ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
Jan Mlčoch, Classic Escape, 1977
‘burrow’ and everything outside as a threat that needed to be traversed
as quickly as possible. 65 It would be wrong, however, to read Kovanda’s
works as metaphors for alienation in the ‘void’ or as gestures of
resistance. Czech artists sought a far more modest form of expression:
‘to act against the manifest ossification of society in the late 1970s, to
transcend it and to find traces of an expression of individuality’. 66
Kovanda, like Mlčoch and Štembera, even today refuses to frame his
work as political, since communist society was so heavily politicised
that he did not want his art to participate in anything approximating the
same mechanisms. By contrast, he has always insisted on a personal
reading of the work, putting himself through experiences that test his
notorious shyness. 67 Social space, for all of these Czech artists, is an
arena in which to experience subjectivity all the more strongly, as
Kovanda recently stated: ‘You just moved about within the limits that
were given to you. I didn’t experience that as something that I had to
fight against . . . there was definitely no political subtext. I worked
within the framework of a particular set of possibilities and I didn’t feel
like I was rebelling against anything.’ 68 Mlčoch reinforces this assertion
of individual survival when asked about the fundamental idea behind
his creative efforts in the 1970s: ‘It was all individualism. In those days
we all strived for the integrity of our personality, as a reaction to the
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