ABOUT SURREALISM
JD (Jan Dočekal) | In the summer of 2013, we taled
about my book Interviews. It would be good to ask you four questions that would
remind you of what you thought about the Stir Up group and surrealism at the
time. You are active in the surrealist group Stir Up. Can a painter become a
surrealist just by wanting to, or does he have to have a mental and
revolutionary predisposition to do so?
JB (Josef Bubeník) | I
think he should have the prerequisites for both. And also a huge desire and the
strength to exercise it. I don’t know which I had more. I went through
different periods. In fact, I am still going through them today.
At first I was an impressionist, then a baroque artist, a
painter of fantasy paintings, then an action painter, later an author of
post-civilization cycles and finally a surrealist. A person becomes a
surrealist by tending towards certain forms of expression, towards certain
currents of thought and towards a certain worldview.
In the second half of the eighties, I associated with a group of
young surrealists. They called themselves the surrealist circle A.I.V. Their
leader was the charismatic Bruno Solařík. Through him, I
later became a member of the Karel Teige Society. But that did not make me a
surrealist. Just as I did not become an alchemist just because I applied for
membership in the Hermetic Society UNIVERSALIA after it was founded. I received
a card with serial number 166 and that was basically the end of it for me. It
is ridiculous that esotericists had cards for esotericism.
JD | Until recently, the
Stir Up group was called a parasurrealist group, i.e. a “parasurrealist” group.
Now it is called the Czech or Moravian surrealist group. Without the prefix
para.
JB | Sometimes we use
the designation with the prefix para and sometimes without it. Personally, I
find the designation parasurrealist group more apt, although with two prefixes
the word is more complicated. But the characterization of the group movement as
parallel to surrealism captures the essence of Stir Up. It follows that the
designation with the prefix para is expansive. Besides, who can say that the
parasurrealists from Stir Up really go parallel to the main movement, or
whether other activities are not also taking place in parallel with them?
Personally, I would like to get rid of both words – surrealist and
parasurrealist, because they are not important. What is important is the work.
JD | Stir Up has had a
number of domestic exhibitions and has been presented at international
surrealist exhibitions in Portugal and Chile. However, little is known about
it. Besides, do you think that popularizing fine arts is necessary?
JB | If there is one
type of art that is hardly talked about in the media, it is fine arts. It is
only mentioned in the main TV news when a financial record is achieved at an
auction or when a museum is robbed. By the way, who is the best-selling living
painter in our country? The popular singer Karel Gott. There are thousands of
real fine artists in our country, but they are on the verge of poverty. On the
other hand, a dilettante famous in another field receives millions for his
work. Stir up has been developing exhibition and publishing activities for
almost twenty years, although it is true that very little is known about it. This
is probably because its main goal is not to do everything possible to make
people learn about it at all costs. But it is also because journalists do not
actively seek information.
JD | So do you think
that surrealism is still the permanent revolution of the spirit that Breton
proclaimed in the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924?
JB | Of course. There
are statements that have been defined, that have become valid, and even though
the author and his contemporaries have long since died and society has changed
since then, the reasons why they were said and proclaimed remain. It is clear
that there have always been Breton followers who have adhered to a literal
interpretation and application of his statements and ideas, and there have
always been many who have approached it in a more general way. The disputes
between some and others were part of the color of surrealism. I think that the
lively discussion on these topics was and remains one of the reasons why this
movement has survived to this day. After all, Breton himself excluded from the
movement several personalities who today no one doubts belonged to surrealism.
Robert Matta’s statement: I am a surrealist in spite of Breton is eloquent.
JD | How much
information about surrealism did you manage to convey to your students during
your teaching career?
JB | Only as much as
was always needed. And to be more precise, I don’t have students, but course participants.
From eighth and ninth graders to high school and university students. Groups of
young people of various ages with a common interest in the subject. And always
after assigning and explaining a practical task, I tell them interesting facts
from the history and theory of art during the work and try to introduce them to
different historical epochs and also the circumstances that led to individual
intellectual movements. I would compare it to a large polyhedral crystal, where
looking into individual surfaces and walls you can always see a new image of
the same center.
JD | Is it possible to
become a surrealist from a suddenly awakened power of will? One could exclaim:
I was bewitched by thoughts…, or: It struck me like a bolt from the blue…
JB | And what does it
actually mean, I will become a surrealist? For some, a great impulse, for others,
just a logical place on the path they have been following since childhood. Or
do others decide that? Do I then have to develop certain abilities? But why
such questions? Isn’t the desire to create enough?
