Avantgarde and Underground

Introduction into the Critical Theory and History in Czechoslovakia

1930´s – 1968

Avantgarde in the 20´s• Dada, Surrealism

– Duchamp, Fountain

• Zurich 1916-1922, anti-art• rational thought and burgeois values

brought terrifying conflict upon the world • Bankruptcy of existing style of art expression• Tristan Tzara - manifesto 1918

• Make it new! (Ezra Pound)• Rejection of tradition, enlightenment

and “God”.• Nietzsche, Beckett

Avant-garde

• The hall-mark of modernism

• experimental, innovative art, culture and politics

• radical social reforms• art for art’s sake –

expanding frontiers• subcategory of

Bohemianism

• Surrealism – Developed out of dada in

the 1920s, manifest by Andre Breton

– Automatic writing

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Situationist International (SI)

• 1957-1972• experiences of life being

alternative to those “admitted by the capitalist order”

• construction of situations, • Guy Debord The Society of the

Spectacle 1967: • Media show a fake reality in

order to mask the real capitalist degradation of human life

Theorists: Frankfurt School 1923 left-wing German-Jewish

intellectuals analyzing culture in the condition of mass production

Theodore Adorno (1903-1970), Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), Herbert Marcuse (1889-1978), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940).

disbelief in scientific and rational progress

Technology used to propagate ideology through mass culture

After TV - the working class has been pacified into accepting capitalism – no social revolution possible

Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

Undeground

1. WWII: an underground organization of a conquered country engaging in sabotage and secrete operations against occupation forces and collaborators (Webster’s New E Dictionary, 1995)

2. "the underground“ against the totalitarian regimes 1948-1989

3. “subcultural” and “civic” underground.Against consumer society, multinational

corporations, neo-liberal capitalism, etc.

Avantgarde in Czechoslovakia after 1945

• Honza Krejcarová– Milena Jesenská (Ravensbrück) and

Jaroslav Krejcar (Devětsil)– Femme fatale, bohemian lifestyle– Hrabal: „swan with a broken wing“

• Without quest for meaning there is no ethics

• To follow one’s bliss is depressing: we can strive for pleasure in small things as biological needs, which though, does not provide satisfaction of the meaning of existence. Nothing we do for ourselves solves the basic need for meaning, because egoism is pointless. (Bondy)

• Egon Bondy– Spiritual father of the Czech Underground– 1949, surrealist Jewish Names with

Honza Krejcarová – protesting against communist antisemitism by taking Jewish sounding pseudonymes

– 1970´s friends with Magor, PPU sing his poems and texts

– Against real socialism, against consumer society

– Hrabal, Medek, Boudník

– 3 Seasons in the Hell

– Signed Charter 1977

Egon Bondy

• secret lectures in apartments on art, buddhism, philosophy (Milan Machovec and Milan Balabán religion)History of Philosophy ‒ not first hand sources, cheap weapon to critics

• supported the generation of Jáchym Topol, Ivan Lamper, Vít Kremlička, Karlík, Placák, Krchovský: underground publishing

• Meetings NERUDOVA 51

1950´s

• Persecutions of the Church• Antisemitic processes (Slánský)• ...• 1956 – Khrushchev – criticism of Stalin´s cult –

situation released

1968• Soviet Invasion, August 21• Jan Palach, 1969 – burrial anticommunist

demostration

Karel Kryl

• Protest Song, 1968-1969

• Brother, Close the Door

The Begginigs of Czech Undeground• The Primitives Group, 1966-69

– Psychedelic performances– Hendrix, Doors, Fugs, Mothers of

Invention– Magor – art student– 1968 Fish Fest– 1969 Bird Fest

Plastic People of the Underground

• Psychedelic • Velvet Undeground• Magor

• 1967 – 1st CS Beat Fest– Hippies– „popular artistic

creativity“– Olympic, Blue Effect

• Black concerts (marriages)

• 1974 Massacre in Budějovice– Commission for

protection of public order– Gestapo practices of the

police, traumatizing• Patočka• Charter 77

StB Actions• Jiří Gans

– Jewish, parents perished in concentration camps

– Almost blind– Accused for spying in České

Budějovice– Listened to jazzrock music –

friends with the American diplomat since 1965

– Surrounded by young people that wanted to listen to the music

– Sentenced to death in 1976 for moral distorsion of youth, tortured