Performance as 'Ethical Memento': Art and Self-Sacrifice in Communist Czechoslovakia

摘要

In its insistence upon the irreducibility of the human body in an increasingly depersonalised and depersonalising public sphere, performance art has always been a politically charged genre. Nowhere was this more true than in Communist Czechoslovakia, where strict censorship severely limited the range of activities that could be carried out in public. Czech performance art falls into two distinct phases, separated both temporally and in their strategies by the Prague Spring. The shift from acts of ludic rebellion during the 1960s to intimate, often violent body rituals during the 1970s is closely related to the events of 1968 and their aftermath, particularly the public self-immolation of student activist Jan Palach. Palach's highly performative suicide may be seen as a model for 1970s Czech art-actions, which likewise posited the body as the last frontier of self-determination in a repressive society. Works by Milan Knk, Jan Mloch, and Petr tembera are discussed.