JD | Kunsthistorie says
that surrealists are not, in principle, dependent on the order of beauty.
Aesthetics are not their primary goal in creation.
JB | I consider myself
an artist, I create visual objects, mainly paintings. I solve something in
these tasks. If it also has an aesthetic effect, it is not harmful. Creating
paintings that are deliberately unaesthetic, i.e. ugly and unattractive, would
border on some kind of obsessive disorder. And after all, surrealism itself
created an aesthetic category that has been either interpreted or imitated for
a hundred years. The extent to which someone develops and builds on that
category, and conversely, who just describes it, is very individual. It is
difficult to talk about what is aesthetic, what is beauty, when aestheticism
has undergone huge somersaults over the last hundred and fifty years. After
all, the ancient Romans already said: Times change and we change with them.
JD | Surrealism has been
revolutionary from the beginning. Permanent, with the slogan Surrealist
Revolution, later Surrealism for Revolution and then with the sobering up from
the service of Marxism through the Soviet Union. Central and South American
surrealists have strongly leftist postulates. How strong is your revolutionary
spirit?
JB | Yes, that’s the
nail on the head. If surrealists don’t have leftist postulates, meaning
progressive, non-conservative, humanistic, then they are not surrealists. At
least from the point of view of the pre-war manifestos. After all, everyone
refers to these manifestos! And that is precisely the problem of our group,
whose name is something to stir up. Some members are strongly right-wing,
others tend towards the political center of opinion.
Josef Kremláček was definitely left-wing. Some of Stir Up are vocal
anti-communists, which is actually highly acceptable from the point of view of
surrealism. But being an anti-communist does not automatically mean being a right-winger.
That is why I never minded Budík’s anti-communism, but the center-right views
he occasionally expressed, I did. After all, the vast majority of members of
the pre-war groups were members of communist parties for some time before they
saw through Soviet Stalinism and communist conservatism. That is why the
communists hated them so much that some even ended up on the gallows, like
Záviš Kalandra, some preferred to emigrate, like Toyen, Brouk, and others died
prematurely of exhaustion, like Karel Teige.
And as for Marxism
itself – I think that few people today know what is hidden under all that. For
example, the interpretation of history in today’s European culture is
thoroughly Marxist, without anyone mentioning it. Also because no one has defined
it better. It is just that people do not talk about it out loud. I also think
that there has been no sobering up from Marxism, but from communism. And that
is a significant difference.
JD | Okay. Let’s
continue with a heated argument. Is an orthodox surrealist able to tolerate the
view of an artistic expression that is ideologically foreign? For example,
romanticism or art nouveau?
JB | Romanticism is
one of the sources of the surrealist worldview and is inherently revolutionary.
It broke the forms of the established classicism, i.e. the movement that was a
manifestation of imperial authoritarianism. It was not just the case of
Napoleon, when the monarch installed by revolution became Caesar conquering the
rest of the world, it was also all the other so-called absolutist monarchies of
his time.
In our environment, it
is the inspiration of K. H. Mácha, an innovator of poetry. Count de Lautréamont
also still has one foot in romanticism and Lord Byron is definitely not a
figure that the surrealists would reject. The situation is similar with Art
Nouveau. It broke the forms of academic realism more than, for example, impressionism.
It meant the transfer of realistic shapes and forms into a sign, it created new
ornamentation from natural objects, it abstracted to the extent that it became
the basis of later abstract art.
František Kupka, a distinctive painter and caricaturist, was Art
Nouveau expressive in his paintings, uncompromisingly critical in his political
caricatures, and when he became one of the main representatives of abstract
art, he never got rid of his Art Nouveau curls in his signatures. Likewise, the
Art Nouveau sculptor František Bílek, with his expressive exaltation, went
miles beyond Mucha’s flamboyance. What I mean by this is that not a blanket
condemnation of the entire movement, but an analysis of individual artists and
an objectively critical attitude towards them can be the only criterion for
assessment.
JD | But the question
was whether an orthodox surrealist can tolerate the sight of…?
JB | Well, it would
certainly be an interesting view of that orthodoxist, who otherwise probably
lives in a vacuum bubble, and when he sees a slightly kitschy Biedermeier
landscape with a shepherd and sheep in the background in a museum exhibition,
he has a fit of rage and starts beating the painting and the surrounding
porcelain vases and plates with his walking stick.
