Zuzana Štefková, one of the curators of Politik-um / New Engagement: Sensitive Issues in Central European Contemporary Art Practice, gave a talk on politics and art in post-socialist central Europe. She examines political art as a term and how it is seen as a type of socialist realism when before it had only referred to works that dealt with propaganda. Now, it is intentionally critical and socially conscious art that has taken hold in Central Europe. Štefková focused on Czech movements and argued that “any art is political since its production and evaluation depends on heterogeneous social, economical, and political powers.” Her talk was split into several categories she created to represent the different forms of political art taking she saw as taking place in the current Czech art scene. Using these examples, she examines four aspects of Czech political art: its lack of independence, parasitism on politics, efficiency, and its audience.
Beginning with the Czech Point exhibition in 2006, several critical points were addressed. Here, activist art aspires at engaging its audience and inflicting changes because there is no clear-cut division between art and politics. It was both self-reflexive and a self-critical exhibition, examining the politics of finances and how art itself has to be dependent on a financial system.
In exploring censorship in Czech art, she cited the artist David Čzerny and a work called Eutropa exhibited in 2009. It was a work commissioned by the European Union that was supposed to be a tasteful puzzle of representing the participating nations. Čzerny produced a work that portrayed Bulgaria as a squat toilet, and the Czech Republic as a territory split in two. Repulsed and horrified by these gestures, authorities quickly covered up the “offensive” portions of the work, thereby censoring the artwork. Another example of censorship took place in relation to a work called Collective Identity (2008). This was created in response to the campaign for the Olympic bid where advertisements advocated for the creation of a collective national identity. However, instead of the images being of athletes, Czech criminals were appropriated in these advertisements. The local municipalities responded by painting over these images and extended a warning by closing down the gallery that supported this work. There was also a significant decrease in the following year’s funding for the arts.
In another one of Štefková’s critical categories, guerilla action in the media space, she uses the Ztohoven Group and their work Media Reality (2007). This group co-opted a channel that normally broadcasted serene Czech landscapes during a morning show and digitally inserted a nuclear bomb explosion. They were charged with “scaremongering” and sentenced to three years in jail. The charges were eventually dropped and they were awarded recognition for rising young Czech artists. Another work discussed was a piece by the Rafani group as an example of an intervention in public space that challenged the notions of nationhood. The gropu was arrested for a public burning of a lbak and white Czech flag. To them, it was seen as a positive act because they believe you have to get rid of symbols to get back to the essence of existence. The burning took place in Wenceslas square in the heart of Prague, a place that was predominantly used as a political rally arena. They had two rules in their manifesto, the first being that “I have to conform to theoretical ideas of the group,” and the second being that “I have to try to recruit.” These statements are playing on the rhetoric of anti-democratic principles.
Štefková also examines Czech attitude towards racism with a piece, Miss Roma (2007), by Tamara Moyes. This broaches the topic of the violent attacks on the Roma population through the use of video where an actual Miss Roma beauty pageant winner’s ethnicity was transformed through the use of makeup. It became kind of mask that was created to comment on the prejudice that the Roma population encounters.
Štefková hopes that there be a resistance created that will inspire critical thinking and “real changes in the real world.” When the talk ended and the lecture dissolved into discussion, someone asked Zuzana why central European art was so focused on the political; basically why it was occupied by this subject matter. I thought the question was maybe a bit misguided especially since she began her talk discussing how her discussion would revolve around the assumption that the political cannot be separated from the art because everything is intertwined. As much as it would like to fight structure, art is dependent on a system. Doesn’t everything have a basis in policy? Can you argue that everything is political?
