It is a mistake to think that bohemianism, i.e. the tendency to enjoy life headlong and creatively discover its beauties, has something to do with Czechness. Only the French 150 years ago concluded that the nomadic Roma came from Central Europe, from the area called Bohemia in Latin. After them, they named Parisian artists who rejected everything conventional, endured poverty during the day and got drunk in cafes in the evening.
Bohemianism as a path to art and its forms in the second half of the 20th century is now being mapped by a large exhibition in the Kunsthalle Prague called Bohemia. It will last until October 16. On two floors of the gallery, the American curator Russell Ferguson has put together a kind of experiential ride through cultural centers. He jumps from Paris to New York, London, San Francisco, and even Beijing, depending on where the artists were the loudest and the parties were the wildest.
Ferguson includes many alternative currents in bohemia: beatniks, hippies, punk, pop art and the art of dissidents facing totalitarian regimes. It presents the work of 39 creators, emphasizing photography in particular. The places where visual art intersects with music are the most intense in the exhibition. It doesn’t just sound like a backdrop. The sound installations prove that the bohemia of the 20th century mixed with the world of music almost as closely as with alcohol and drugs.
Exhibition curator Russell Ferguson. | Photo: Vojtěch Veškrna
At the same time, the viewer will find only a few works that also include music in the Kunsthalle. But that is enough for them to continue to convey an encouraging mood, especially jazz. The nearly half-hour black-and-white film from 1959, Pull My Daisy, was created by photographer Robert Frank and painter Alfred Leslie, and the actors involved the future cream of New York bohemia: writer Jack Kerouac and poet Allen Ginsberg or painter Alice Neel.
The plot based on Kerouac’s play is based on a bizarre visit of the bishop and his mother to the railway brakeman’s apartment, which is interrupted by the arrival of several excited friends. After a while, the respectfully welcomed bishop faces a barrage of questions that refer to Ginsberg’s famous book Lament. “Is the world holy? Is baseball holy? Is the orgasm holy?” The startled clergyman finally gets up abruptly to leave. Energetic period music is interspersed with a quirky commentary by Kerouac, who alternates between the role of a cheerful commentator and the dubber of all the characters.
“Today, the film seems like an open-ended record of a group of friends fooling around. In its time, however, it appeared to be extremely radical,” writes the curator in the exhibition catalog. For example, the experimental director Jonas Mekas admired the film for its sense of reality and immediacy.
The image from the exhibition shows an installation by Stan Douglas called Hors–champs from 1992. | Photo: Jan Malý
Emotional, but no longer comic, is Stan Douglas’s installation called Hors-champs from 1992. It is a remake of a performance from the 1960s: four American jazzmen living in France play in a French television studio. A double-sided screen hung in the middle of a dark room transmits the views of two cameras. One captures the musicians at a concert, the other the same men who are just waiting for the performance to begin.
The music beats, musicians of African-American descent put their art, hearts and bodies into it. And also the sadness of disinheritance. In order to play freely, they had to leave the heavily segregated America.
Trumpeter Miles Davis felt the racial hatred on his head when he was shot by a police officer outside a jazz club in New York with twelve blows because Davis escorted a white woman to a taxi. However, he was charged with assault. That is why Europe, especially Paris, has become a desired destination for many African-American artists.
“According to legend, Paris is a city where everyone loses their heads and morals, where you experience at least one ‘histoire d’amour’, you stop showing up anywhere on time and turn your nose at the Puritans – in short, it’s a city where everyone gets drunk on the good old breath freedom,” said the American writer James Baldwin, who spent almost the entire 1950s in the French capital. As he later added in his biography, the freedom of Paris was bought for him and the other exiles by “immeasurable estrangement from himself and his people”.
The curator of the Prague exhibition presents his selection of unrestrained personalities as a chain of stories that intertwine and connect with each other. Australian dancer Vali Myers became a symbol of Paris in the 1950s. The modest possessions of this redhead fit into her handbag and she had only a few other things scattered around the studios of the painters for whom she became a model.
