A Glossary of Catchwords of the Czech Avant-Garde

A GLOSSARY OF CATCHWORDS OF THE CZECH AVANT-GARDE CONCEPTIONS OF AESTHETICS AND THE CHANGING FACES OF ART 1908–1958

Petr A. Bílek – Josef Vojvodík – Jan Wiendl (eds)

Opera Facultatis philosophicae Universitatis Carolinae Pragensis, series editor: Jan Royt

Publication funded by the Centre for Research into the Czech Avant-garde, Institute for Czech Literature, Faculty of Arts, Charles University Prague (LC 06053)

Copy readers: Lenka Bydžovská Peter A. Zusi

Opera Facultatis philosophicae Universitatis Carolinae Pragensis vol. XI Petr A. Bílek – Josef Vojvodík – Jan Wiendl (eds): A Glossary of Catchwords of the Czech Avant-Garde. Conceptions of Aesthetics and the Changing Faces of Art 1908–1958 Published by the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague, nám. Jana Palacha 2, Prague 1 and TOGGA Publishers Ltd, Volutová 2524, Prague 5 © Charles University Prague, Faculty of Arts, 2011 © TOGGA, 2011 © Petr A. Bílek, Josef Vojvodík, Jan Wiendl (editors), 2011 © Michal Bauer, Dáša Beracková, Petr A. Bílek, Karel Císař, Petra Hanáková, Libuše Heczková, Tomáš Jirsa, Andrea Jochmanová, Marie Langerová, Petr Málek, Vladimír Papoušek, Alžběta Plívová, Zbyněk Sedláček, Hana Šmahelová, Veronika Veberová, Josef Vojvodík, Jan Wiendl, Irina Wutsdorff, 2011 Translation © David Short, 2011 collage © Karel Teige – heirs c/o DILIA, 1926 Cover and typography: Jana Vahalíková Fedra typesetting: Dušan Neumahr Press: Tiskárna PROTISK, s. r. o., České Budějovice First edition, Praha 2011 ISBN 978-80-7308-374-8 (Univerzita Karlova v Praze) ISBN 978-80-87258-77-4 (TOGGA)

CONTENTS

9 By way of introduction 15 The Czech avant-garde: evolution, groupings, transformations, theories, programmes, techniques (Josef Vojvodík) 65 Abstraction (Zbyněk Sedláček)

71 Aesthetic function and Functionalism (Irina Wutsdorff) 85 Alphabet (Josef Vojvodík)

99 Anti-ornament (Tomáš Jirsa)

113 The body, physicality, anthropological constants (Libuše Heczková – Alžběta Plívová)

125 Childhood, books for children and the avant-garde (Hana Šmahelová) 143 Civilised woman (Libuše Heczková) 149 Civilist poetry (Vladimír Papoušek)

155 Cubism in literature (Dáša Beracková)

163 Dream, dream record (Marie Langerová) 179 Edifice and poem (Josef Vojvodík)

199 Exoticism, the poetic travelogue (Veronika Veberová)

209 Film: the seventh art, tenth muse (Petra Hanáková)

219 Hallucinatory objects and the crisis of the object (Josef Vojvodík) 231 The Humblest art (Dáša Beracková) 241 The Interior model (Josef Vojvodík)

251 Liberating the theatre (Andrea Jochmanová) 263 Mass (re-)production (Petr Málek)

283 Materialised poems and book-objects (Josef Vojvodík) 291 The new order of life and art (Jan Wiendl)

311 Objet trouvé (found object) (Marie Langerová) 323 Photography (Karel Císař)

331 Proletarian art (Michal Bauer)

349 Socialist Realism and the avant-garde (Petr A. Bílek)

361 Structuralism, phenomenology and the Czech avant-garde (Josef Vojvodík) 379 Town/City (Petr Málek)

409 Ultraviolet pictures (Josef Vojvodík) 423 Voice-band (Andrea Jochmanová) 433 Zone (Michal Bauer) 441 Literature

483 About the authors 493 Index of names

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

A Glossary of Catchwords of the Czech Avant-Garde is a collective project that aims to reconstruct certain pivotal concepts and ideas brought by the Czech avant-garde into — primarily — literature and the visual arts1 in order to label and identify their own specific structuralising methods, techniques, concepts and programmes in art and aesthetics, and the relationships subsisting among the various media and methods. At the same time, the entry-words herein have become the established terms by which researchers identify the forms through which the Czech avantgarde gave account of itself in the theory and practice of art. However, our aim is also to offer new insights into the linkages, interdependencies and issues involved within the broader European context, and to see how these have been developed (and, up to a point, set in stone) by Czech literary history and aesthetics during times that have been both favourable and less than favourable to research into the avant-garde.

