The moon reel finishes and the loose end of the film starts flapping against the edge of the projector. Kuba adjusts the drum machine’s rhythm to coincide with its clicks. Roger switches the projector off, unloads the film, selects another reel to show. He’s dug a can out from the pile when brisk footsteps on the staircase announce the arrival of Honza Pokorný, manager of The Martyrdom of St Sebastian and owner of one behemoth of a blue truck in which the band and their equipment are to be transported to Hradčany.
“What the fuck?” says Honza, switching the light on and waving away the smoke in front of him. “I told this painter guy we’d be there half an hour ago. Where’s the stuff?”
“Later, Honza, later,” several voices call out soothingly.
“No,” he snaps. “We have to do it now. I’m parked two streets away and I’m going to drive over here right now. By the time I get here I want to see every amp and guitar and whatever on the street outside and ready to be loaded. OK?”
“Fine,” they tell him. Honza turns and leaves the practice room. They wait until his footsteps die away, then start giggling. Kuba switches the light off. Roger switches the projector back on and threads the new reel through its spools.
* * * * *
Joost van Straten
c/o Martin Blažek
Galleria MXM
Nebovidská 7
Praha 1
16th December 1992
My Dear Han,
I have an awful hangover. People in Prague drink non-stop, perhaps obeying some deep-rooted need to compensate for their country’s landlocked status. Bars open at five in the morning so the lumpenproletariat can get properly pissed up before they start operating cranes or whatever it is they do. The art crowd start later and drink wine, not beer, and vodka, not this diabolical drink called slivovice you see builders knocking back at kiosks — but the end result’s the same. All roads to Rome.
The art crowd are running the country. When Havel came to power he filled parliament with his friends. I went to a gig the other night, with Martin, at the invitation of the Minister of Culture — not the opera, you understand, but some club in a former nuclear shelter which the Minister, I found out later, runs. I’d met him earlier the same day, at the Castle. You go in past all these soldiers wearing brightly coloured uniforms and marching around ceremonially, like they do chez nous in Holland — only it turns out that these uniforms and marching patterns are the consequence of Havel deciding that the old outfits and routines were boring and commissioning a choreographer chum to devise new ones. After two thousand years, Plato’s philosopher king becomes a reality — and the first thing he does is get some fag to spruce up his goons and make them march around more aesthetically. Sometimes I despair of our profession.
I certainly despaired of it in Budapest. The painters there are stuck in socialist realism mode. Here in Prague it’s the other way round: they worship postmodernism without really understanding it. Most of Martin’s stable at MXM slavishly copy Andy Warhol circa nineteen sixty-eight. Martin wants me to include half of them in the Eastern European show: I have to feign excitement as I flip through portfolio after portfolio of tawdry plastic haut-kitsch. I’ll take none of his artists — though I’ll have to wait until I’m not staying at his place before I tell him this. I’ll take Brázda, who’s represented by his half-American niece, and another artist I’d never come across before named Ivan Maňásek.
I met Maňásek yesterday. Martin despises him and did everything he could to try to talk me out of looking at his work, but I invited him round all the same. He’s in his middling thirties but seems older, doubtless due to the degenerate life he leads. He stumbled into the gallery looking like an aristocratic tramp: bearded, his hair all dishevelled, but wearing a deep-blue blazer. Martin grudgingly introduced us. I noticed that he wasn’t carrying a portfolio, and commented on this. “Oh no,” he said, “if you would deign” (we were speaking English; I promise you he actually used this word, deign) “to come to my atelier, I’m sure we can accommodate your desire to assess my work.” Accommodate. Those that do speak English here — or those of Maňásek’s generation that do — speak it very formally, their grammar perfectly correct but utterly awkward. I’d love to see the textbook they all used.
So we went round to his studio. Wandering there through a park, we bumped into two young ladies with whom Maňásek was apparently acquainted. Maňásek suggested they accompany us to his place, winking to me, evidently unaware of which side of the street I do my shopping on. He made us stop off to buy several bottles of vodka on the way — borrowing, in the most caddish fashion, money from the girls to do so.
He lives on the top floor of a glorious but decrepit apartment block. Pays peanuts for rent. That won’t last long. The point is, though, that his work was quite intriguing. He paints and makes collages by assembling objects that have the misfortune to cross his path, gluing these to canvases. He does this without any apparent programme, doctrine, logic of assembly or whatever you might call it in mind — yet they look rather good. There’s something fundamentally honest about them. He’ll find a tie lying on the floor, pick it up and paste it on so it half covers a photograph of a family picnic, then paint round a plastic toy that’s stuck to it, then reproduce the outline of the toy elsewhere, and so on. An innate aesthetic sense prevents the experiment from becoming a mere hotchpotch of marks and interventions. He assembled, glued and painted even as we talked — well, not at first: etiquette demanded that we immediately fall upon the vodka. We must have polished off the first bottle within ten minutes. When I admitted to feeling the effects, Maňásek proposed that I should snort some speed and, true to his word, lifted a cigar box from a mirror lying on his coffee table to reveal a line of white flakes marshalled into formation by a razor blade that now was resting, sergeant-major-like, in front of them. I vigorously declined his offer, and expressed a preference for coffee.
So he disappeared into his kitchen to make some, dragging giggler number one with him and leaving me alone with giggler number two. Did she speak English? I enquired. Ne, she demurred. German? French? Spanish? Ne, ne, ne: Český. Right. There’s only so much polite smiling one can do — especially when one’s already feeling nauseous from drink. After five minutes I could hear the water boiling. After ten minutes it was still boiling. No other sound was coming from the kitchen. I went through to find out what the delay was — and found giggler number one leaning back against the cooker, quite oblivious to the state of the water, while Maňásek knelt before her with his head shoved up her skirt. Seeing me, she shrieked and pushed him away, but Maňásek, ejected from his tent, just grinned up at me and declared: “An aperitif!”