The Museum of Modern Art consistently attracts direct engagement—or what I call “messing with MoMA”—by artists, the general public, and staff. These actions take a wide variety of forms, from manifestos and conceptual gestures to protests and performances. “Messing” connotes the variety of these interventions, which question, play with, provoke, subvert, and comment on MoMA as an institution, and on the paradox of institutionalizing modernism.

Documents related to seven decades of interventions are shown here, selected from my ongoing attempt at a comprehensive chronology. (This related exhibition checklist has other examples.) The selections are organized chronologically, focusing on more intimate, less well-known interventions from which a common theme emerges: a consistent desire for inclusion in the messiness of the modern project, a drive to fully engage with the art of our time.

Even in its first decades, MoMA engendered debate and controversy. Much of the criticism came from journalists and concerned the nature and validity of modernism, but artists and staff sometimes joined the fray. The earliest example here is a satirical invitation to the 1939 opening party for the Museum’s new building. Miffed that some fellow staff members weren’t invited, Manager of Publications Frances Collins organized and circulated this official-looking card, complete with a deckled edge and engraving-style type. By opening the card, the front of which bore the phrase “Oil that glitters is not gold,” recipients were invited by hosts “Empress of Blandings” (a fictional sow featured in P. G. Woodhouse novels) and “Charles Boyer” (presumably the film actor) to the new digs of the “Museum of Standard Oil.”

According to Russell Lynes’s history of the Museum, Collins was especially irked that staff members such as telephone operator and “office boy” Jimmy Ernst weren’t invited.¹ (Ernst, a child of artists Max Ernst and Louise Strauss, later worked in the Museum’s film library). Lynes notes, “The staff, if not the trustees, were greatly amused by what their young colleague had done.” Indeed—Collins was promptly fired.

Today, Collins’s sardonic gesture would be called institutional critique—an analysis of the sociocultural context in which art functions. In fact, in 2007 the card was appropriated and incorporated into just such a work: R.S.V.P 1939 (2007–2009) by Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck and Media Farzin. Though the works were conceived seventy years apart, they show how questioning the role of oil-industry funding in philanthropy remains prescient.

A year after the new building opened, the American Abstract Artists (founded 1936) organized a protest, demanding more curatorial attention to contemporary American artists. This accompanying broadside by artist Ad Reinhardt asks, “How Modern Is The Museum of Modern Art?” Responding specifically to the exhibitions Art in Our Time (1939), Modern Masters from European and American Collections (1940), and Italian Masters (1940), the pointed text reads in part:

How Modern is the Museum of Modern Art? Let’s look at the record[.] In 1939 the Museum professed to show ART IN OUR TIME—

Whose time Sargent, Homer, La Farge and Harnett? Or Picasso, Braque, Leger and Mondrian? Which time? If the descendants of Sargent and Homer, what about the descendants of Picasso and Mondrian? What about American Abstract Art? [. . .] What about Towne and Ward—British cattle painters—turned loose on a Missouri farm? A Minnesota grain elevator painted by Daubigny? Bellows’ Stag at Sharkey’s done by Henri Regnault? The Nebraska prairies by Eugene Boudin? The Bowery by Eugene Carriere?

And MODERN MASTERS . . . Eakins, Homer, Ryder, Whistler. . . . Those are the only Americans included. Are they the grandfathers of the Europeans they are shown with? [ . . . ]
ITALIAN MASTERS—Caravaggio, Raphael, Bronzino! And such examples! How easy to justify a Praxiteles show! How revolutionary the Egyptians! [ . . . ]

Art in Our Time, a massive survey, was the first exhibition in the new 1939 Goodwin and Stone building (the opening party for which Frances Collins conceived her invitation). Italian Masters, a show of canonical Renaissance and Baroque art, was largely a historical accident: following their showing at the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens, New York, the works were stranded in the United States at the outbreak of war, and the Museum took advantage of the opportunity to put them on view. According to curator Dorothy Miller’s catalogue introduction, Modern Masters was intended to complement the Italian Masters show, demonstrating “the great indebtedness of the modern masters to the work of their ancestors. . . .”²

As it turned out, more than fifty peeved descendants of these “ancestors” signed the broadside, including A. E. Gallatin, Agnes Lyall, Louis Schanker, and Suzy Frelinghuysen—but also Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, and David Smith, who were already becoming integrated into MoMA’s master narrative.

In the late 1950s, the esteemed art writer Calvin Tomkins made a quieter intervention. The intimacy of his gesture, his insight into it, and the feeling of being alone in a peaceful gallery is conveyed in his memoir:

. . . when I was just starting to look at contemporary art, a painting at the Museum of Modern Art stopped me cold. It was an exhibition called “Sixteen Americans [1959],” and the artist . . . was Robert Rauschenberg. The painting—its title was Double Feature [(1959)]—was covered with a number of apparently unrelated passages of messy paint . . . along with several odd collage elements [including] part of a man’s shirt, with pocket. . . . Glancing around to make sure nobody was watching me, I fished a quarter out of my pocket and slipped it into the pocket of the shirt in the painting. It was a dopey thing to do, but I felt good afterward. I’d made a connection to something that would become, for reasons I didn’t even suspect, increasingly important to me. Marcel Duchamp claimed that the creative act is bipolar, in that it requires not only the artist who sets it in motion but also the spectator who interprets it, and by doing so completes the process.³

In contrast, the 1960s are correctly associated with political activism as museums and other institutions began to be aggressively questioned by artists. MoMA in particular became a site of active debate on topics such as the artist’s role in the exhibition and the sale of his or her work, emerging and historical art movements, and overarching social issues such as the Vietnam War, racism, sexism, and economic injustice. High-visibility activities well documented elsewhere include group interventions by the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC),⁴ Guerrilla Art Action Group (GAAG),⁵ Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), Artists Meeting for Cultural Change, and Angry Arts. Specific gestures such as Takis’s removal of his sculpture from the exhibition The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age (1968) and Hans Haacke’s MoMA Poll (1970) are also landmarks in this period.

Organizing efforts by curatorial staff were also highly visible at the time, but it’s worth pointing out that work actions by non-curatorial staff, in particular Security and Housekeeping, have received far less attention. This press release regarding a strike by security guards is one of few traces, even though non-curatorial departments were some of the first to be unionized and their quiet but crucial work keeps the Museum functioning.

The selections here focus on individual artists’ activities, most of which are critical but quieter and often mischievous or elegiac. These involve artists Bruce Conner and Ray Johnson, Vern Blosum and William Anthony, as well as writer and curator Gene Swenson.