JD | Surrealist
theorists emphasize that surrealism was never an art form, but rather an
attitude to life that is interconnected in all directions. Isn’t that a
problem? Is it possible to be a true, strictly defined surrealist today? One who
distances himself from material goods, the state, and religion?
JB | Someone who
distances himself from material goods doesn’t have to live under a bridge and
doesn’t have to get rid of personal property. It is about not accumulating
profit just for the sake of profit. Standing out against the state does not
mean not following the laws. However, a situation can arise, and it has already
happened several times in our country, when a group of legislators agree and
adopt such laws that they require active resistance. And then the talk about
politics not being done on the street and everyone should wait for the
elections is just chatter. And as for religion, it is mainly a problem of the
church itself. It has identified faith in God, i.e. the idea of love,
with the power of money. That is a matter of the collective church conscience.
JD | Are these judgments
still relevant? Can they be found in the essences spread by contemporary
surrealists? By you?
JB | Even the most
precise judgments and ideas are always tied to the specific experiences of
specific people at a specific time and in a specific place of work. And that is
precisely the source of novelty. Each new generation formulates similar ideas
in new words, new postulates. And this new form then transforms the content
into a newer form, which then in turn supports further transformation of the
form in further development.
To think that nothing should change in perfectly formulated
postulates would put such a movement in a position similar to the Catholic
Church, where every change is the work of the devil.
JD | Probably most of
today’s admirers of surrealism do not know what surrealism was and is. What
attracts them?
JB | Nowadays, in our
general media space, surrealism, and in fact all visual art, is perceived as a
synonym for something crazy, primarily irrational and hilariously entertaining.
For example, some time ago we could hear a comment on television describing the
prime minister’s speech as surrealistic.
But there is nothing wrong with the very fact that people
perceive only the first, outer shell of surrealism. One has to start somewhere,
and those who want to go below the surface will find other layers. There is
mystery in them, and mystery is what attracts people. And in fact, it is only
through the depth of interest in a thing that laypeople become knowledgeable
about things.
Then there is the second type of people. They also got the hint.
Maybe they know a surrealist personally, so they think they are enlightened,
illuminated by something mysterious with the only truth, then they feel
elitistly superior. That is the only way it could have happened that four years
ago, if I remember correctly, a certain person living in Prague wrote to the
editor of the Brazilian magazine Agulha Revista de Cultura, with whom you
collaborate, asking what right you have to write about surrealism, and moreover
in a foreign press, when only members of the Prague surrealist group can
express themselves about it. The group that, according to that person, is the
only true successor to the pre-war surrealists. And how is it possible that
someone presents himself as a surrealist when the clique of cardinals from
Prague has not blessed him. But perhaps it was just a private outcry from a lonely
writer who, with contemptuous pathos, reveals that the group around Budík is
not surrealist, but artistic. Well, yuck!
JD | A suitable material
for the debate on surrealism is offered by Budík’s pivotal text from the
mid-nineties. Let us recall at least its introductory part.
ARNOŠT BUDÍK | If
today, after three quarters of a century, we approach at least a cursory look
at the adventure of the spirit that surrealism undoubtedly is, and if we free
ourselves from the accumulation of epithets with which its gravediggers and
uninvolved observers have showered it, we will see under the patina of time one
large three-pointed star, which not only has not dimmed yet, but which still
shines brightly above the current, not for everyone acceptable reality.
Contemporary society, at least as we know it in Europe, despite certain
material advantages, which it sometimes generously and at other times very
cautiously redistributes to its citizens, often mortifies the human psyche with
its indifference, established orders, conventions and exhausting conformism.
That three-pointed star, which still sparkles and attracts those who have
stopped trusting the postulates of self-salvation philosophy, infallible
development, so-called modern art and progress as the only source of human
happiness, this star with the flavor of subversion of resistance and the effort
to repeatedly confront reality with questions about its true meaning, this star
represents the trinity that fulfills the essence of surrealism – poetry, love and
freedom.
JD | In order to bring
your thoughts on contemporary surrealism to the knowledge and opinions of
another background, I asked Rik Lina from Amsterdam, a friend of ours, to
contribute to our conversation.
RIK LINA | Surrealism?
