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Underground explosion

A one-man art movement, recounted in drawings and text
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By Tony Ozuna
For The Prague Post
October 31st, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Illustrating oppression with a declaration "Never again!"
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Vladimír Boudník: Explosionalism

at Prague City Gallery–House at the Golden Ring
Ends Dec. 2. Týnská 6, Prague 1–Old Town. Open Tues.–Sun. 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

In local modern art history, Vladimír Boudník was a one-man art movement, a singular voice in the gray wilderness. Boudník’s postwar style, Explosionalism, is documented in original texts, photographs and an abundance of small drawings currently showing in three rooms at the Prague City Gallery’s House at the Golden Ring.
Recognized primarily as a graphic artist, Boudník (1924–68) was also an icon for the underground movement in the 1970s and ’80s, together with his close friends and collaborators Zbyněk Fišer (Egon Bondy), Ivo Vodseďálek and Bohumil Hrabal, whom he met while working at a factory.
Like Bondy and Hrabal, Boudník was at heart a writer, especially in his earlier years. However, more than the others, he incorporated all forms of creative activity into his writing efforts. Two of the three rooms in this exhibit are devoted to original documents — essays, proclamations, short prose texts and poetry — which were published in samizdat editions.
Beyond these texts, Boudník also maintained a compulsive correspondence advocating his theories and ideas (critiques of war and support of abstract art in general), not only with friends and collaborators, but also in more formal appeals to state officials and cultural institutions. There are several drafts of some letters.
Boudník also wrote countless manifestos. His proclamation of his movement never ceased, it merely took on different forms. Thus, his visual artworks represent only one part of his life’s production.
Approximately 100 small-scale drawings, photograms and collages (as well as diary entries with drawings) are in the last room of the exhibit. Much of this artwork was done on letters or made as enclosures for envelopes. For instance, there are delicate, goldish-brown monotypes with titles like The Hand of a Drowned Man and Dead Deepwater Fish, and photograms that look like
X-rays of scribbled skeletons, various bones and splattered liquids. A small black-and-white photo showing Boudník naked on the floor is titled Me, Myself.
Boudník also made “specks” (peculiar, postage stamp-size drawings of people or animals) and “decalcomanias” (abstract images made by pressing lightly painted surfaces together). He kept these in stamp albums so that he could carry them around and show them at his street actions, which were his most significant works, though unfortunately the least documented.
Mostly done between 1949 and 1951, Boudník’s street actions were the predecessors of “happenings,” meaning often-impromptu activities designed to catch the attention of inadvertent passers-by. Possibly the most significant principle of Explosionalism was that everyone in society has the potential for expressing their imagination and creative ideas. Boudník created more than 100 situations on Prague’s streets to make this possible, urging everyone to become involved in the creative process, and transform their lives and society out of the banal reality.
Boudník’s favorite areas of Prague for his street actions were Kampa, Žižkov and Karlín, places he could most easily find walls with crumbling plaster to serve as his canvases. He would make drawings or, more often, just scratches on the dilapidated surfaces. Passers-by would then be asked to seek out images or form visual associations from the patches of peeling plaster on the walls, with his scratches helping bring an image to light.
The crucial moment in such events was the interaction with the spectators, and a successful action was when Boudník could stimulate the imagination of a random viewer to see a dog or someone’s face on the wall. By 1956, he had staged about 150 actions, and, not surprisingly, some were attended by the secret police — the StB.
His last action was in the summer of 1957. But by that time, Boudník was already focusing most of his energy and ideas, still under the banner of Explosionalism, into the medium of printmaking. This is the work he is most remembered for — graphic art that, at its best, resembles the crumbling and dilapidated walls of bygone Prague.
There was a major retrospective of Boudník’s prints in 2004 at Prague Castle’s Imperial Stables. His small-scale visual art efforts and the photos documenting his actions in this exhibition speak for themselves. However, if a larger public outside this country is ever to appreciate his groundbreaking work, Boudník’s primary texts (manifestos, prose, poetry and correspondence) will need to be translated, at least into English and German.
It would be well worth the effort. After all, Boudník precedes Josef Beuys, who also espoused expanding creative activity to society in general for the betterment of all humankind. Boudník was at least 10 years ahead of his time, though blunted by the communists. In retrospect, he filled a significant role as the great-grandfather of — and isolated prophet in — Czech conceptual art.

Tony Ozuna can be reached at features@praguepost.com


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