Conner and Johnson’s gesture is discussed by Anastasia Aukeman in her forthcoming monograph on Conner.⁶ She traces how his SUPERHUMAN DEVOTION sic was considered for the 1961 exhibition The Art of Assemblage, but the work was damaged during shipment to New York and declined for the show. In response, as the artist recalled, he put the assemblage back in the shipping crate and, along with Johnson, brought it to the opening:

I invited Ray Johnson to the gallery and we painted the box, drilled holes in it. I had previously asked Ray for 100 hands and he opened a box and scattered 100 watch hands in the box, set fire to part of it, glued things on it and made a rope handle to carry it. We caught a taxi to MOMA for the opening . . . and were refused acceptance at the check stand. The guard wouldn’t let me carry it inside the museum. The box sat in the center of the entryway and everyone walked around it. After the opening we took the Staten Island Ferry and Ray and I threw it off the ferry in front of the Statue of Liberty.⁷

Two years after Conner’s assemblage was hurled into New York Harbor, MoMA acquired Vern Blosum’s painting Time Expired (1962) as an early example of Pop art and displayed it in the exhibition Around the Automobile (1965), linking the parking meter image to the material culture of cars. Further research revealed the work to be, in fact, a critique of Pop, painted under a pseudonym, and one of several. Writer and artist Greg Allen and curator Lionel Bovier conducted in-depth research into Blosum and traced how the Museum came to understand (and misunderstand) the artist and his work.⁸ The theme of transience, embodied by the parking meter and time “expiring” in this work and echoed in others from the series, supported Allen and Bovier’s conclusion that the elusive artist was mourning the ascent of Pop at the expense of interest in Abstract Expressionism, to which he was committed.

In a similarly mischievous approach to the passing of art historical time, artist William Anthony’s Object Stolen, Circa 1965, by the Artist from The Museum of Modern Art (2011) incorporates a wall label “acquired” from a quiet gallery. His gesture is similar to Tomkins quarter-in-the-pocket move a decade prior, but using the strategy of removal instead of addition. In an e-mail, Anthony recalls:

[C]irca 1965 the galleries of the museum weren’t so populated as they are now. I had the gallery to myself when I did the dirty deed. After ripping the label off the wall I ran like hell out of there joining my girlfriend (now wife) Norma and some friends in a nearby gallery. I’m not sure but I think we all had dinner at the museum, shamelessly gloating over the stolen goods. Anyway I remember the gloating.

Ironically, Anthony “ran like hell” with the label for Abstract Painting (1960–61), by Ad Reinhardt, creator of the 1940 broadside objecting to the lack of artists like himself at MoMA.

A more mournful gesture from this period involves writer and (briefly) staff member Gene Swenson. According to a perceptive memoir in Artforum,⁹ recollections by Linda Nochlin,¹⁰and Swenson’s own writing in the New York Press, in the context of personal difficulties and alarm about social conditions he believed would lead to revolution, in 1968 Swenson began to picket the Museum, carrying a large question mark. Later that year he stridently objected to the exhibition Dada, Surrealism, and their Heritage (1968), arguing passionately that curator William Rubin’s formalistic approach trivialized profound, psychosexual, and revolutionary aspects of the movement, an interpretation Swenson called “The Other Tradition.” Again Swenson took it to the street, placing newspaper ads and instigating a protest at the opening. One of the ads reads:

Dada is Dead. MOMA is Dead. Celebrate! Mausoleum of Modern Art . . . Artists and poets! Do your thing! Join Les Enfands du Parody in: The Transformation! Tea and black tie optional.

Photographs from the event show Swenson in front of the Museum, in black tie, leading a cohort of costumed demonstrators. According to several accounts, at the time Swenson was likely undergoing a break with reality, adding a psychological dimension to his concern with Surrealism and its reach for the subconscious. Increasingly marginalized in the art community, Swenson died in a car crash in 1969.

Performance predominated messing during the 1970s, put toward a variety of expressive ends. These included political issues, responding to art world sexism and government repression in Brazil and Russia, but also lyrical and mischievous interventions, one involving a road trip and anothera prankster.

The poster Attention! Women Artists and Feminists! (1972), recently acquired by the library, embodies this spirit. Created under the auspices of the Conference of Women in the Visual Arts for a demonstration that year, the text demands that “Women artists must no longer be invisible” as a pattern of silhouetted women marches in the background. In a similar mode, as part of a 1976 demonstration, artist Joanne Stamerra placed erasers stamped with “erase sexism at MoMA” throughout the galleries, as documented in the magazine Womanart. More recently, the long-lived activist group Guerrilla Girls paid indirect homage to her gesture with their own series of erasers.

In her photographic series 100 Boots (1971–73), Eleanor Antin thoughtfully engaged public spaces at MoMA, and her project is an early example of collaboration with the Museum. Antin conceived a series of photographs showing one hundred pairs of boots installed in diverse settings. Photographed by Philip Steinmetz, the images were intended to function like film stills, suggesting a journey from California to New York. Antin printed and mailed the images as postcards. In the one shown here, the boots enter the Museum, engaging the sidewalk.

In a series of pranks likely intended to satirize the machine aesthetic and Minimalist sculpture, in 1971 one Harvey Stromberg placed “illegal art”—illusionistic photo-sculptures of fixtures such as an electrical outlet—in the MoMA galleries. A photo essay of examples in New York Magazine is shown here, along with an invitation to an unofficial opening.

Other interventions from this period addressed global politics. For example, artist Vagrich Bakhchanyan initiated his First Russian Propaganda Art Performance at Museum of Modern Art in New York (1978) by engaging with Russian avant-garde art in the Museum’s permanent collection from the perspective of an immigrant. According to fellow émigré artists Rimma and Valeriy Gerlovin, in his performance

Bakhchanyan walked around the Museum . . . dressed as a “walking propaganda center,” covered from head to toe with slogans like “Stalin is Lenin today,” “Beware, savage dog,” and “Why is there no vodka on the moon?”¹¹

Bakhchanayan documented the event in this modest, self-published artists’ book. In the wry linking of political propaganda and the persuasive language of gallery talks, as well as interest in the diaspora of early Russian avant-garde art, Bakhchanyan’s performance and book presage the activities of Goran Djordjevic and Yevgeniy Fiks, discussed below.

Similarly, Marta Minujín’s Kidnappening of 1973 appears playful at first sight, but reveals an equally somber political undertone. In her performance, enacted during a Museum gala, selected visitors were blindfolded by artists (whose faces were painted to resemble Picasso portraits) and driven around the city in taxis. On the one hand, the work enabled art worlders to enjoy a garden party Happening and “afterparty” adventure. On the other, by essentially enacting an abduction, Minujín was inviting the subjects to experience, in highly sanitized form, the disappearances and abuses of power under authoritarian regimes in her native Argentina.

Beginning in the 1980s, with politically engaged art practices ascendant, “messing” started to become an accepted practice at MoMA and other art institutions, with artists and curators collaborating on projects. Meanwhile, independent actions continued apace.

On the independent end of the spectrum, following completion of the Museum’s 1984 expansion, the group Women Artists Visibility Event [sic] protested the underrepresentation of women artists in the opening exhibition, An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture. The group organized a color-coordinated series of protests, of which this flyer was part. Demonstrating their expertise in institutional critique, the group subverted the Museum’s own promotional methods, incorporating rigorous branding, curatorial statements, and even a satirical version of pins worn by Museum staff.

