Michal Blažek

“The Communists had it planned out nicely economically: they worked out that we had five thousand artists here, they reckoned that the average pay was two thousand crowns a month, they came up with a law that for every construction, half a percentage had to be spent for artistic activities, and they calculated that artists can thus earn ten million crowns. When they divided ten million by the number of artists, it worked out to two thousand, which was the average pay. But of those ten million, nine were taken by the two hundred members of the Union of Visual Artists [UVA], and one million was left for the other five thousand people. [Q: It would probably be good to point out that the union decided about everything, right? You couldn’t just organise your own exhibition...] You could do whatever you wanted to, but you couldn’t exhibit in all galleries. In Brno there was the Socialist Youth Union club Trněný, where they held exhibitions, the cultural secretary for Prague 10 organised exhibitions in the cultural centre... [Q: And when you wanted to buy art equipment?] You could, but there was an awful lack of it. The UVA members knew what would be in stock, they bought it up, and there’d be nothing left for you. You couldn’t even get plaster back then! When I came to Holland, I said that for me, democracy means being able to get plaster. There was no plaster! You wanted to make statues, but you couldn’t because there wasn’t any plaster to be had. Say for a month.”

“We were a fellowship of people who’d said to themselves: ‘So as not to argue, we won’t talk about art at all.’ One person did this, the other that, and I pretty much didn’t like anything of what the others did. The one exception was Pepa Žáček, and him and I kept the whole thing up the whole time, but I did it for the others too. But the Ševčíks were focused on current trends, and they valued people who were able to spruce them up the fastest. First they brought some magazines, they said, this is how it’s done, and they lauded the artist who did it like that all the way to the heavens. I wrote about it in the tenth issue of Respekt in 1990. We built up a wide-ranging resistance against the union, and suddenly the Tvrdohlavýs withdrew and started doing exhibitions. The UVA secretary was said to have laughed with joy that we’d lost our unity.”