It’s still alive. It’s thriving. Even some art historians I know agree with its
current development. For me, they’re a kind of family, people to whom you don’t
have to explain exactly what you’re doing. Even arguing group gatherings come
to an agreement at the end of the day. That’s how it’s always been. Look at
Breton and Bataille.
Yes. Surrealism is marginal, almost ephemeral, especially in the
Netherlands, but it also has a global appeal. In October I was in Portugal for
a meeting and exhibition of Dutch, Portuguese, Brazilian and French
surrealists. We had a great time, we’re still in touch.
I’m currently reading a new translation of Breton’s L’Art
Magique, with some additions from contemporary scholars. Very interesting. And
both recently published large encyclopedias of historical surrealist
activities, Spanish and English, clearly show the current trends underway. The
fact that this is happening completely outside the official canon, outside the
commercialized art world, is a promising and hopeful sign.
JD | At the end of this
section, I cannot just put aside the invitation to the exhibition that just
arrived, I will not say where. It carries the announcement: The exhibition of
paintings includes surrealist and fantasy work that carries thoughts and feelings
from life, both of the author and of people in general. Her work leads the vie wer
to think, in many paintings by means of exaggeration.
STIR UP GROUP
JD | I think that the
most influential founding member of the Stir up group and subsequently in its
other activities was the already mentioned Arnošt Budík, born in Brno. He lives
in Brussels. (editor’s note: Doctor of Philosophy Arnošt Budík, (31. 10. 1936
Brno – 29. 4. 2025 Brussels, Belgium).
JB | Without a doubt.
JD | In the spring of
2006, he decisively participated in the content of the unique first exhibition
in the gallery in Mohelský mlýn on the Jihlava River near Třebíč. Yes, that is our gallery of surrealists,
it has the romantic name Čertův ocas.
JB | Yes, it was
unique. The exhibitions in the immediately following years were also
interesting. But after a certain point, interest began to wane. In a sense,
this is also related to the overall crisis of group work and group activities.
JD | I have been writing
about that gallery for ten and a half years as a typical home of surrealism. I
have always felt that it belongs there.
JB | That is the nail
on the head. On the one hand… The group refers to the entire the breadth of the
surrealist intellectual movement and says that he does not want to create
categories of beauty or aesthetics. On the other hand, he wants to preserve his
activities in a stone museum building in the poetic landscape of the forest in
the valley of the Jihlava River. Random fragments of events fit together.
Creating a gallery in a former mill was undoubtedly an interesting undertaking,
maintained by the meritorious initiative of Lubomír Kerndl. However, there is
also the other side, conservation, lowering the level.
In this context, I remember a story that Libor Vodička told me when he was still a student of
theater studies. He helped in the theater archive. He called on directors to
bring their missing older works for safekeeping. One day the door opened,
director Eva Tálská came in. She threw a pile of scripts on the table and
exclaimed: You are my gravedigger!
And that’s how it is. Museums preserve the memory of culture and
thereby preserve it. The group should have written its own history while the
witnesses still had the opportunity to do so, and published a monograph. That
would was a bigger task than preserving and presenting the works. art in the
dampness of a water mill.
Everything has its beginning, course and end. The dignity of the
end is also important, just so that there is no bitterness and aftertaste left.
Čertův ocas is a gallery of its kind and one of
the few in its uniqueness. My occasional criticism has not changed anything
about that. And it cannot be ignored that the main problem of all private
galleries is the lack of money. Only a system of state and municipal
contributions would ensure their regular operation.
JD | Budík emphasizes
that he is above all a poet, that in his collages he draws on the impulses of
poetry. You are not a poet.
JB | Why should I be?
Poetry is not my cup of tea. I create out of the desire to create. And
sometimes I also write theoretical texts, also about the universe and cosmos.
So I can think that my poetry is hidden in them.
JD | The history of Czech
surrealism includes two creative communities, the Brno group Lacoste in the
1960s and the North Moravian part of the Karl Teig Society in the 1990s. Can
the Stir Up group be seen as a continuation of its predecessors?
JB | First of all, it
is a chronological development in life. The Lacoste group movement was a
youthful rise of university students (Arnošt Budík, Josef Kremláček, Václav Pajurek, Jiří Havlíček) who discovered surrealism in the 1960s, which had been
silenced in our country until then. Aleš Navrátil and Lubomír Kressa soon
joined Lacoste, and Pavel Řezníček, a writer, poet, collage artist and
translator from French, collaborated with the group from the outside. At that
time, he organized a reading of his translations of surrealist texts in the
Brno Small Theatre of Music under the attractive title Ďáblův ocas je bicykl. Here is a beautiful
analogy with the gallery that was created at the Mohelský mill in the bend of
the Jihlava River, on the map called Čertův ocas.