In a collaborative but also critical gesture, in her show Projects 9: Louise Lawler (1987), the artist mobilized MoMA’s means of production to send a political message. She designed the exhibition brochure to include this paper airplane, intended to contrast the complacency of attending cultural institutions with U.S. military action in Nicaragua.

A similar tension between participating in and being critical of the institution emerged when artist Chuck Close found a clever means to identify and fill a gap he found in the collection: Chuck Close: Head On/The Modern Portrait (1991), one of a series of guest-curated Artist’s Choice exhibitions. Close chose to assemble portraits from MoMA’s collection and wanted to include a portrait by Ray Johnson, but the Museum didn’t own any of his work. As a work-around, a portrait from the library collection, part of an extended mail art exchange between Johnson and MoMA librarian Clive Phillpot, was displayed. As Chief of Library Milan Hughston often points out, this exemplifies how the work of many now-established artists first entered the Museum through the library collection.

Returning to the theme of populations underrepresented in the collection, in the late 1990s the Guerrilla Girls organized a postcard campaign to protest the exhibition Objects of Desire: The Modern Still Life (1997). The card reads: “3 white women, 1 woman of color and no men of color—out of 71 artists?” Of the many cards received by the Museum, one in the MoMA Archives bears the note, “How embarrassing for you,” while another recommends “Fish, Murphy, Matthíasdóttir. Brady. Quintanilla. Rego. Celmins. Etcoff. Blaine. Neel.”

In a final example from this period, filmmaker Tony Kaye mobilized his objection to Philip Morris’s sponsorship of the exhibition Jasper Johns: A Retrospective (1996–97) by having a giant canvas erected across the street from the Museum. Perched in a bucket lift, Kaye hand-painted the quip “look at Jasper’s pictures / think we are nice / smoke our cigarettes and die.” A year earlier, when Kaye was at the Museum to receive an ad-industry award, his request to park his car in the lobby was declined. In response, he had a similar banner hoisted, reading “CON CEPTUAL.”¹² Both actions suggest a figure ambivalent about the power of commercialized communications, even as he mobilizes them.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, a millennial mindset prevailed at MoMA, taking the form of collection shows, a substantial expansion project, a staff strike, and a merger with P.S. 1. One of the strongest responses to the Museum’s expansion came from artist Filip Noterdaeme. Following completion of MoMA’s expansion project in 2004, Noterdaeme produced this flyer to protest high museum admission prices and to address the ongoing issue of homelessness. The flyer parodies an advertising theme created for the MoMA reopening and incorporates an image of Marcel Duchamp’s famously rejected Fountain (1917). A year later, Noterdaeme took the theme a step further with MoMA HMLSS (2005), a suitcase designed for on-the-fly display of miniature versions of objects in the Museum collection. Modeled on Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise (1935–41), the artist’s traveling miniature monograph, Noterdaeme added a critical dimension by taking the suitcase on the road, in particular to the sidewalk outside of MoMA, making his “collection” freely available to literal outsiders. Both works are part of his Homeless Museum of Art (HOMU), founded in 2002.

Returning to the theme of Russian avant-garde diaspora, artist Goran Djordjevic’s ongoing project The Museum of American Art in Berlin deconstructs the circulation of Russian modernist tenets in Eastern Europe during the Cold War via MoMA and other Western institutions. The exhibition catalogue cover shown here appropriates the design of a book by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., intended to popularize modernism. Barr’s What Is Modern Painting? (1943) was revised and reprinted for decades, and it was translated into several languages—but not Russian. Djordjevic incorporates in-depth contextual research into the MoAA project, which encompasses performance (taking on personae such as Barr and Gertrude Stein), gallery models, copies of artworks, texts, and numerous other interpretive forms.

Artist Yevgeniy Fiks explores a similar theme, but Fiks approaches the dissemination of early modernist tenets from the other direction, critically (and humorously) examining the circulation of Communist tenets in the New York City context. Through the form of a 2011 gallery tour, Fiks explored complex relationships among Western artists, the Museum, and leftist ideas during the contentious Cold War period, deconstructing how they were leveraged by the Museum (at the time, MoMA often resisted Red Scare pressures by positioning modernism as apolitical—emphasizing individual expression independent of sociopolitical context). Fiks’s ongoing project seeks to reestablish the connections, bringing out nuanced attitudes among left-leaning Western artists and their Eastern counterparts as their works mingle in the permanent collection galleries. As seen in his reinterpretation of a printed map available to MoMA visitors, Fiks’s tour articulates leftist attitudes among and between artists whose political activities are often downplayed in Modernist narratives. For example, while Diego Rivera and Pablo Picasso are readily associated with Communism, Fiks brings out less well-known artists’ relationships with leftist ideology, such as Henri Matisse, Rene Magritte, and Lee Krasner.

Another recent intervention is Maria Anwander’s The Kiss (2010). By giving the wall of the Museum’s atrium gallery a big smackeroo, the artist embodied both aggressive and affectionate attitudes toward the institution: she both kisses off and kisses up. Intervening during a point of transition in one of the Museum’s main galleries, she took advantage of the flux to make a gesture both outsized and intimate, political and personal. She marked the spot with a label, appropriately written and formatted in institutional style (reappropriated here in this institutional-style post), articulating the idea of kissing as a power dynamic:

Anwander uses art institutions as forums where hierarchical, social and economic models can be tested and reimagined. The piece is part of a series . . . which Anwander has developed since 2004, playing with the link between art institutions and the market . . . “The Kiss” was given to the MoMA without asking for permission . . . Kissing in some cultures and religions symbolizes the exchange of souls and powers.¹³

The elegance of the work lies in this contrast between the cool remove of the label copy and the visceral nature of the kiss itself—a conceptual gesture with a phenomenological jolt. We can’t help but imagine ourselves in her place, the touch of our own lips on the wall—and feel a shock similar to encountering Meret Oppenheim’s Object (1936) for the first time, or to entering a steel-and-glass museum building in 1939.

The kiss up/kiss off tension of Anwander’s gesture brings us to the present and future of messing with MoMA. In particular, consider these decades of messing in light of current art world interest in participation, performance, and social practice art, in which critical intervention has been largely institutionalized. What is the nature of “messing” in the fully participatory museum? How do contemporary ideas about the social role of art museums change relationships between participant and observer, between collusive and critical actions, between what can and can’t be messed with?

I conclude with two examples that show this tension. Thilo Hoffmann’s video series 30 Seconds (2010) falls on the sanctioned end of the messing continuum. The artist initiated a practice of brainstorming and executing brief videos about the MoMA experience. The prevalence of playful behavior in these individually imagined videos is striking: visitors and staff enjoyed cartwheeling, skipping, bicycling, play-fighting, making music, and even bathing in otherwise highly controlled Museum spaces.

