meghan leigh forbes

The Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek is singularly known in English for his long and rambling novel, The Good Soldier Švejk, which follows the adventures of a bumbling recruit through the first World War. It was originally published serially in four volumes, ending only with the author’s premature death in 1923. By contrast, “A Rendezvous with the Censor” comes in just over 1,000 words, but conveys in that space the farcical humor and healthy skepticism of bureaucracy that are the defining characteristics of the much longer tome. I first encountered this short story in the early days of the current US presidency and the parallels in “A Rendezvous with the Censor” to our current moment struck me as unnervingly uncanny.

"The utopic order of the Bauhaus school was to prove insufficient when confronted with external totalitarian forces and an internal patriarchy. Bang reminds us that if its vision of a total, equalizing architecture was heartfelt in theory, its egalitarian notions could not (or would not) be enacted in practice.

With a furtive look over the shoulder, Bang urges her reader to consider a collective past in order to account for our own catastrophic moment. The penultimate poem, in which a 'a man with / moronic orange hair' appears, registers a plaintive warning: 'In November we inched closer to the ledge / over which one only falls once.'"

A highly evocative record of that fateful year is captured in a series of 66 “evidence” collages by Jiří Kolář, collectively titled Diary 1968, and all currently on view at the Kinsky Palace, part of Prague’s National Gallery, in the city’s Old Town Square. They comprise the main thread of a solo exhibition of Kolář’s work, Grimace of the Century. These individual collages are are a constant presence throughout the show, hung in sequence on a wall constructed especially for them, that weaves through much of the exhibition space.

The wide range of print and publication processes employed, and the creative use of materials, seemingly as both a matter of economy and a means of experimentation, were integral to the particular aesthetics of the GDR underground magazines. The publications I will focus on here are precisely those that embrace an aesthetic of scarcity and “deformation,” and that pose their assembled and irregular contents not as limited by material circumstances, but rather as incredibly dynamic objects enriched by haptic, textual, and visual qualities.

“Look into the lake,

Braid algae with your mouth and down below

I fetch you,

I lay you down in a paper airplane.

And it flies…

the coastal air

between two evenings

on a plate two smiles.”

~ translated from the slovak

Finding Lucia in the archive was like catching a glimpse of myself. I took to her story personally; she became my companion as I mined a historical record that has not deigned to preserve many of history's women. [...] I read through her diaries, written as a young girl in Prague, and then later, as a woman at the Bauhaus, married to one of the school’s most esteemed 'masters.' And I looked through her photographs, taken of and by herself. I read her letters. 

I’d stumbled upon her and looked into her life; an accidental intimacy.

In this book—part walk through art history from the Stone Age to the early twentieth century, part Marxist discourse on class-based power relations—the eye is posited as an organ that has developed its particular capacity for seeing over time, and in relation to the material conditions that determine how we look. Our “visual consciousness” (“świadomość wzrokowa”—a phrase often repeated in Theory of Vision) is related not only to the natural environment in which we find ourselves, but also to cultural processes and social structure. In his introduction, Strzemiński continues, “In addition to the passive physiological reception of visual sensations, there is the active, cognitive work of our intellect. There is the mutual influence of thinking on seeing and seeing on thinking. Thinking poses questions for seeing to answer.” Seeing becomes ever an interpretive act, embedded with bias, and reflecting a “truth” that is not outside of the influence of history and the specific economic, social, and political structure of a place. 

Vkhutemas is often referred to in relation to its more famous counterpart as the “Soviet Bauhaus,” relegating it to the diminutive other, and belying an assumption of a flow of influence from West to East. In fact, an exchange of ideas moved in both directions, though only occasionally and partially. In many ways, we are looking at two distinct schools existing at the same time in different places, with some salient points of productive contact. These points were generated through a variety of modes, including correspondence, exhibitions, and travel (in the form of student exchanges and guest lectures). The intersections were likewise made visible and further encouraged in magazine publications. This platform was used across the interwar avant-gardes to strategically signal transnational alignments and to cross-promote the work of other movements, as well as to engage in a public dialogue about avant-garde aesthetics and their social utility. 

In the spring of 1923, Walter Gropius (1883-1969), who was then the director of the Bauhaus and was to become one of the most famous architects of the Twentieth Century, wrote from Weimar to Karel Teige (1900-1951) in Prague: ‘It makes me very happy that I have found in you a contact with the Czech architecture movement.’  Teige was at the forefront of a cohort of young artists, writers, architects, and actors who had founded the group Devětsil in December of 1920. The circle employed a variety of strategies—including publication, lectures, exhibitions, and travel—to spread its influence both at home, and abroad, and the mid-decade correspondence between Teige and Gropius is a telling indicator of the success of this exchange.