Unlike previous discussions of the reception of the Czech avantgarde, we have pushed its origins back to the first decade of the twentieth century. This is motivated by appearances on the scene of two groups in particular — The Eight (Osma) in 1907 and 1908, and the Group of Visual Artists (Skupina výtvarných umělců) in 1911, which were already avantgardist in their way: each group had its own shared objective, though they lacked the political ambitions and implications that typify the true avant-garde movements of 1920s and 1930s Czecho­slovakia. In addition to having a shared programme, both these early groups were, significantly, aware of their innovativeness (not least as regarded tradition, with, for example, their novel view of the Gothic and Baroque through the prism of the Cubist ‘multidimensionality of the world’2) as opposed to the conservatism of the academy. One major criterion was the principle of a ‘new way of seeing things’ as fundamental to any avant-garde aesthetics. This principle had a critical function in reflecting an altered, far less ready, way of seeing and perceiving the world; at the same time, it 1

The entries herein draw chiefly on catchwords in literature and the visual arts, with some note taken of the spheres of theatre and cinema. Architecture and music feature passim with no dedicated entries uniquely relevant to them.

2 See LAMAČ, Miroslav: Osma a Skupina výtvarných umělců 1907–1917. Odeon, Prague 1988, p. 161; LAHODA, Vojtěch: Český kubismus. Brána, Prague 1996, p. 46.

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A GLOSSARY OF CATCHWORDS OF THE CZECH AVANT-GARDE

embodied a challenge to move away from automatic perception of things towards a genuinely sensory experiencing of them, towards sensibility and conscious reflexion, the creation of new forms and the dismissal of conventions. The theory and practice of the avant-garde is unthinkable without this critical dimension and without the cathartic effect of any truly avant-garde work.

Although the artists of the first two decades of the twentieth century claimed aesthetic autonomy, they did not demand dismissal of the term ‘work [of art]’; quite to the contrary, they did produce works as autonomous artefacts. A further reason we have for insisting on the term ‘avantgarde’ is the need to keep it apart from ‘modernism’ (however defined), a term that remains, in the history of Czech literature and the visual arts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, highly problematical, notwithstanding its far-reaching and sophisticated reconstruction and conceptualisation of recent years.3 The search for new ways in post-Impressionist painting, under the aegis of Cubism, was a radical step forward also in pre-First World War Czech art; it was associated with a number of already avant-garde processes, such as the fragmentation and geometricalisation of form, the deconstruction of the forms of objects into the discrete structural elements of autonomous images, which goes hand in hand with a radical definition of what an image/picture is and how it relates to the external world.4 The evolution of the Czech avant-garde as a movement, its programmes, aesthetic concepts and mutating artistic strategies, techniques and methods are all traced here right through the 1940s and up to 1958.

At that time the Prague Surrealist Group centred on Vratislav Effenberger was still active, if at the fringes of underground and dissident circles, and it consciously continued in the tradition of the interwar avant-garde. Yet 3 At the time of writing this includes inter alia such books as: Daniel VOJTĚCH: Vášeň a ideál. Na křižovatkách moderny (Academia, Prague 2008); Petr MÁLEK: Melancholie moderny. Alegorie, vypravěč, smrt (Dauphin, Prague 2008); Lenka ŘEZNÍKOVÁ: Moderna a historismus (Libri, Prague 2004), and the contributions by O. M. URBAN, Luboš MERHAUT and Daniel VOJTĚCH to V barvách chorobných. Idea dekadence v českých zemích 1880–1914 (Arbor vitae, Prague 2006).

4 See GEHLEN, Arnold: Zeit-Bilder. Zur Soziologie und Ästhetik der modernen Malerei. Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 1986, esp. pp. 88–89.

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BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

this was no ‘neo-avant-garde’ or ‘post-avant-garde’, not even some successor to the avant-garde, but a reflected and creative reinterpretation of it within a process of ‘appropriating’ the avant-garde tradition. It is this aspect, as one of the most striking specifics of the Czech avant-garde — within the context of European avant-garde movements — that we take to be of prime importance. 1958 is treated as our end-point because it was then that the phenomenon of the avant-garde and surrealism was able, after a ten-year gap and no matter how briefly, to re-enter public discourse. Although that attempt at a critical re-appraisal of the Czech avant-garde of previous decades was nipped in the bud by the powersthat-be, it could not be killed off completely. Later developments in the 1960s are, however, beyond the purview of the present volume.