On the other end of the continuum are surprise visits by Occupy Museums in 2008, part of the Occupy Wall Street movement objecting to economic recklessness and inequality. Here, music-making in the galleries was considered disruptive, even as it reflected contemporary social conditions to which most gallerygoers could relate.

These types of messing are characteristic of our very participatory present. Where will they take us? With hashtags, selfies, sleepovers, kimono-wearing, and tastings the norm, where does messing sit on the participant-observer fan-critic continuum? Will the pendulum swing back toward encounters at new levels of remove, or perhaps emerge into other forms of even more intense participation not yet anticipated? I look forward to chronicling the future of “messing,” in which artists, public, and staff continue to creatively manifest diverse forms and attitudes toward the Museum and the art of our time.

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When, in the 1980s, Dick Higgins and Ken Friedman outlined the basic ideas of Fluxus,¹ Higgins placed internationalism first and Friedman, globalism. In the twenty years since Fluxus had emerged during the first half of the 1960s—at the height of the Cold War—artists associated with the movement had been willfully flouting borders of all kinds. The poets, visual artists, and musicians gathered around Fluxus coordinator George Maciunas were engaged in a wide range of activities, and they hailed from many countries. Promoting communication among them, and among all people in general, became one of Fluxus’s main missions. Maciunas’s correspondence network and Nam June Paik’s vision of global telecommunications bridges not only grew out of utopian ideas for worldwide democracy, but also reflected the practical needs of a movement that refused to respect the existing divisions of the world.

One of the many intercontinental relationships to arise from Fluxus in the second half of the 1960s was the one between Milan Knížák and Ken Friedman, the two of whom Maciunas had appointed as directors of Fluxus East and Fluxus West, respectively. Knížák lived in Czechoslovakia, a satellite of the Soviet Union, and Friedman in California. Although the two men were separated by the Iron Curtain and spoke different languages, they found a common vocabulary almost immediately. And although their dialogue was hardly an example of unfettered global communication, the constraints imposed by physical distance and political circumstance only seemed to strengthen their ties.

Art was the principal concern of neither of them. Like many young people in the 1960s, they felt the need for an antiauthoritarian change in society, one that would foster a new universal consciousness and admit countercultural values as well as sexual liberation. Many Fluxus artists felt that art should be dissolved in life. In Knížák and Friedman’s correspondence, life itself is revealed as a form of art, open to change, flower-power ideals, and, above all, love.

Directors of East and West

A pioneer of action art, Knížák worked outside Czechoslovakia’s established art community. He abandoned traditional art in the mid-1960s and began engaging in radical social activities whose aim was to reform life itself. In 1964 he founded Aktual Art, an association of nonconformists who organized playful street actions and participated in projects that were later identified as mail art. Some of its members experimented with drugs. Most outsiders took the group for a cohort of long-haired hooligans with a penchant for playing pranks and creating disturbances.

In 1965 Aktual dropped “art” from its name and published a samizdat magazine filled with social manifestos and utopian declarations. The members showed no desire to join the established avant-garde and criticized the concept of art as such, asserting that art should become a part of life, a pursuit aimed at “living otherwise.” In late 1965 or early 1966 Knížák began corresponding with Maciunas.

It was in 1965 that Friedman first came into contact with Fluxus and Maciunas. Friedman was only sixteen at the time, but he quickly found his place among Fluxus artists. He spent most of the years discussed in this essay as a student at San Francisco State University or living with his parents in San Diego, all the while developing and expanding his artistic activities.

As the respective directors of Fluxus East and Fluxus West, Knížák and Friedman operated on the peripheries not only in the geographical sense but also in terms of the kinds of activities they engaged in. For although both considered Fluxus important, particularly when it came to expanding their personal networks, the movement was just one of many outlets for their endeavors. In addition to their Fluxus projects and contacts, both artists, but especially Knížák, pursued independent activities. For Knížák, Fluxus represented an international gateway, and yet he repeatedly criticized the movement for being overly focused on art. He was far more interested in projects with a direct social thrust, ones oriented toward developing new types of interpersonal relations, communities, and togetherness.²

Even before coming into contact with Fluxus and Friedman, Knížák had been using postal communications to address the public. By 1965 he was sending out large numbers of letters under the name of Aktual, sometimes choosing the addressees at random. The missives resembled chain letters whose goal was to create communities of letter writers. At about the same time, Knížák developed the concept of Keeping Together Manifestations (KTMs). He hoped to promote global togetherness through written correspondence and by organizing synchronized actions all over the world.

Love

Friedman and Knížák began to write to each other toward the end of 1966 or early 1967.³ Their correspondence has a passionate character not found in the letters Knížák exchanged with Maciunas and Higgins, although these, too, convey the euphoria of kindred spirits who, independently of one another, had arrived at similar ways of thinking. At this time, all of Knížák’s letters to his friends in the U.S. were signed “Love, Milan,” but the epistolary exchanges between Knížák and Friedman were ardent and visually wild even when it came to practical matters such as coordinating joint activities. Especially in the letters from the spring of 1967, the cadence and tone of their letters are comparable to those of impetuous lovers. The writers’ eagerness to communicate was often frustrated by the speed of the postal service, with each losing track of what he had already written to or sent the other. The letters constantly repeat the same questions: “Did you get my letter?” and “Why haven’t you responded?” At the time of this feverish exchange, Knížák was twenty-seven and Friedman barely eighteen.

The letters Friedman received from Prague were from a foreign and yet in many ways familiar world, and they were not from Knížák alone. In one letter, twenty-one-year-old Aktual member Soňa Švecová, Knižák’s partner at the time, introduced herself as someone for whom life was more important than art. She sent out anonymous letters and packages and staged performance pieces on trams and in public spaces, never documenting her projects because she didn’t consider them important. She pasted playful photographs of herself all over her letter to Friedman and closed with the words, “Write to us something about you!”⁴ The flirtatious pen pals even developed a form of correspondence-based physical contact: Knížák or Švecová would trace the outline of his or her hand on a piece of paper and send it to Friedman, who would then trace the outline of his hand over theirs. In this way the friends could touch each other over a distance of thousands of miles and carry on a love game across continents.

Friedman identified strongly with Aktual and Knížák, and he shared Knížák’s ideas about blurring life and art. After looking over some materials produced by the organization, he recognized that his Instant Theatre project, under which he presented public events in California, qualified him as a member.⁵ He wasted no time in founding an American branch of Aktual. In March 1967 Knížák wrote enthusiastically: “Dear Ken, I love you for your activity. We must keep together more places on the globe! To want to live—otherwise. To live otherwise. I’m shaking with your hands for basing of Aktual USA. Right Idea!”⁶

Keeping Together

During the first years of their correspondence, most of their collaborative projects were initiated by Knížák, who emphasized the need for reciprocity between Aktual’s Czech and American branches. He set out to achieve this mutual exchange largely by organizing Keeping Together Manifestations and sent Friedman a mock-up of a publication on KTMs that he hoped might be published in the United States. He even wrote a song in English that was intended as a kind of KTM anthem: “Shake my hand, shake my heart. World is nice, world is love.” The slogan “Keep Together” appeared in English on the cover of the third issue of Aktual magazine in Czechoslovakia, with Friedman’s address printed inside.