Everything was intertwined with the so-called Brno bohemia, Jan
Novák, Arnošt Goldflam, Karel Fuksa and others. The painter Jan Wolf also moved
in this environment. He later mentioned how widely he participated in the
events of that time. Unfortunately, almost no one from the Vrtevice community
remembered him. After 2002, I contacted Wolf through Arnošt Budík. He offered
Wolf a guest appearance at the Stir up exhibitions. After 2002, I connected
Wolf with Arnošt Budík. He offered Wolf a guest appearance at the Stir up
exhibitions. He happily accepted it as a logical outcome of his artistic
development. He bore the title of guest only with difficulty. But it was soon
replaced by a well-deserved membership.
JD | Back to chronology.
The occupation in August 1968, Budík’s Belgian emigration, the collapse of
Lacoste. It is important to remember here that Budík continued to send out
manifestos about the situation in Czechoslovakia under the name Lacoste
throughout Western Europe for some time.
JB | As I have already
mentioned, sometime in 1991 the Karl Teig Society was founded, of which I was a
passive member. I know little about its development and dissolution four years
later, in 1995. However, I do know that Jiří Koubek, then
editor-in-chief of Analogon and a rebel, wrote an excellent book, The Sintered
Lamp.
With the dissolution of the Karl Teig Society, its Ostrava
section also ceased to exist. Some members founded a new group in 1995. At the
suggestion of Vladimír Kubíček, they named it Stir up. Arnošt Budík did not like this
name, he imagined it to be at most something French, but he did not propose
anything, he did not invent anything.
JD | The Stir up group
consists of two parts. How can they be put together when they are over a
hundred kilometers apart?
JB | Exactly. Northern
and southern part. In the north, members from Ostrava, Rožnov and the
surrounding area, in the south from Brno, Třebíč and these areas. Brno was the connecting point for most. Some
studied there or met there, Budík, Pajurek, Havlíček, Navrátil, Filipová, Kerndl, Wolf, you
and I.
How does the group work? It is definitely not about café
discussions and polemics, as it used to be during the time of peak surrealism.
Stir up is active mainly through exhibitions. The focus of the exhibitions,
i.e. the theme, was usually chosen by Budík, Pajurek or Kremláček. Some themes were more abstract – Light, Love, others
more concrete –
Rudolf II., Casanova, Sigmund Freud, the Templars, the Marcomani.
For example The Marcomani theme was called We, the Marcomani
today. The concept of the exhibition, which premiered in Třebíč, followed by Brno and Ivančice, was put together by Josef Kremláček. He taught at the elementary art school in Třebíč and created art artifacts with children
that reminded of the early history of Moravia, where the Marcomans were their
home.
The exhibited collection consisted of works by Kremláček’s children (students) and works by
members of the Stir up group. Who else but an active artist with imaginative
thinking could connect the inspiring theme common to both children and members
of the surrealist group. And for example, another exhibition on the theme of
Light was the work of Václav Pajurek for a change. He wrote a series of
associative names associated with light for it and sent them to the members of
the group as inspirational stimuli. I found it very beneficial, yet free. In
later years, similar activities declined. The exhibitions organized became
boring and formal.
JD | The group’s
exhibitions represented personal creative approaches, but often also a
completely free perception of collective belonging, where the theme of the exhibition
was not reflected in any way.
JB | Yes, I remember,
for example, the exhibition called Templars. One could have expected a lot of
interesting analogies. That did not happen. The exhibition largely re-presented
what had previously been stored in the warehouse of the Ďáblův ocas Gallery in Mohelský mlýn. Similar recycling
became more and more frequent. That was the reason for my gradual disappearance
from the group’s activities.
JD | In the past, Stir
up had various events, pleasant and successful, some perhaps inconspicuous. But
one exhibition unfortunately stands out because it was absurd in that it was
announced but did not take place.
JB | The one in Prague in the spring of 2013. I had no
intention of returning to it. But speaking of her...
