Slovak and Czech Performance Art from the 1960s to the Present

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After Czechoslovakia's dissolution in 1993, Czech and Slovak artists have been struggling to assert their national identities as distinct in wider performance art histories. This project seeks to investigate the development of Slovak and Czech performance art from the 1960s to the present as two arguably distinct yet complementary genealogies. Despite growing research into Eastern and Central European histories of performance art in recent years, there has been little substantial work in terms of Czech and Slovak performance art, and what little research has been undertaken tends to conflate them into a single national culture. While these two countries have a strong social and cultural affinity historically, there has also been an increasing anxiety among artists since the Velvet Divorce (the peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia) in 1993 about who owns the cultural remnants and artefacts of the two countries. The conflation of the countries seems to privilege Czechia (formerly the Czech Republic) over Slovakia and has incidentally had a reductive effect on the way Slovak art in particular has been researched internationally. As historian Mark Stolárik points out, one of the key reasons for the Velvet Divorce was precisely the lack of a homogenous Czechoslovak identity and, therefore, the continuous conflation of Czechoslovak art contingent on national identity is reductive. I seek to show that Slovak performance art has been influenced by Hungarian traditions and focuses predominantly on music-based performance, happenings, and land art. On the other hand, Czech performance art focuses on action art, interventions and body art traditions. Moreover, the growing tensions caused by the current rise of Far-Right politics and xenophobic migration anxiety in both countries have prevented artistic and scholarly focus on what have historically been some of the key issues of performance art in Wester Europe (such as queer and identity politics). The proposed doctoral research will intervene in this complex political situation by analysing a series of case studies from both Slovakia and Czechia in order to disentangle their national identities and establish their genealogies as distinct within wider performance art histories. My project will rely on analysis of primary and secondary sources, archival research, translation, qualitative research interviewing, and with methods concerning close textual and historical analysis of performance documents and events. My language abilities in Czech and Slovak put me in a unique position to undertake primary research that would otherwise remain inaccessible to Anglophone scholarship. Part of this translation-focused effort will also focus on the way artists talk about themselves in their native languages, the critical reception of their work, and the effects with which English critical vocabularies (especially the adopted word 'performance') is often appropriated, adapted and deployed in the two countries. I will undertake extensive primary research in artists' archives. These mostly exist without institutional support in the homes of artists - such as Tomás Ruller or Sláva Daubnerová. In some rare cases, they are held at organizations such as Julius Koller Society. Archival research constitutes a major source of research in performance art studies and is deployed by performance art historians such as Heike Roms and Dominic Johnson. Moreover, the particular political history of Czechoslovakia under the USSR as well as performance art's resistance to documentation requires performance art to be disseminated by oral traditions. As well as visiting artists' archive, I will interview artists, arts professionals and audiences to re-construct knowledge that has otherwise been lost.