The planning and coordination of KTMs account for a significant portion of the correspondence between Friedman and Knížák. The two associates agreed to inaugurate Keeping Together Day in March 1967 with a full month of KTMs. Every year thereafter, the occasion was to be celebrated on the Sunday following the first day of spring. KTMs could include diverse, unspecified actions and activities; the important thing was for people to be aware that others, perhaps even those on the other side of the planet, were participating in something similar. Knížák conceived of togetherness events that could be organized easily by almost anyone. In the spring of 1967, as a part of the inaugural Keeping Together Day, he proposed a KTM, later titled Difficult Ceremony, in which participants spent twenty-four hours together without eating, drinking, smoking, sleeping, or communicating. The 1968 KTM was less demanding: “Put a table in front of your house and take a lunch. Invite passers-by.”⁷ Knížák asked Friedman to realize this action in the U.S. and to promote its widespread organization by others. To assist, Knížák made a handwritten, unconventional-looking English-language poster, which he mimeographed and sent to California at the reduced rate for printed matter.

Friedman did not have the resources to implement all of Knížák’s plans, nor did he adhere strictly to Aktual’s program. He ex post facto claimed as KTMs some of his earlier Instant Theater performances that were not directly related to the notion of human togetherness, and on occasion he organized activities with no connection to the ideas coming from Czechoslovakia. As early as March 1967, he printed his own posters promoting Aktual USA. Their messages were in keeping with the ethos of late-sixties California: “Aktual is holding hands, making love, being people, keeping together. Aktual is now—is you.”

Friedman surely exaggerated when he described the impact of the Aktual movement: “AKTUAL/USA reached 10,000 people in public instant events in its first week of operation. If you wish to be AKTUAL, let us know, and we can bring INSTANT THEATRE towards liberation, satori, truth, fun, and games in your neighborhood soon.”⁸ The true reach of Aktual was very likely more modest. In Czechoslovakia, the second annual Keeping Together Day was celebrated on March 24, 1968. Photographs in The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Archives at The Museum of Modern Art show several Aktual members and sympathizers with handmade posters on Prague’s Národní třída (National Avenue). The posters, designed in the style of American psychedelic art, exhorted people to organize communal lunches and to invite the public to partake. If there was a wider response to this celebration, the documentation has not been found.

Activism

One specific element that Knížák brought to KTM was antiwar activism. As part of the inaugural 1967 Keeping Together Manifestation in Czechoslovakia, Knížák planned or even sent out a letter to foreign embassies in Prague and Czech army officers asking them to disengage from military activities. Written in the name of the worldwide movement for peace, freedom, and nonviolence, the letter was followed by an anonymous mimeographed flyer titled “Assassinate All Those Who Prepare War.” The concept of the flyer came from Robert Wittmann, a member of Aktual, but it was adopted by the whole group. Wittmann and Knížák planned to hold International Atentát Day on Sunday, April 9, 1967. To promote it, Knížák sent Friedman several small accompanying brochures typewritten and copied using carbon paper.

This project, which we will refer to as the Aktual Atentát Project, deserves further clarification. For decades Communist propaganda had thoroughly discredited the concept of fighting for peace. Because of this, few serious art projects east of the Iron Curtain were committed to the cause of world peace,⁹ though elsewhere, the pacifism and nonviolence associated with the hippie movement had become fashionable. The shock effect of Wittmann’s militant, absurdist rhetoric calling on people to kill in the name of nonviolence was surely intended to astound its audience. Wittmann and Knížák used the word “atentát” (assassination) even in English translations. In Czech, the word is closely associated with the killing of the German Acting Reich-Protector Reinhard Heydrich by the Czechoslovak resistance in 1942. The crime was avenged immediately by the German occupying forces, who erased an entire village and its inhabitants from the map, not only punishing the assassins, but also murdering anyone who sided with them. The word “atentát” was repeated endlessly in Nazi propaganda. As a result, in Czech, the word acquired a horrific connotation for its association with absolute terror.

Knížák first developed Atentát, as he did Keeping Together Manifestations, prior to his association with Friedman. But the message of Atentát was not clear in English and thus did not gain the support abroad that his calls for togetherness did. The problem is highlighted in a letter from Dick Higgins, dated February 25, 1967: “Dear Milan, We are 100% with you and will keep together with you all. I’ll send you some info about how we keep together here. We’ll get 500 people to keep together in New York and another 500 in San Francisco. Here is some info on how they are doing it there. Your letter ends with the words: Commit ‘atentat’ on each man which is preparing warm! I can’t quite figure out what it means. The word ‘atentát’ doesn’t exist in English, nor does the phrase ‘preparing warm’. Does your sentence mean ‘Kill all those who are preparing war?’ If yes, then I agree. Venceremos!!!”¹⁰

Travel
Knížák is usually identified as one of the Eastern European members of Fluxus, but considering the broad range of his activities, such pigeonholing is misleading. For Knížák, Fluxus was a source of many friendships and validated the path he had chosen in life. Far more important for him, however, were the activities associated with Aktual. Although small, the membership, which was otherwise exclusively Czech, acquired an important international dimension through Ken Friedman. Aktual’s loose organizational structure resembled that of Fluxus, with Knížák as the main organizer and intellectual leader. In his correspondence with Friedman, he is sometimes jokingly referred to as the “bishop” of the religion of Aktual. Without him, Aktual would not have existed.

Maciunas invited Knížák to Fluxus headquarters in New York in 1966. Two and a half years later, Knížák obtained permission to leave Czechoslovakia and, in the summer of 1968, traveled to New York. He worked briefly for Maciunas’s Fluxhouse cooperative and later supported himself as a construction worker.

Knížák and Friedman first met face-to-face in the spring of 1969 in California, where Knížák had been invited by Friedman to give a lecture. “Ken Friedman was waiting for me. He looks like a younger version of the Czech artist Franta Sedlák. But K. F. is a conceptual artist and is 19, although he doesn’t like to say so about himself, and his parents have a beautiful house in San Diego with a terrace and a pool where I even went for a swim.”¹¹ Knížák’s time in California was not one of concentrated artistic activity; it was more of a holiday, an enactment of the motto “live otherwise,” filled with long discussions about the future.

It is clear from his travel journals that Knížák had little interest in the artistic goings-on in New York.¹² He was repelled by the degree of institutionalization he found in the world of art, which he saw as too detached from life. His own work received scant attention. In New York, only a half dozen people turned up in response to the hundreds of invitations issued to his Difficult Ceremony, and some participants escaped through a window only a few hours after the start of the twenty-four-hour event. Difficult Ceremony of 1969 was one of the few works Knížák realized during his stay in the United States.