Vali Myers was made famous by the photographer Ed van der Elsken, with whom she collaborated between 1950 and 1954 on the picture book A Love Story in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Decades later, she became a role model for teenage singer-songwriter Patti Smith. “I had her photos plastered all over the walls,” recalls the musician and poet, who later met Vali Myers in New York. There, the dancer tattooed an image in the shape of a small lightning bolt on her knee.
Patti Smith had another love in her youth, which connected her to the very first Parisian bohemians. “As a girl I devoted a lot of my dreaming to Rimbaud. Rimbaud was like my boyfriend. When you’re fifteen or sixteen and you can’t have the boyfriend you want and all you can do is fantasize and dream about him all the time, it doesn’t matter if he’s dead a poet or a boy from the high school graduation year?” she wrote.
Arthur Rimbaud, the cursed poet of the mid-19th century, was also admired by other Americans. The Prague exhibition reminds us that David Wojnarowicz photographed his friends in the neglected corners of New York in the 1970s with a mask of Rimbaud’s face on their face.
There are a lot of connections and references in the Kunsthalle. And also similarities that can only be seen after a long time. Such as the one between the cycle of intimate pictures of herself and her friends Ballad about sexual addiction by the American photographer Nan Goldin and the nameless cycle of black-and-white photographs by Libuša Jarcovjáková, unpublished for decades. In the 1980s, she captured the atmosphere of Prague’s T-Club, an establishment with a gay and lesbian clientele. Only in the last decade has Jarcovjáková experienced international acceptance.
Photo of Libuša Jarcovjáková from Prague’s T-Club, 1980s. | Photo: archive of Libuša Jarcovjáková
As an exotic detour, which ultimately fits well into the whole, the exhibition has a bohemian feel outside the traditional art centers. The curator presents the Iranian architect Bijan Saffari, whose simple drawings depict persons in a circle of homosexual friends from shortly before the Islamic revolution in 1979. Or the Beijing bohemian, with whom the globally known artist and dissident Ai Weiwei collaborated. Another set of photos documents the action of the now deceased Zagreb action artist Tomislav Gotovac.
Bohemianism as a lifestyle has survived for 150 years, but it may not last much longer. Curator and UCLA professor Russell Ferguson thinks his twilight is coming. He attributes it to the proliferation of social media and the commercialization of anything that turns out to be just a little bit trendy.
The picture from the exhibition shows the work Zorah by the Zagreb action artist Tomislav Gotovac from 1977. | Photo: Vojtěch Veškrna
“Belonging to the bohemian world meant a certain charm and exclusivity, although it more often meant poverty and hardship. International capitalism, in a culture completely driven by commodification, can more and more convincingly make such alternatives a mere hole in the market,” says Ferguson. He notes that, for example, the word bohemian has long been in the vocabulary of travel agencies offering “bohemian beach paradise” or sellers of home accessories.
The Prague exhibition is actually quite brief. The visitor will surely come up with something else he would like to see there: photos of Patti Smith by Robert Mapplethorpe, footage from Andy Warhol’s Factory, pictures from the Woodstock festival. And where is the Velvet Underground and why does only one photo by David Bailey resemble Mick Jagger, lead singer of the Rolling Stones? Even the Czech scene should have something to offer, not only the discovery of Libuša Jarcovjáková in recent years. Speaking of Chinese or Yugoslav action artists, why not Milan Knížák and Fluxus, or the peaceful actions of Jiří Kovanda, Petr Štembera, Zorka Ságlova or Jan Mlčoch?
But that would be a different exhibition – and it would actually repeat what we already know from Czech galleries. Russell Ferguson presents his vision and the artists he understands, some of whom have previously staged separate retrospectives. Thanks to a certain brevity, Bohemia is absorbable. It gives space to get to know and understand a lot.