Although literature is the medium that is central to our research interests, the reflexion of cross-media phenomena as one of the basic principles of the avant-garde remains a major preoccupation; in the late 1910s this aspect was already being developed by Oskar Walzel in his Wechselsei­ tige Erhellung der Künste (1917), which is considered one of the first theoretical approaches to inter-media crossover. However, the idea of the ‘mutual illumination of the arts’ had been formulated almost programmatically as early as 1900 by Otokar Březina in a letter to the sculptor František Bílek: ‘All kinds of art are essentially one and the same, a painting, statue, music, the word, they all cast light on one another.’5 This volume arose out of the previously faintly registered fact that numerous exponents of the Czech avant-garde — even in its infancy — were active in several different media at once: painting, graphic art, verbal art, design, photography, stage design, film, choreography and so forth. The entries, then, aspire first and foremost to reconstruct the conceptions of the artists themselves, documenting the status of any crossmedia phenomena, but also looking at specific creative methods and practices. Due account is taken of the ways in which different conceptual models (for example, ‘artificialism’ or the ‘inner model’) were developed further within the Czech avant-garde — whether in discourse or actual 5 BŘEZINA, Otokar: Korespondence I. (1884–1908) (comp. Petr Holman). Host, Brno 2004, p. 526 (letter from around the turn of century, 1900).

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A GLOSSARY OF CATCHWORDS OF THE CZECH AVANT-GARDE

realisations in literature and art. In that regard, A Glossary of Catchwords of the Czech Avant-Garde follows the lead of such similar works as the sixvolume Pojmovnik ruske avantgarde (Glossary of the Russian Avant-garde, ed.

Aleksandar Flaker, Zagreb 1984–1993; in German as: Glossarium der russischen Avantgarde, Graz, Vienna, 1989) or Lexikon ruských avantgard 20. století (Lexicon of Russian Avant-Garde Movements of the 20th Century, ed. Tomáš Glanc and Jana Kleňhová, Prague, 2005).

It is axiomatic that the present volume has been conceived not to treat art forms as if they were in some sense isolated, but to focus instead on the interplay and cross-fertilisation arising from aspects of their intellectual conception, the materials and objects they used, the themes and motifs they embodied, their semiotic techniques or constructive approaches. Hence the reader will not usually find here entries on the traditional groupings, sundry ‘isms’, periodicals, or such categories in the history of art and literature as ‘Cubism’ (or ‘Cubo-Expressionism’), ‘Poetism’, ‘Surrealism’, ‘Devětsil’, ‘The Literature Group’, ‘Left Front’, ‘ReD’, ‘Host’ and suchlike with all the relevant description and historical outline. A partial exception is the reflexion, or rather meta-reflexion, of the relationship between the avant-garde model of art and the ideology of Socialist Realism. Thus with that proviso, we are, as indicated, interested in (a) reflecting just one of the fundamental principles of the avant-garde generally: transformation of the various forms of art (theatre, literature, painting, film etc.) on the basis of the theorem of a ‘new way of seeing’, and (b) in a productive reflexion of the verbal, or textual, character of non-verbal art forms (such as the metalanguage of dance in Milča Mayerová’s creations to accompany Nezval’s Alphabet [Abeceda]), and conversely the reflexion of the non-verbal aspects of literary genres.

In these terms, this book, though lacking, for practical reasons, illustrations, seeks to be a fairly wide-ranging contribution to the study of questions bearing on cross-media phenomena within the Czech avant-garde.

Individual entries have been conceived as reconstructions of crossmedia responses (text, image, music, theatre, film, photography) to the period context in science and cultural philosophy and what was going on and being talked about at the time. The texts of the entries, of unequal length, expressly vary in genre between retrospective reconstructions

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BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

of art-historical or socio-cultural phenomena and pieces focussed on areas that have been reckoned problematic and open to mixed interpretations. This heterogeneity seeks to enhance the transparency of the terms that the book does include both diachronically and synchronically. No less important is the ‘feedback’ perspective and the transformation of a given conception out of one medium or art-form into another (such as Cubism in literature, the principle of film editing applied to extended polythematic (‘zone’) poems, or film projected in the course of stage art).

We hope that the book’s non-traditional point of view, its ideas and approaches, directed at specific problems and features of the Czech avantgarde, will inspire the reader on many fronts. We have sought to breathe new life into a broad range of synchronic linkages and diachronic connections within the Czech avant-garde in the first half of the twentieth century by this innovative approach and specific way of asking highly specialised questions.

P. A. B. – J. V. – J. W.

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