The premiere took place at the Špalíček Gallery in Prostějov. The second presentation was announced for April 2013 in a
private gallery in Prague. I will not name it, it would have undeserved
publicity. The gallery is owned by a lady with whom I personally agreed on
everything. With the belief that the given word is valid. Posters and invitations
were sent out. But two days before the installation, the owner denied
everything to me, that she knew nothing, that we would not agree on anything,
and added something about the low artistic level. She decided that there would
be no Stir Up exhibition in her gallery.
It would be acceptable if some hostile interest group had
prevented the exhibition. That would have brought an uplifting feeling of
persecution, censorship, restriction of freedom. However, nothing of the sort
happened. The cause was gross dilettantism and amateurism on the part of the
organizer.
Several well-informed journalists, of course also members of
Stir up, spoke up. After an explanation, they agreed with what we thought.
Without looking for a conspiratorial background. There was none. The
exhibition, which did not take place, was an embarrassing disgrace for the
Prague gallery.
JD | The Stir up website
lists deceased members, but there are many active members missing. We read the
postulates of surrealism that are exactly a hundred years old, nothing from the
present. What good is it?
JB | That’s a question
for me? I have nothing to do with it. It’s a shame that the website exists in
this form. It needs to be fixed, updated or canceled.
JD | Last year, on the
occasion of the centenary of the First Surrealist Manifesto, there were many
more exhibitions than usual. But looking for authors from Stir up, as well as
other our surrealists, in the accompanying publications is almost completely
futile. At the exhibition in Paredes, Portugal, only Arnošt Budík and,
surprisingly, Linda Filipová appeared.
JB | Maybe there are
too many roosters and not enough yards. But the point is that you can’t please
everyone. For some reason, you have to choose. I understand that everything is gender-balanced
these days. Arnošt Budík as a kind of guru of the Stir up group. Linda
Filipová, a young woman, a skilled draftsman. The choice is understandable. It
was also logical to leave more space for domestic artists. But it is sad that
the Stir up group itself did not initiate anything similar on an international
level.
JD | Your participation
in the Stir up group is long-term. Convincingly active. However, this is
precisely why you have often criticized it since the second half of the last
decade. If I see it correctly, out of a desire for movement, out of a desire to
no longer postpone obligations for later.
JB | Imagination has
no boundaries or fixed forms. I do not want to perceive or have someone who
will give me a form, a field where I should move correctly. You yourself came
across this when you mentioned metaphysics in my paintings and said that the
surrealists had it the other way around. Yes, they probably did. I am not
forced to feel like a surrealist, yet I have been participating in exhibitions
of a group that calls itself surreal for years. And do I have to call myself a
surrealist just so I don’t hurt the Stir Up group? So I don’t become an enemy
in the party? No. I don’t want anyone telling me where I can and can’t go. Or what
I’m forbidden to do. That’s all.
JD | In June 2020, you
wrote me a completely open opinion about your relationship with the Stir up
group. It is not intended for publication. However, here is a good place for a
possible publication. What do you think about it?
JB | I agree with this
good place.
I first exhibited with the Stir up group in 1999. Josef Kremláček invited me to participate as a guest
author in an exhibition called Ohnivý děšť. It was in Třebíč. Since then, I have been a guest at other group exhibitions for
half a decade. And then there was a change. In the invitation to the opening in
2004, I was listed as a member of the group, I was no longer a guest. But the
truth was that no one discussed this change with me, no one asked me for my
opinion. It just happened.
Nothing changed in my work for the group. I continued to
negotiate and organize some exhibitions, edit invitations and catalogs for
them. From the second issue, I was in charge of the typesetting and editing of
the surrealist bulletin Styxus. The first one was prepared in 2002 by Vladimír
Kubíček. It
presented the work of the Stir up group. Over time, more and more exhibitions
followed. I accumulated a lot of texts and photographs on my computer. So I
decided to publish the second issue of Styx, including covering the financial
needs. In the following years, I edited and graphically edited five more
issues. Styxus was published intermittently. The seventh issue was published in
2024.
All issues were produced by the Amaprint-Kerndl printing house
in Třebíč, owned by Lubomír Kerndl, a member of the Stir up group and a
tenant of the Mohelský mlýn on the Jihlava River, where our Devil’s Tail
gallery is located. Without technical cooperation and financial support, Styxus
could not have been published. And we must not forget the many small poetic
prints by surrealist authors. These were also published by the Amaprint-Kerndl
publishing house over the years.
