Continuity and Discontinuity

The generation that in the Czech Republic is nowadays termed "the Seventies generation" entered the adverse climate of hard-line Communist suppression (officially called "normalisation" in an unostentatious, almost secretive way. Initially, in about the mid-1970s, it was very difficult to distinguish its protagonists and reveal its characteristic features since it did not have the possibility of making an eye-catching appearance on the art scene or making itself known to the public. Although the members of this generation occasionally had the opportunity of receiving grants from the official Czech Union of Artists, such awards were given with the assumption that the artist would be willing to meet the ideological requirements of the approval committee - as many artists indeed were at the time. There were others, however for whom the freedom of their own process of searching and raising questions was more important than momentary social success and material well-being. True artists thus remained hidden in their studios, and it was up to private individuals to act on their own initiative and seek them out, however, possibilities began to emerge for these artists to stage occasional exhibitions, usually at unorthodox venues that were not originally intended for the presentation of art at all.

The constant pressure that was invisibly brought to bear by the Union of Czech Artists paradoxically resulted more in artists grouping together, despite all the clearly defined qualities of their individual artistic characters, than in their being forced into isolated submission. After the Karlovy Vary exhibition (March 1981 at the Gallery of Fine Art; the exhibiting artists were Vaclav Blaha, Vladimir Novak, Ivan Ouhel, Petr Pavlik, Michael Rittstein and Jiri Sozansky) it was clear that they would have to clarify their position not only in terms of the inner situation of their art, but also towards the outward circumstances of the regime¹s officialdom. During the 1980s, there followed a series of exhibitions which took place away from official (and officious) Artists¹ Union venues, and outside large administrative and cultural centers. These shows attempted to define the image of the emerging generation and present views of its artistic orientation from various different angles. They clarified the generation¹s position in the framework of Czech modern art and mapped out the dynamic ascendance of its creative powers. These exhibitions, still staged at unofficial venues, did not escape the attention of those in authority who sought to keep control over society and art. However at this point it was becoming clearer that the regime no longer had the means or capacity to deal with the artistic activities of this generation. From the mid-1980s, the character of the Czech art scene itself changed: into the space opened up by the continuing intense activity of the Seventies generation there began to emerge a series of young artists who were at that time still students at the Academy of Fine Arts. There came a fresh wave of unofficial confrontation-style exhibitions in which these young artists defined their position towards their immediate predecessors and towards modern art in general. Their interest was oriented more towards contemporary European art trends, and their links to the domestic artistic context were therefore looser and more polemical in character.

In the spring of 1988, a group of eleven artists exhibited their most recent work at a show entitled (for some, rather eccentrically) "12/15, Better Late Than Never" which was held at the riding hall of a Baroque stately home in the village of Kolodeje not far from Prague. During the brief period that the exhibition lasted, it was visitedby 12 000. At a time when Czechs were used to visiting exhibitions staged in unorthodox places in order to make clear their attitude towards the existing political system, this represented a huge number. The title that the group of artists chose for themselves was not intended as an evaluation on their own work and standpoints, but rather as an ironic reaction to the changing image of self-presentation, chiefly that of the emerging generation. The artists did not conceive their group as something definitely enclosed, but as " a free grouping", in other words a configuration whose basis allowed the possibility of constant change. Those who participated in the first exhibition included most of the artists from the Karlovy Vary show of 1981 as well as other artists of that generation. Soon afterwards, two other older artists whose early career was associated with the pluralist atmosphere of the 1960s became members of the group - Jiri Sopko and Jiri Naceradsky. Their co-optive group thus made clear which line of Czech modern art they felt an affinity towards, and with which of its trends they felt they were associated. This conviction about the necessity of continuity was made plain in the subsequent exhibition of the 12/15 group, entitled "One Older - One Younger". Apart from the members of the group, the participants included a series of artists to whom they were linked either by friendship or by respect for their life¹s work. Although the selection of artists did not represent the realisation of a precisely defined conception externally tracing how that generation was meant to be placed in the context of Czech modern art, it was still possible to follow the connections in which this generational group viewed itself.

The generation of the artists involved in this exhibition finished its studies at a time when there culminated a general scepticism in international art towards the strength and possibilities of traditional artistic media - painting, the wall-hung picture, the sculpture - and towards the creation of an art work that would remain after the creative process. This was most strongly felt in a series of artistic activities oriented towards the intellectual or rational abilities of man; such trends included Minimal art, Conceptual art, activities linked with the landscape, nature and the artist¹s own body. They became a predominant feature of the overall situation of art, and were the focus of interest of the art world and the public alike. It consequently seemed that the emerging Seventies generation with its inclination to traditional artistic media reacted negatively towards the culminating wave of Minimalism, Conceptualism and other related art trends. Today, however, it is clear that this was not the case: their approach to art and the art work were formed much earlier, and out of different sources. The trends mentioned above were at the time only signals on a path that had been embarked upon, an impulse for fresh reflection, not the cause of a radical artistic decision. Movement in art, especially after Second World War, never followed a single direction, so the situation of art was also much more complex than it might have seemed in prestigious magazines and exhibition spaces. In the labyrinth of international art trends, several of them persisted in a broadly latent way, forming the basis of a strongly renewed interest in traditional artistic media and the picture as such which appeared at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the Œ80s, culminating in what was accurately termed" hunger for pictures".

The well-developed and active art scene in Czechoslovakia that had existed from the beginning of the 1960s, when this generation of artists finished its secondary studies and began at the Prague Academy, presented them with a great variety of possibilities to acquaint themselves with the polyphonic character of modern artistic expression, both in their own country and internationally.

