People at the gallery are laughing, but there is nothing funny about it, on the contrary, it is very disgusting. Shoot down your own deputy, the art group Czakra from Ústí nad Labem is calling on visitors in the Prague NoD gallery and visitors are provided with an air gun, three projectiles and a target in the form of photographs of two hundred Czech members of the lower house. Paroubek, Topolánek and Rath have had the most head penetration wounds so far. When the exhibition is over, its authors will send the photographs to the individual deputies to let them allegedly know what the public thinks about them.
Ehm. In this country there are many occupations whose representatives arouse fury, a sense of powerlessness, and the aggressive desire to slug it out with them once and for all. The faces of the political elite shot to bits are considered humourous by many at the exhibition today, but would people laugh even if the photographs of deputies were exchanged for example for portraits of ticket inspectors, taxi drivers, property seizure administrators or football players? Would it be considered funny if, for example, Baroš were sent a photo depicting his face with a hole between his eyes for inspiration?
We live at a time when contemporary art defines itself more and more against politicians and vice versa. Both worlds clash against one another and are becoming more radical and dumber. With politicians a supreme example of this process was the order of the Prague City Hall to close down the Art Wall gallery, because one of its ironic projects was meddling with their lofty plans for the Olympics. And for artists, the biggest chutzpah is the current exhibition in NoD. The disadvantage of the gallery is that it is supported financially by the Ministry of Culture and the Prague City Hall, that is it is dependent more or less on the same people whose removal it is now calling for.
When the group Pode Bal opened its project Malík urvi in the Galerie Václava Špály a few years ago, it started a steep decline of the gallery into a long-time financial crisis. One of the portraits of the elite of the nation with state secret police and communist past depicted also the then minister Grégr who as part of his revenge consequently made the gallery lose its main sponsor. It would be great if we were somewhere past this today, if bashaws did not care about NoD’s project and let the gallery live on further, without interference in its existence. However, they are easily put off by much less important things.
For example, last week Brno city councillors banned sculptor Michal Blažek from making a sgraffito on the building Dům umění in the form of a Renaissance image of male beauty. Not that their decision should not be welcomed, as the idea of architect Petr Hrůša to reconstruct the building into a strange mixture of classicism and functionalism was a bad choice from the very beginning. Nevertheless, what is terrible is that one of the reasons of the ban was concern about good morals of Brno’s inhabitants – they could be allegedly threatened by the sight of the naturalistic penis on the façade.