In 2014, I suggested that Stir up limit its exhibition
activities and focus primarily on writing its history, a group monograph. From
the 1960s, through Budík’s Belgian emigration to the Karel Teiga Society, then
from Stir to the present. I had a rough outline and a few basic texts. But then
in the summer of 2015, Josef Kremláček suddenly died. Without him, almost everything began to unfold
differently.
It was all the more important to evaluate the activities to date,
but something else happened. Lubomír Kerndl supported efforts to recruit new
members. I did not agree with this. I felt that I could not continue in the
current spirit, which I described as pseudo-activity of a pseudo-surrealist
kind. And my creative thoughts were also directed elsewhere. Moreover, no
process, no change happens in isolation.
When I left the Center for Experimental Theatre in Brno in mid-2019,
I had two options. To expand the number of unemployed people who, even with the
best practice and experience, cannot find a job until retirement. Or to ignore
it with the belief that the universe will not let me starve. And somehow it
works. I occasionally receive commissions for typesetting various publications,
I lecture in courses at a private school and at the Moravian Gallery in Brno. I
realized that with an honest approach to my own life, everything related to it
is actually more honest.
I no longer saw the point in participating in the declining
activities of the Stir up group. What it gave me, it later partially took away
from me. I am not saying that it took away my interest in surrealism or in the
members of the group with whom I am friends.
However, I think that a group of people who protect themselves
with a certain attribute does not automatically guarantee the right to
uniqueness. Neither here nor anywhere else in the world. A surrealist group
should meet regularly, which probably used to be in a narrow circle of
founders. Then, when the group spread from Ostrava to other places in Moravia,
there was no space left for community sharing of specific expressions and
ideas. Who read and understood Breton’s works Arcanum 17 or Magnetic Fields?
But is it really important? Can a contemporary group exist
according to Breton’s centuries-old principles? And is the model of any group,
even Breton’s, binding for others? Isn’t such a requirement rather a surrealist
anachronism? Time does not stand still. And it is Breton who speaks of the
liberation of the mind and the control of the subconscious. And we can discuss
how it was or was not intended, and whether this is exactly what is supposed to
be a manifestation of a permanent revolution of the spirit. So all art
exhibitions with the adjective surreal can also be considered pure atavism.
Yes? It is possible, but not necessary. Because it would solve nothing at all.
You probably remember my protest against the absurd realization
of the Stir up exhibition in the upper house of the Czech parliament. I made
Josef Kremláček, who
arranged all this, very angry, and he wrote me a rude letter.
As the years go by, I feel more and more that the Stir up group
is long obsolete, that its devotion to a recognized idea is just a kind of
alibi.
JD | The last question
concerns your university pedagogical studies. Jiří Havlíček was a significant teacher at the faculty and later also a
friend. Did he influence your later surrealist orientation?
JB | Jiří
Havlíček was more than a teacher and his influence on me was not in
the narrowly defined spectrum of surrealist orientation. It was broader. And it
was precisely the spectrum of correlations where everything is interconnected,
and the discovery of invisible structures and relationships, that was Jiří
Havlíček’s contribution to all who could listen to him.
I remember the mid-1980s. It was almost unbelievable that during
the communist regime at the Faculty of Education, Havlíček, in his lectures on the history of art, illuminated the
mysticism of medieval culture through contemporary body artists, compared the
flagellant movement with the performances of Rudolf Schwarzkogler or Hermann
Nitsch, connected Egyptian or ancient Greek mysteries with modern media
campaigns, and so on. He was a revelation. He gave me the right dimension in
the perception of the space-time of art history.
The logical culmination was my diploma thesis entitled
Phenomenon of the Labyrinth. Under Havlíček’s guidance, I established the concept of the labyrinth
principle using the comparative method and subsequently verified it in various
manifestations of the history of art, artistic creation and human activity. In
the summer of 1998, when we had been friends for years, he said this: When I
once said that Arnošt should see it, I meant Budík. That’s how he introduced me
to Arnošt Budík. Budík, who died on April 29, 2025, was undoubtedly a leading
member of the Stir up group. In 1969, he emigrated and lived in Brussels.
Havlíček was not a member of Stir up at the time, but we all knew him.
Václav
Pajurek was the longest. In the mid-1960s, he founded the surrealist group
Lacoste in Brno with Arnošt Budík and Josef Kremláček. Havlíček became a member of Stir up only after 2000.