Knížák did not use his time in the United States to build new and lasting relationships within the art community. He considered important the people with whom he had been corresponding before coming to the U.S., and he continued to value them. Knížák’s need for a universal coming-together declined during his two-year American sojourn, leading to a reduction in Aktual’s activities rather than to the movement’s flowering. Paradoxically, the modest, more or less virtual, and internationally ambitious Aktual movement did better when its principals lived in separate countries.

When his Czech exit visa expired in April 1970, Knížák decided to return home. His correspondence with Friedman continued after his return, with Friedman wanting to pursue their joint plans and experiences: “We believe in the same truth, love the same love, work for the same goal.”¹³ Knížák sent him the kinds of requests that are common among good friends: he was looking for a book on the history of communes and frequently reminded Friedman to send him the records he received free from a music-critic friend. The desire to coordinate joint projects weakened, however. In 1970 Czechoslovakia was a different place from what it had been in 1968: the repression associated with the hard-line Communist regime’s consolidation of power was in full swing, and Knížák was facing even greater obstacles to staging public activities than before. On top of that he suffered serious financial problems. Aktual was reduced to just a few of his closest friends and effectively ceased to exist.

At home, Knížák was effectively isolated from the public and had no urge to engage himself with the local art community. After 1970, almost all of his exhibitions, collectors, and supporters were outside of Czechoslovakia. He left Prague for the countryside, but, under police surveillance, organized no further Keeping Together Days. Friedman kept those celebrations going in California, however, and for the 1972 event was joined by artists from elsewhere in the United States and in Canada. Friedman tried to assist Knížák, who was arrested for several months in 1972-73 and received a two-year sentence in 1973 after artworks by him were seized at the Czech border and judged pornographic and harmful to the country’s image.¹⁴

Raising Global Consciousness
In their time, Keeping Together Manifestations represented a utopian attempt to create a global network of togetherness, but it took another letter-driven project—this one aimed at saving Knížák from judicial prosecution—to elicit a strong response by and the active involvement of the international community. The petition calling for Knížák’s release was distributed by various groups associated with Fluxus and was signed by prominent individuals including Allan Kaprow and Harald Szeemann. Knížák, who was aware of the power of international public opinion, had helped to initiate the campaign. In a letter to the German collector Wolfgang Feelisch, dated February 19, 1973, he wrote: “Please ask the people around the world, all the people you know, to write letters and protest to Czech government against it, to publish protests and notes and news about it in all newspapers and magazines around the world. . . . Please do all you can because I . . . can do very little myself, please tell what happen to everyone in the world because if I will go to the jail, all Czech art will go with me, all art freedom will be jailed, too.”¹⁵ Knížák’s sentence was commuted to probation: he was not allowed to publish in Czechoslovakia, to work in public spaces, or to organize even private group activities.

Bridging great distances and an even greater geopolitical divide, the correspondence between Knížák and Friedman in the late 1960s and early 1970s linked two individuals with similar ideas, engaging them in a kind of long-distance love affair. Knížák remembers how important it was to receive confirmation that he was not alone in his way of thinking. And he himself was able, through his letters, to influence a kindred spirit in far-off California. For Knížák, as for other Eastern European artists, the international art world, accessible via the postal service, became one of the few—if not the sole—public platform for his work. Knížák would have to wait until 1979 to set foot in that world once more; only then did the Czech authorities again allow him to travel abroad.

Milan Knížák never attempted to reestablish Aktual and instead pursued an individual art career. After 1989 he became Dean of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and from 1999 headed the National Gallery in Prague for almost twelve years. His current political views come close to right-wing libertarianism. Ken Friedman continued with his artistic endeavors and became the leading historian of Fluxus. He held several teaching and research positions in the fields of philosophy of science and philosophy of design. Since 2007 he has served as Dean of the Faculty of Design at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.

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This fictional walk with Jiří Kovanda provides us with the unique opportunity to pass through Prague’s historical center; the original photographic documentation captures a number of sites that have been radically transformed since. Thus, the “walk” presented here offers glimpses of now-vanished features of the once-totalitarian city.

The meaning of place in its political and aesthetic context have not been examined sufficiently within the framework of action art. While the specific location of an action can sometimes be deduced from descriptions and photographs, the work’s exact position and, more important, why its particular location was selected, can be elusive. Moreover, under Communism, artists’ actions had nuanced connotations that are hardly fathomable today. These works straddled the border of art and everyday life and were at home in both domains. In order to understand such actions, it is as important to stand on the very spot where they were performed as it is to read through documentation. In many cases it is even more important. Indeed, the personal experience of reimagining such an event cannot be fully communicated in words.

Conceived as part of Pavlína Morganová’s project of mapping more than 150 happenings, performances, and other interventions carried out in Prague by over a dozen artists in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, Kovanda’s walk is incorporated in the book Procházka akční Prahou: Akce, happeningy, performance 1949-1989 (A Walk Through Prague: Actions, Happenings, Performances 1949-1989), published by the Research Centre of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 2014. Members of C-MAP’s Central and Eastern Europe group had the privilege of experiencing this walk, led by Kovanda and Morganová, while visiting Prague in the spring of 2014.

Notes On The Documentation

Kovanda carefully documented his art actions from the very start in the mid-1970s. Conceptualism became for him, an autodidact with minimum funds, a chance to devote himself to art. It was thanks to conceptualism that Kovanda realized that one did not need anything or need to know anything to become a good artist.

On a sheet of paper the artist would type a work’s title and approximate or precise date. Occasionally he included a short written description of an action and supplemented the text with photographs or drawings of the situation described. Today these documents, which Kovanda once carried in well-worn folders to show to anyone who was interested, are viewed, exhibited and sold as artworks. In fact, the MoMA Photo department recently acquired a few of these photographs / documentation sheets . They were originally records, documents and proof that the action took place and of the methods used. Today, these documents are a peephole to the past; they help to make present what is now absent. Yet, they are also interesting documents of specific places that sometimes no longer exist. Here, the original photos are juxtaposed with recent photographs of the locations taken by Ondřej Chrobák when Pavlína Morganová and Jiří Kovanda reexamined the places in 2014. Addresses and the short written descriptions from the documentation sheets are also included. The original images and scans of the documentation were kindly provided by Jiří Kovanda from his personal archive.

The Walk

1. Untitled, November 18, 1976

This action, one of Kovanda’s first, was conducted in a construction trailer parked near the Národní Muzeum (National Museum) on Wenceslas Square. The artist worked there in the mid-’70s as a surveyor on the construction of the Muzeum subway station. He based Untitled on his daily routine of waiting by the telephone to be summoned to perform a task. It is evident from the photo-documentation that the phone eventually rang but the call was not for Kovanda, so he passed the receiver to someone else.

