Jiří Surůvka An artist and a bureaucrat won’t understand each other, and why should they

Well, that childhood goal came true only with approaching old age, sad to say. I suppose I wanted to be a pensioner, financially independent, right after nursery school. After various ups and downs, I didn’t finish my studies until I was about 31. Then, after a year and a half of teaching at a secondary school of applied arts (SUPŠ), I really was a pensioner (on disability) for about five years, hoovering up all sorts of residencies across Europe and the USA, exhibiting all over the place, doing a lot of performance too. Around 1996 I was probably the first here to start making digital prints, and I tried out various forms of new media, mainly video art and video installations, objects and so on. It was fairly hard going, though, given the state, the capabilities and the capacity of the computer technology I had access to in the 1990s and around the turn of the millennium… And now, in retirement, I’ve had it up to here with computers, so I’d happily go back to painting and making objects… I’m cutting back on performance too.

Well, I’m not yet from the generation that grew up with computers, and it took me a long time to grasp the logic of communicating with them. To me it’s like communicating with bureaucrats, or like that exchange in the tale of Hansel and Gretel: “Excuse me, did some children come by this way?” – “I’m weeding my flax; once the flax is weeded, I’ll lay it out to dry…” and so on. So for me it was a lot of suffering and hours spent hunched over a laptop that cost 85,000 crowns in 2002, which was half a year’s income for me back then. And I had to travel to specialist firms to edit video, paying the IT guys a hefty hourly wage, because my computer’s capacity at the time was 3.6 GB, while a video might run to 6 GB. And that was with the Macintosh G3 I had in 1999, which cost 130,000. Some Ostrava magnate bought it for me back then in exchange for about seven paintings I gave him for it. So – a maximum pain in the neck. I didn’t even feel like learning the basic Adobe and Microsoft programs and the rest of it. And when the bureaucrats finally mated with computers and got them into their offices, it became a double hell on earth. Applying for grants and then filing the financial reports on them, and later university teaching too, all got bureaucratised, and I was forever having to write things up on forms and send them off to various officials at the rectorate and the ministry and so on. Hell! So in the end I gave up on New Media… An artist and a bureaucrat won’t understand each other even with a computer’s help, and why should they.

Well, in the 1990s I’d travel to Prague about twice a month, a few days each time, to make a name for myself there, but I wouldn’t have wanted to live there. I was lucky that the curators Jana and Jiří Ševčík, Lenka Lindaurová and Ivan Mečl – who put together my first catalogue as a supplement to his magazine Umělec (Artist) – took notice of me along with other artists, including ones from outside Prague. After that everyone knew me and I no longer had to go up to Prague so often. I’m a local patriot and I love Ostrava. Nobody here puts on airs or hides their emotions, there’s less hypocrisy, and for an observer – and an artist should be a good observer – it’s easier to make sense of a lot of things. I’m not saying I didn’t meet plenty of wonderful people in Prague and elsewhere, but stupidity and herd mentality, among other things, are best studied right here in Ostrava.

Well, most of my favourite Praguers are originally from Moravia anyway, apart from a few exceptions – and even those weren’t originally from Prague. I took the entrance exams at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (AVU) in 1990; out of 900 applicants, 60 of us made it to the second round. I was trying for the painting studio (J. Sopko, Načeradský and B. Dlouhý), and over those few days I got to know Tomáš Vaněk, Roman Franta and Roman Trabura. Pavel Šmíd and Petr Pastrňák were my companions from the group Přirození; they later got into AVU, and in the 1990s we’d meet at joint exhibitions, mostly in Prague, and at symposia. And my cousin Petr Lysáček was at that time a student of St. Kolíbal. I’d go to visit them at AVU and would run into M. Knížák, J. Sopko, Vl. Kokolia, J. Kovanda and others there. It was Petr Lysáček who introduced me to the Ševčíks. We made a joint three-channel video on an Ostrava slag heap for the exhibition What Remains (To, co zbývá, 1993), which they curated, and they really liked my part – me out on the street with a mountain bike doing something like Spartakiada calisthenics (the mass-gymnastics drills of the communist era). A still from it even ended up on the cover of the exhibition catalogue, and that was probably one of the key moments; from then on I was a fixture at their annual exhibitions. Another important moment was my first solo show at the MXM gallery (in 1998) and the fact that I showed, among other things, those digital prints. As luck would have it, the printer for them had been acquired – the first in the country – by our friend Rosťa Němčík from Petřvald near Ostrava. He bought it, from Hong Kong I think, before anyone in Prague did.

