The 36th issue of Notebook for Art, Theory and Related Zones contains a profusion of genres and themes. It includes three peer-reviewed studies, an essay, an interview, and two reviews. In the first text, entitled The Politics of Intimacy: A Discussion on the Relationship between Private and Public Spheres in Czech Art of the 1990s, Kristina Láníková looks what specific elements the reception of second-wave feminism may have encountered in Czechia. While women artists in the West were motivated by the principle that “the personal is political”, in Czech art of the early 1990s, intimacy, on the contrary, became a tool for the de-politicisation of the personal. In an essay written in English entitled Hybrids: Trans-corporeal Performances at the Labyrinth Gallery in Lublin in the 1970s, Polish scholar Michalina Sablik examines selected performances by Polish artists, who as early as the 1970s were relativising the boundaries between the human body and more-than-human beings or technical apparatuses. An even more radical interrogation of the boundary between one’s own body and its environment is offered by Lenka Veselá in Notes from the Endocene. Veselá introduces a new concept in order to capture how moods and emotions are increasingly influenced by biochemically manipulated hormonal processes that are the product of the pharmaceutical industry. The essay Within an Extended Field: Notes on Art, Agriculture and the Rural by Kateřina Konvalinová Žáková compares the author’s experiences at the Jednorožec community and organic farm in Central Bohemia and the Inland project in Asturias, Spain, which is based on the link between agro-ecological farming and contemporary art practice..
This February, the Hungarian art historian Edit András visited AVU. In an English-language interview, which we conducted to mark the launch of her first book translated into Czech, András offers her thoughts regarding the cultural policies of the Viktor Orbán regime. In contemporary Hungary, the authoritarian legacy of state socialism intersects with new methods of surveillance and power hegemony, including the use of commercial interests and incentives for political ends. The book, a translation of Cultural Cross Dressing: Art in the Ruins of Socialism (Hradec Králové: Galerie moderního umění 2023), is reviewed by Tomáš Pospiszyl, who argues that it could inspire a scholarly publication on the history of Czech art after 1989. This issue’s final text is another review, in which Vojtěch Märc discusses the anthology Mapování pohyblivého obrazu: Média, aktéři a místa v českém prostředí / Mapping the Moving Image: Media, Agents and Sites in the Czech Context (Praha: Národní filmový archiv 2023), edited by Martin Mazanec and Sylva Poláková. Here, too, we encounter reflections upon a certain hybridisation, this time in relation to the medium of the moving image.
Notebook 36 2024
