ),
23 January 1978, Kovanda’s escape is, like that of Mlčoch a year earlier,
painfully lyrical, and Tuč’s photograph captures the artist as a blur as he
hurtles away from a startled group. Strained social pathos is a hallmark
of many of Kovanda’s actions in public spaces, such as Attempted
Acquaintance (I invited a group of friends to watch me making friends with
a girl, 19 October 1977), or the micro non- conformity of Untitled (On an
escalator . . . turning around, I look into the eyes of the person standing
behind me . . . , 3 September 1977).
These attempts at intimacy seem to testify to the strain of living in a
society where privacy was all but eliminated. Following a trip to Czechoslovakia
in 1981, Ilya Kabakov described the psychological and
topographical condition of a people born in ‘the void’ (state socialism),
and which penetrated every aspect of their life, referring to home as a
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