2. Untitled “Theatre,” November 1976

This action took place in Wenceslas Square, one of the busiest places in the city center. Jan Palach immolated himself here in 1969 to protest the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact troops. After that event, the site became the center of protests and demonstrations that culminated, in late November 1989, in the Velvet Revolution, when , the entire square was filled with people every day. It should be noted, however, that Kovanda’s reasons for siting his work here probably had less to do with the square’s political symbolism than with convenience: he was employed on the excavation of the Muzeum subway station (directly beneath the monument) so that he was working in the square on a daily basis.

3. Untitled, November 19, 1976

Yet this performance was intended not merely as a confrontation with random passersby, an attempt to bridge the anonymity of the city and break down the barrier that everyone carries. It was predominantly Kovanda’s attempt to break through his own timidity and diffidence that had enveloped the artist in solitude even when in presence of others. Although he used his body as an obstacle, his gesture was also an attempt to open himself to members of the public, to establish contact with them and perhaps even embrace them. It is hard to tell from the documentation whether he succeeded in this. The looks of indifference, bafflement and irritation on the faces of those captured in the photographs reflect the tenor of public space under totalitarian rule. They become visible only in confrontation with Kovanda’s artistic gesture. In this piece, the body’s experience, a key aspect of body art of the 1970s, recedes into the background and social experience takes center stage. Kovanda presented similar “social gestures” in other early works in the city center.

4. Untitled, August, 1977

During a work break, Kovanda carried out this action on the upper part of Wenceslas Square. In front of the construction trailer, he stood looking at the sun until his eyes teared. With its emphasis on the imperceptibility of the change brought about by the action, this piece is typical of Kovanda’s work. An intimacy of sorts, which is revealed in the documentation, is also typical.

5. Untitled, September 3, 1977

The escalator in the pedestrian underpass at the middle of Wenceslas Square was one of the first of its kind in Prague. In the 1970s and ’80s, people streaming down the sidewalk of the commercial avenue between Muzeum and Můstek had to use the underpass; crossing the street was prohibited.They took the stairs down but ascended to the other side on an escalator that was always packed. This detour, which people passively accepted, was superbly captured in Jan Ságl’s 1972 film Underground, in which women, men, and children are shown emerging from the underpass, their faces expressing resignation or expectations of everyday joys that have nothing to do with the political situation. After a regular crosswalk was opened in the 1990s, the escalator was removed, since no one used it anymore. The escalator on the other side of the street, which Kovanda used for his action, is now used by only a few pedestrians exiting the Můstek subway station. It would be difficult for the artist to carry out his action here today.

6. Contact, September 3, 1977

In this action Kovanda gently bumped into fellow pedestrians in Wenceslas Square and the surrounding area. The photographer documenting the action was on the other side of the street, unnoticed by the artist’s targets, who had no idea that they were participants in a performance; only in the photographs are Kovanda’s intentions clear. Attempting to interact with strangers in the street, on streetcars, and the subway is a recurring theme in Kovanda’s early actions.

7. Installation I, 1978

An empty storage room on a street near the lower end of Wenceslas Square served in 1978 and 1979 as the meeting place for Prague’s leading body artists and thus as a center of Czech performance art. The meetings were linked to Petr Štembera and Jan Mlčoch’s activities in the basement of the Museum of Decorative Arts and in St. Agnes Monastery. The room on Provaznická Street was the final refuge for these artists before their interests shifted away from body art, and it was here that Kovanda made his first installations, the first works to signal the fatigue that was descending on the circle of Prague’s body artists. Installation I, created at the end of 1978, consisted of a potted flower placed behind a column in an empty room. Some of Kovanda’s later installations focusing on specific spaces and their visualization were developed in this same spirit.

8. Installation II, February, 1979

Installation II was related to Installation I. In this second piece, Kovanda tied a string around the column behind which he had placed the flowerpot in the earlier work. He used string in other actions, such as White String, which he carried out at his home in November 1979.

9. Installation III, March 15, 1979

Two poles tied together and leaning against the ceiling of a room on Provaznická Street didn’t seem like a work of art or an action in 1979; the piece was ahead of its time by a couple of decades. It wasn’t until about 2000 that the younger generation of Czech artists gradually began to respond to such pieces by Kovanda. The artist still uses the principles he employed in these early installations in his current Post-Conceptual works.

10. Installation IV, Spring, 1979

This was the final installation that Kovanda made in the room on Provaznická Street. In the 1980s he returned to working outdoors in the city’s public spaces.

11. An Attempt at Meeting a Girl, October 19, 1977

Another frequent location for Kovanda’s actions was the Old Town Square, Prague’s medieval center, surrounded by Gothic and Baroque churches. A small group of friends who regularly attended evening performances in the basement of the Museum of Decorative Arts and later in the storage room on Provaznická Street watched from the Jan Hus monument as Kovanda attempted to make the acquaintance of a random girl. Among those photographed while watching were Karel Miler, the action artist and art historian, theorists Jiří Ševčík and Jana Ševčíková, action artist Lumír Hladík, and photographer Dušan Klimeš.

12. Untitled, January 1, 1978

Kovanda arranged to meet several friends at the Jan Hus monument on Old Town Square and ran off while they were talking. In the photo-documentation from 1978, the medieval square appears nearly empty; today it is filled most of the year with food stands, cafes, and other popular attractions.

13. Untitled, January 1, 1978

The historic building that houses the Prague’s Museum of Decorative Arts is situated near the Old Town Square. In the mid-1970s, Petr Štembera, a key figure on the Czech body-art scene, was employed by the museum as a depository worker and night watchman, positions that gave him access to the building at night and enabled him to open it to a small circle of kindred spirits that included Karel Srp, Petr Rezek, Květoslav Chvatík, Jaroslav Anděl, Lumír Hladík, Jana Ševčíková and Jiří Ševčík, Jitka Svobodová, Milena Slavická, Ludvík Hlaváček, and Pavel Büchler. Between 1975 and 1978, when the museum’s attic spaces were under renovation, performance evenings were held there in which Štembera, Jan Mlčoch, Karel Miler and, later, Kovanda presented actions. Kovanda’s untitled piece from 1977 was the first performance he gave at the museum. Until then he had attended the evenings as a spectator.

14. Untitled, December 8, 1977

The second action that Kovanda presented during the clandestine performance evenings at the Museum of Decorative Arts led to contact with the spectators. During this period the artist was carrying out a series of contact actions on the street.

15. Untitled, February 23, 1978

This undocumented action, in which Kovanda played a Dylan song to those who had gathered on one of the last performance nights at the Museum of Decorative Arts, stands at the threshold of Kovanda’s transition from action to installation artist. Around this time the group took part in a number of exhibitions around the world and the individual artists performed in Poland and Hungary. Petr Štembera, invited to the US by Chris Burden, performed there in 1978 as part of the Polar Crossing exhibition in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The group was still briefly active in the late 1970s in the temporary space on Provaznická Street.