In that period of newly won freedom, three generations were actually entering the art world at once: those belonging to the generation of the 1960s and ‘70s, us from the 1980s generation, and gradually those ten years younger too. So we’d meet at various exhibitions with artists from groups like Tvrdohlaví and 12/15, with the teachers from AVU and UMPRUM (the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague) and gradually their students too, and we didn’t cultivate any intergenerational resentment – the way people do these days, in my view. We were glad the older generation was friendly and welcoming towards us, and we respected their work… It probably wouldn’t even have crossed our minds to call them boomers and sneer at their opinions. I suppose capitalist competition wasn’t bearing down on us; back then art was on the margins of society’s attention, and there weren’t as many artists per square metre of the country as there are today… And finally, the help of Ivan Mečl and the Divus team, which I’ve mentioned elsewhere in this interview. Blanka Jiráčková, the editor-in-chief of the magazine Ateliér, and the exhibition curator Milena Slavická also helped us in the early days. Then there were the shows at the Špála Gallery, several of which I took part in, and a project for the 1999 Venice Biennale with M. Juříková, the future director of the Prague City Gallery (GHMP), and her later support. My occasional collaboration with the MXM gallery on Kampa and its second curator, Jan Černý, was also key, even though I wasn’t one of its regular artists. And I’ve surely forgotten plenty of other wonderful art people and artists just now…

Well, I mention it in the previous answer – those good people who noticed my work from the very start, thanks to whom I gradually made my name in Prague and later elsewhere. And thanks to the fact that I was probably different from the rest, for which I thank my Ostrava and my friends there…

As far as visual art went, there was almost nothing here. Just the Regional Gallery with its outdated programme; the other institutions were missing – a city gallery, secondary and higher art schools, small galleries, a grant system – so we had to do it ourselves, at least as much as we could. Small galleries (Fiducia, Jáma 10), the Malamut performance festival, group exhibitions and symposia at the Michal Mine and the Mining Museum below Landek, the magazine Landek, exhibitions and programmes at the Černý pavouk (Black Spider) club including the cabaret Návrat mistrů zábavy (Return of the Masters of Entertainment) and the band Vzhůru do dolů (Down Into the Mines) – that was already in the 1980s – the group Přirození, and so on.

Well, after the KulturKontakt residency in Vienna in 1999, European curators like Jan Hoet, Peter Weibel and Lóránd Hegyi were already inviting me to international exhibitions, so I had some international experience even before Venice in 2001. I also had a lot of contacts in Poland and in our twin city of Dresden, going right back to the 1980s. So we were building a network with similar groups of artists and small galleries across Central Europe, and mostly in cities other than the capitals (Katowice, Kraków, Wrocław, Poznań, Gdańsk, Opole, Bielsko-Biała, Zielona Góra, Dresden, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Maribor, Ljubljana, Rijeka, Dubrovnik, Lviv, Kyiv, Minsk, Gothenburg, Helsinki, Copenhagen and so on). We’d come up with joint exhibitions or reciprocally invite their artists and they ours. The best exchanges were probably to performance festivals around the world, including China, because that’s the least demanding thing to organise and finance…

At that time I didn’t yet have the internet – hardly anyone did – so email at most. I heard about this residency from Ilona Németh, whom I met in 1998 on a Soros Foundation scholarship in San Francisco. She was there in a different capacity, but we met all the same. So I wrote to them at the end of ’98, sent a catalogue and a cover letter in English (that’s the usual procedure), and they picked me for a stay in April, May and June 1999. And there I met two Ukrainian artists from Kyiv, an artist couple, who then recommended me to the gallerist at the RA gallery in Kyiv. I invited them to Ostrava and they invited me to Kyiv. I’d exhibited there before, through the Czech Centre, and in Kyiv, once they found out that my grandfather came from Kyiv, I became for them a Ukrainian artist living in Czechia and showed in several more exhibitions. In much the same way, through Polish friends, I ended up at the first edition of the Navinki performance festival in Minsk (1999), and then once more in 2005. France, Sweden and China I was invited to by the curator Jonas Stampe, who has organised, and still organises, performance festivals in those countries. And I know him from Poland too. And so on. Unfortunately, after the Czech Republic joined the EU in 2004, these organisations (KulturKontakt, the Soros Foundation, the Goethe-Institut, Pro Helvetia and so on) shifted their support further east, and everything was left to Czech organisations and to state or regional funding, which to this day doesn’t even match the level it was at before 2004. And the presentation of Czech art abroad has slackened somewhat, to my mind. But we have only ourselves to blame, because we don’t value our artists and we underrate Czech art… and yet it’s first-rate!

Well, performance sells badly here; let me give a few examples. Milan Knížák once called me saying he’d like to buy some of my video for the National Gallery’s collection. So I sent them all the videos I had on a VHS tape, for them to choose from… Then nothing happened for ten years, and under the new director the videos turned up in the collection and were exhibited – registered as a gift from the then-director (M. K.). Fortunately, the new curator of the contemporary art collection sorted the situation out and bought a series of prints from the 1990s connected to that period, which made up for it. Or: the Research Centre for Visual Arts at AVU (VVP AVU), in good faith, produced several DVDs of performances and video art, volumes I to IV, in a run of a few hundred copies for educational purposes. Every institution bought those cheaply for its archive and has them on hand – so why would they buy the same thing from the artists at the price of a painting, right? Or the other day I noticed that a certain regional museum, going by its chief curator’s announcement, is going to devote itself to building a collection of Czech video art… Great – except that the same curator declared they haven’t acquired anything yet, because nothing good has been made here since the 1990s… Well, there’s a connoisseur for you, or a conceptual desk-bound know-it-all! He’s waiting until it’s world-class!