However, he never openly declared his membership in Stir up. Perhaps also
because consciously signing up to a platform can take something away from one’s
own work. He never gave up his original sources of inspiration, motifs or unique
style. He devoted himself to intaglio graphics, where he brilliantly processed
esoteric-alchemical themes. In this way, he filled the esoteric part of
surrealist work.
In alchemy and esotericism, the surrealists found sources of
inspiration, but without the ghostly ballast. This was already emphasized by
André Breton. It is about the search for the miraculous, when finding the most
ordinary things from everyday life can create tension reaching up to esoteric
mystery. After all, alchemy deals with magical rituals. These, especially among
so-called primitive peoples, are part of pre-civilization mythologies. And mythology
itself is another parallel source of surrealist inspiration. Surrealists
consider The Golden Bough by James George Frazer to be an important book. Jiří
Havlíček studied and knew it.
JAN DOČEKAL (Czech Republic, 1943). A prominent visual artist, art historian, poet, and cultural journalist, widely recognized for his contributions to contemporary global surrealism and for his work in disseminating art through digital and print media. He began his artistic career creating traditional surrealist collages. In the second half of the 1990s, he began experimenting with layered collages and collages applied directly to book covers and pages. Since 2004, he has expanded his work to include drawings and paintings that move between expressionism and abstraction. He is an active member of the Czech art group Stir Up. He works as an art historian and cultural publicist, frequently analyzing the evolution of contemporary surrealism. Dočekal’s work has connections to the Lusophone and Latin American scene, and he is an active contributor to the Brazilian magazine Agulha Revista de Cultura. He regularly participates in exhibitions of painting, photography, and collage in shows dedicated to surrealism around the world. | JOSEF BUBENÍK (Czech Republic, 1965). A remarkable artist introduced to us by our friend and regular contributor to our magazine, Jan Dočekal. Both artists are members of the surrealist group Stir Up in the Czech Republic. Josef Bubeník studied with Petr Skácel and in Jan Wolf’s studio at the Faculty of Education of Masaryk University – Art Education. He is a member of the Union of Plastic Artists and the BonusArt artistic association. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions in the Czech Republic and abroad, and has organized thirty solo exhibitions. He works primarily as a painter, but also dedicates himself to creating posters and books. Josef’s artistic expression presents many intertwined forms, both thematically and temporally, and in terms of technique. At first glance, it may seem that he processes his artistic inspirations abstractly, but he himself rejects this categorization, and likes to say that everything is connected to everything else, which is why an element cannot be removed from the whole without the element or the whole itself losing its meaning. We can observe surrealist and metaphysical tendencies in Josef’s drawings and paintings. He explores what is inaccessible to the senses and attempts to capture the uncapturable. Recently, he has been working on an extensive series of crystal paintings. For him, these symbolize the records of memory, concentrated memories imprinted on the structure of matter. The emerald-green canvases on the wall shine as if sending a message about memory and recollections to the surrounding environment from their center.
JAN ŠVANKMAJER (República Tcheca, 1934). Artista surrealista, marionetista, animador e cineasta, é conhecido por suas releituras sombrias de contos de fadas famosos e pelo uso vanguardista da animação stop-motion tridimensional combinada com filmagens em live-action. Alguns críticos o elogiaram por privilegiar os elementos visuais em detrimento do enredo e da narrativa, outros por seu uso de fantasia sombria. Adaptou obras literárias como Alice e Fausto. Sua obra Šílení (2005, Loucura) foi descrita como uma história de terror cômica que demonstra a influência do escritor americano Edgar Allan Poe e do nobre francês Marquês de Sade. Hmyz (2018, Inseto) é baseado na peça Ze ivota hmyzu (1921, A Peça dos Insetos) de Karel e Josef Čapek. A obra plástica de Jan Švankmajer nos acompanha nesta edição de Agulha Revista de Cultura em que é nosso artista convidado. Também podemos encontrar uma reveladora entrevista que lhe fez Floriano Martins, publicada em três idiomas.
Agulha Revista de Cultura
Número 265 | junho de 2026
Artista convidado: Jan Švankmajer (República Tcheca, 1934)
Editores:
Floriano Martins | floriano.agulha@gmail.com
Elys Regina Zils | elysre@gmail.com
ARC Edições © 2026
∞ contatos
https://www.instagram.com/agulharevistadecultura/
http://arcagulharevistadecultura.blogspot.com/
FLORIANO MARTINS | floriano.agulha@gmail.com
ELYS REGINA ZILS | elysre@gmail.com
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