16. Wedges in the Cobblestone, Autumn 1980

In this piece, Kovanda inserted wooden wedges between the cobblestones in a recess on the left side of the main entrance to the Rudolfinum building. It was one of his first installations in a public urban space in which he followed up on his final actions and first installations in the room on Provaznická Street. In the years that followed, Kovanda created a number of unobtrusive installations in various nooks of Prague. They took the form of modest, material interventions in the urban environment, and the artist left them to their fates. Their simplicity stems from the limited means Kovanda had at his disposal and enjoyed using, and their low profiles were perfectly adapted to the close surveillance of public space in the years of “normalization.”

17. Two Little White Piles, 1980

Despite the strict surveillance of public space in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and ’80s, neither informers nor secret police agents were disturbed by either of the two small white piles of plaster that Kovanda placed on the railings of the Charles and Mánes bridges. These understated yet conceptually monumental installations could be seen by viewers looking across the Vltava River toward the panoramic backdrop of Prague Castle.

18. Two Little White Slats and Three Little White Slats, Autumn 1980

A neglected area at the foot of the Mánes Bridge was the site of several actions. It was here, in 1965, that Milan Knížák gave his lecture “Why Indeed,” an event documented in a photograph that is now in MoMA’s Archives. Knížák was a key figure in Czech action art, founded the Aktual group, was affiliated with the Fluxus movement, and in 1966 took part in preparing a Fluxus festival in Prague. Owing to the situation in Czechoslovakia, Kovanda did not know about Knížák’s talk at the site. The only way Kovanda could have found out about the older artist’s presentation was it through personal contacts, which he did not have in those circles at the time.

19. Untitled, June 29, 1977

The dilapidated wall in front of Sova’s Mills, now the Kampa Museum housing the Jan and Meda Mládek collection of work by František Kupka and other 20th-century Central Europeans, was renovated in the 1990s. Thus, any romantic inscriptions that might have survived Kovanda’s efforts to remove them have been irrevocably lost. The photo-documentation indicates that no one took much notice of the artist’s strange and persistent activity in the then-public space.

20. Kiss, May 11, 1976

Several locations in Prague witnessed more than one action by Kovanda. These include temporary “alternative spaces,” such as the basement of the Museum of Decorative Arts and the storage room on Provaznická Street, as well as Wenceslas Square, where he worked in the 1970s. Another important site was Střelecký Island. In the middle of the Vltava River and accessed via Legion Bridge, it is one of the most romantic places in Prague. The island is essentially a park surrounded by water in the center of Prague. It was here in 1976 that Kovanda staged one of his early actions, though he himself did not perform it. The artist directed a chosen couple to kiss while making footprints in a slab of wet plaster.

21. Water, June 11, 1976

This action is one of Kovanda’s earliest and precedes those carried out in the vicinity of Wenceslas Square. In the mid-1970s Kovanda began to take a strong interest in Conceptual art and attended performances organized by fellow Prague artists Petr Štembera and Jan Mlčoch. He leaned a photograph of a bottle of water against the wall of the stairs leading from the Legion Bridge to Střelecký Island and placed an identical glass bottle next to it. Then he set the photograph on fire. This action does not appear in later publications even though it was documented by the artist.

22. Untitled, May 19, 1977

An important element in Kovanda’s performances is the pointlessness of the performed acts. In an interview with me in June 1997, Kovanda emphasized that the difficulty or usefulness of an action is not important to him. The importance lies in its execution. This action refers to Karel Miler’s Unveiling the River, an action from 1975. Miler became an important model for Kovanda in the second half of the 1970s, when the two artists worked together at the National Gallery and shared interests in Zen Buddhism and Conceptual art.

23. Untitled, May 19, 1977

This action was one of several that Kovanda carried out on Střelecký Island on May 19,1977. He performed for a small circle of spectators recruited from among his friends, thus taking to an outdoor public space the type of performance meetings he had been involved in at the Museum of Decorative Arts. The secluded spots where Kovanda staged his work on the island provided the kind of safe, intimate atmosphere favored by the artist.

24. Untitled, May 19, 1977

Among the onlookers at Kovanda’s final performance on Střelecký Island on May 19, 1977 were, pictured on the left, Jana Ševčíková and Jiří Ševčík, key theorists of the 1980s and ’90s, performer and art historian Karel Miler, with whom Kovanda worked in the National Gallery, and Lumír Hladík, another Czech action artist.

25. Autumn Piece, Autumn 1980

Kovanda returned to Střelecký Island in 1980 and with three wooden laths “secured” fallen leaves to the ground. His previous interventions involving objects had been presented in the room on Provaznická Street and outside a summer house in the Czech village of Uhlíře. With Autumn Piece, along with other installations he executed that fall (see numbers 16–18), Kovanda switched definitively to working in the public space of the city. The small scale of these installations forms a striking contrast with the monumentality of the American land art that undoubtedly inspired it.

26. Salty Corner, Sugary Bend, Winter 1981

Kovanda made this installation in a recessed section of the right front side Legion Bridge (formerly known as May Day Bridge), near the National Theater. As in a number of his other outdoor installations in Prague, it is based on an internal “unrecognized” dialectic.

27. Fur Coat (concept by L. H.), Winter 1982

Kovanda’s final piece on Střelecký Island was also his last work in a public space in Prague. Fur Coat was based on Lumír Hladík’s idea of wrapping handrailings in protective material during the winter months. Hladík had emigrated earlier that year, and Kovanda created the piece as a reminder of a friend whom he might never see again. He installed it on the upper part of the staircase leading to Střelecký Island from Legion Bridge.

28. Sugar Tower, Spring 1981

Kovanda produced more than thirty actions and installations in Prague. Sugar Tower, the final work included in this unusual walk through the city, was made in Vyšehrad, an important historic location and tourist attraction. Ancient legends say that Vyšehrad was the seat of the first Czech rulers. Situated on a hill overlooking the Vltava River, the fortress appears as a counterweight to Prague Castle. In the 1960s, Kovanda and others in the circle of Petr Rezek and Petr Štembera closely followed the revolution in art that was being led mostly by American Conceptual artists and which included Minimalism, land art, Conceptual art and other approaches such as antiform, process art, environments, and Happenings. Makeshift translations of various texts describing these avant-garde currents were included in Czech samizdat anthologies in the ’60s and ’70s. Shortly before installing Sugar Tower, Kovanda translated for his own use an interview with Carl Andre that was later printed in an important samizdat publication on Minimal art and land art (Karel Srp, ed., Minimal, Earth, Concept Art, Jazzpetit 1982.) Kovanda’s variations on Minimal art, inflected with his subversive humor and penchant for understatement, asserting themselves as radical gestures exemplifying what Jana Ševčíková and Jiří Ševčík aptly called the aesthetics of minimum difference.

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