Well, Ostrava, as I wrote above, is – or used to be – a rough industrial trap for people. Growing up in a polluted environment full of the working class and rough thugs, run by communist functionaries and later by their heirs, isn’t easy, but it toughens you up for the rest of your life… including the life of an artist. We made art as complete autodidacts, without much information about the state of contemporary art in the world, and so our output differed a bit from that of the capital – and for foreign curators it was often all the more interesting for it. It was probably more “Eastern” too, but for them in a safe and nearer zone… In my conversations with the writer Jan Balabán about my diploma work Flypaper (Mucholapky) – where parts of miners’ work clothes were stuck to rubber conveyor belts from the mines, hung from the ceiling of a factory hall – we concluded that once Ostrava gets embedded in your character, you can’t leave it without “losing a limb,” like a fly on flypaper…

Well, my grandfather Vladimír Lozinskij, born in Kyiv in 1900 into a Polish-Czech family, became a Czech legionnaire after the 1917 revolution and the rise of the communists in Tsarist Russia (of which Ukraine was then a part), and fought against the Reds in Siberia. After the founding of Czechoslovakia and the withdrawal of the legions from Russia during the 1920s, the legionnaires gradually sailed out of Vladivostok on various ships, via Japan, China, Canada, the USA and France, to Bohemia (my grandfather arrived in 1926). He settled in Brno and became the secretary of the People’s Party there. He married my grandmother (she was from around Třebíč). They lived above the Typos arcade in the centre of Brno until 1945. Then, because the NKVD was arresting people of Ukrainian origin, he relocated to the Sudetenland, where in Svitavy he was again the secretary of the People’s Party. Sadly, he was arrested by the Czech communists in 1948 and died in 1952. So he’s now buried in Brno’s Central Cemetery, in its oldest part. With the group František Lozinski o.p.s. (yes, he’s the grandfather of my cousin Petr Lysáček too) we shot a video-art piece of us searching for him at the Brno cemetery with the dog Emil…

And I also did my military service in Brno in 1981–82 (at the military hospital in Zábrdovice, as a medic and a basic-service conscript – two years, back then). I liked Brno; we’d go to the pub U Pavouka near the Zbrojovka works, in a factory district rather like Ostrava, full of Roma who’d been moved to Brno precisely from Ostrava-Vítkovice… Back then I’d also go to performances at the Theatre on a String (Divadlo na provázku), to the House of Arts, and in summer to the garden of Morgal (the Moravian Gallery). In uniform we got in for free, but we had to sit at the front and, on cue, jump up, raise our arms and play trees, waving our arms about like treetops. That probably sparked my interest in unconventional theatre and gave rise to my ambitions in cabaret and performance.

I always liked coming back to Brno. The third member of our performance group, František Kowolowski – originally from Jablunkov in the Beskydy Mountains – worked at the House of Arts and put on the A.K.T. performance festival. Since my student days I’d also known the pair of Brno artists Blahoslav Rozbořil and Josef Daněk, and of course Václav Stratil – then still an Olomouc man living in Prague (and, later still, living in Brno) – and the performers Tomáš Ruller and Káča Olivová (then still a student at FaVU, the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno, later a gallerist at Umakart). And so on. Nor must I forget the activities of Zdeněk Plachý, the exhibitions at the Skleněná louka (Glass Meadow) venue he ran, and taking part in the TV projects he directed (Artists for NATO…), where we’d meet other Brno artists and occasional performers and figures of the Brno bohemia (Dr. Zavadil, Marian Palla and many others).

I understood that most graduates would be forced, for reasons of making a living, to leave Ostrava and set off into the world, and those who stayed I supported with exhibitions at the Jáma 10 gallery. And I was glad for the ones who made their name in Prague and elsewhere… I’d advise them how to break through – through scandal, say, or through performances – not to stand aside from public life, to make engaged art. But according to their temperament – they were all different, and the advice went accordingly.

Well, thinking that if you stay in the region you’ll make a living from your art straight away is naive. Let alone starting a family at the same time. You need to find some kind of job so you can manage your own work alongside it. That’s why, after ten years of poverty and hardship, I too went into teaching, at the age of 43. But I never did start a family… which is probably too high a price for relative success…

Well, from what I gather chatting with my colleagues in the art world, women have a clear hierarchy, unlike men (or at least they used to): 1. a relationship and love, 2. family and children, 3. work and career. Us men, roughly: 1. work and career, 2. then everything else. But I don’t know whether this too is changing with the rise of feminism and shifting priorities – maybe it’s the other way round now and we’ve got the same order, in which case I suppose we’ll die out, or at least breed less, because humanity is already reaching its maximum number, and the ruling oligarchy is starting to find its fast, luxury cars useless, since they’re stuck in them in the same traffic jam as the plebs in their cheap secondhand ones… Which is, of course, a catastrophe. And artificial intelligence will soon have had it up to its virtual teeth with us too!!!