A decisive role in Czech artistic development, something that was not tangibly disrupted, was played by art which relied on classical artistic media whose ultimate and justifying result was the artefact. In accordance with the existing pluralism of approaches, in particular from the end of the 1950s, its formal features were not predetermined by any style-forming requirements. It was chiefly factors of content which linked the various forms of expression in Czech art, and it could be added that this has also characterised the Czech art context throughout its history. This situation did not change radically even during the period when trends culminated which placed the main emphasis on non-artistic, intellectual and reason-based aspects of the artistic process. The viewpoints of these young artists thus began to be formed in a situation in which Czech art during the 1960s absorbed most of the impulses of international developments and often managed to modify them in an original way. In this diversity of personal and group styles, there also appeared highly individual forms of expression that always stood outside domestic categories of topical issues, which in art are usually very changeable. In this open position of Czech art, there was no longer a reason or urgency for those who would subsequently form the Seventies generation to keep pace with developments on the international scene. Not even Czech tendency towards intellectualised aestheticisation and professional artistic perfectionism corresponded any more to their questing outlook in life, since it seemed obsolete and remote from all of life¹s reality. They became increasingly not simply from an overall view and orientation in artistic approaches and the latest trends. In the ferment of confusing diversity it was necessary for them to search for - and return to - their own roots, to their own interpretation of the art tradition - not only the modern tradition, but the deepest layers of personal and artistic experience. They considered the best approach to be a return to a point earlier than the style - and form-creating avant-garde of the modern era, and tried to find a place that would provide them with the achievements of modern art without them being made to feel duty-bound to any of them. What is generally called modern art represented a concluded chapter of history to them.

For young artists, the focus of interest was not art itself, but the position and fate of man in the modern world, in other words its human content. The question about this cannot be answered and exhausted at a social level by any definitive political forms, and at the level of art it cannot be revealed by any predetermined, preconceived formal means. This question could only be understood and manifested trough renewed traditional media of art which do not know be concern of modernism to achieve constant innovation of form. They realised early on that form, style in itself, and the attempt to achieve a style could no longer be a self-evident guarantee of quality. They were convinced that form must be an end result of the creative process when communication, content and a strongly ethical message were of primary significance. In the experienced corporeality of man they would found the unity of man¹s meaning which concentrated all the questions of emergence, existence and extinction. Although the work of most of the members of this generation consciously followed on from the trends of Czech art, they did not accentuate the aggressive sarcasm and uncompromising grotesqueness of the view of both social and private human life. It was characterised more by a large degree of empathy that was often accompanied by restraint of expression. The formal affinity that existed between the individual artists¹ work shortly after they graduated from the Prague Academy soon began to change according to their particular characters. As the subsequent development of their work up to the 1990s showed, however, there remained an inner bond of ideas between them. The shift occurred only in their personal viewpoints forming the basis of their understanding of the world and of man in that world. Man, however, continued to be the focus of their interest; the question of the meaning and content of his life remained a constant one.

To this day, the contemporaries of the Seventies generation are united in their conviction about the meaning of art stemming from profound exploration into the mystery of life, which they do not approach with representative symbols and which they do not treat with a reassuring detachment that would make them invulnerable. Instead, they have allowed themselves to be carried on by its inevitable flow. The fact that from the very outset they did not provide themselves with a priori formal means enabled them to renew their artistic expression in a fresh way, without the danger of blindness or empty artistry. They were thus able to react in an original way to changes in the social situation, and above all to those in the artistic situation. The 1980s consequently saw their work flourish, achieving a great freedom and boldness of expression, while the artists themselves reached an even deeper understanding of their own disposition and type of talent. Against the harsh background of a society that was rigid and stagnated, artists in their studios paradoxically developed work of great strength and spiritual freedom which provided a vivid reflection of the world in which it appeared. On the one hand, their work featured an inner bond with Czech Modernism, particularly that of the 1960s, and on the other hand their form of expression bore an affinity to the new wave of painting which they helped to create.

In the current climate of interest in the installation and environment, it is remarkable that artists of the Seventies generation have from the outset been involved in the question of space, in which painting and sculpture come together in the attempt to redefine the space of the frailty of human life (especially in the case of Vaclav Blaha, Vladimir Novak and Ivan Ouhel). The issue of the installation and the environment were not seen by these artists as a purely artistic one, but as an existential question. Their space is therefore not the space of reflection or rationality but the touched space of life itself. Despite the fact that most of the members of this generation dealt with the question of space in their work, they never permanently abandoned the issues of painting or sculpture ­ in fact the painting and sculpture became an integral and integrating part of installations and environments.

From today¹s point of view, the situation of artists of the Seventies generation represents a milestone in Czech art of the last decades. Without ambitiously seeking out contact with current developments, and in the extremely adverse climate of the 1970s and Œ80s, this generation renewed the role of the picture at a time when, in the international scene as well, there were similar (albeit latent) attempts to do so, although these took place in wholly different social and artistic contexts, and in conditions that were incomparably more favorable. This generation played a key role in terms of how it maintained an uninterrupted continuity of free artistic expression during adverse years of discontinuity in an interaction with artists of older generations. Over the past decade, following radical changes in the socio-political environment in the Czech lands, a series of artistic of the Seventies generation have staged major solo exhibitions confirming their strength of expression, and, despite, a variety of changes, the inner stability of their work.

Ivan Neumann