1999, NOVEMBER, Czech Republic, "The Racist Wall will cut your Flag"

NOVEMBER.17.1999, USTI NAD LABEM, CZECH REPUBLIC, PUBLIC PERFORMANCE AS A CULMINATION OF PROTEST ACTIONS AGAINST XENOPHOBIA AND RACISM. IT TOOK PLACE NEXT TO A WALL WHICH WAS BUILT TO SEPARATE ROMA AND WHITE CZECH COMMUNITY ....."IF YOU BUILD A WALL YOU HAVE TO DIVIDE YOUR FLAG"

FILM:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_g8lHleC_g

Supported by a grant from the branch of the Cultural Ministry in my birthplace Pilsen, I addressed the issues of xenophobia and racism in my homeland through performance art. I was fulfilling a proposal for a traveling program to the small towns of the region to address these issues. I wanted to investigate the reasons and roots of xenophobic feelings that even I personally brought with me to the United States a decade earlier. I searched, with the help of the audience, to find out why I immigrated to the US with that "package on my back." Organizing several performances in small towns, I arranged "meetings" with the predominantly white-Czech audience seated in a circle around me. I addressed these issues first by emphasizing how a lack of contact and experiences with another group can lead to racism. The overwhelming response from the audience was that they were not racists and that these issues were not a problem. I demonstrated my point using the unfamiliar form of performance art to bring the audience face-to-face with various cultural differences. I drew parallels between the discomfort the audience felt with the unfamiliar art form and their lack of experience with the Romani-Czechs. In one performance, I exemplified the misunderstanding of cultural differences by considering varying conceptions of time, which I had experienced upon immigrating to the United States and also when helping to resettle refugees from all over the world once they were in the US. The Romani-Czechs, for example, conduct their lives with a different sense of time than the white-Czechs, which can lead to a ripple effect of misunderstandings that grow and change, resulting in larger problems. One of the planned performances took place next to an infamous outdoor wall, which was raised October 13, 1999 in Usti nad Labem, and intended to separate the Romani-Czech community from the white-Czech community in that town. On November 17, the 10th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution which ?supposedly? established a democratic society as the Czech Republic, the nation was focused on the celebration of this anniversary. The media awaited a counter-action to the commemoration, for which I was prepared. Helped by my friend Vladimir Libal, we painted a Czech flag on a large piece of plywood. Placing it next to the wall, I sawed the flag in half. We then placed one piece on each side of the wall to symbolize the divisions in Czech society, as represented by the wall. That evening, all the Czech TV stations and some world media outlets (including the BBC and CNN), reported news of the perfromance. On the next day, the event received front-page coverage in the main daily newspapers throughout the country. Because of the media response, this performance became the last "hit" in the culmination of protests concerning this issue, which forced the embarrassed city officials to raze the wall several days later. I believe the atmosphere that surrounded me on that day to be similar to the mind-set at the beginning of the civil rights movement in the U.S.

City officials are removing the wall which was built between white Czechs and Roma neighborhood :

1999, PULA, CROATIA, "I do not want to be leashed"

FORUM, CROATIA, INTERNATIONAL ART EXCHANGE PROGRAM BETWEEN MOBIUS AND ARTISTS FROM PULA, PUBLIC PERFORMANCE IN TRG FORUM "I DO NOT WANT TO BE LEASHED"

This performance addressed the xenophobia present among the predominately white Croatian population, by recently uncovered evidence that many war crimes during a recent war in Croatia (1991-95) were actually committed by civilians. The civilians expelled many Croatian citizens of different ethnic minorities from their homes, and if they resisted, they were killed. I asked four casual bystanders on Trg Forum in Pula, a symbolic gathering place of local citizens, to step on milk crates organized in a circle, and hold dog leashes, which I provided to them. Then I placed three paper balls containing big pieces of blue, white and red fabric in the center of the circle. The colors referred to the Croatian flag. Then I completely covered myself by black fabric and entered the circle. As the performance progressed I approached each of the three paper balls, removing the different colors of fabric and wearing them over my initial black wrap. After each approach of the paper ball I hooked myself to each the bystanders on the crates so that I became leashed like a dog step by step from four different sides - complete manipulation. Before each "attachment" I asked the bystander to teach me about the typical song, food, smell and color of Croatian culture, referring to the four human senses which we all share. After a while walking in the circle on the leashes, I become tangled with the leashes so that it made me absolutely immobile: the cultural hegemony had prevailed. Then I rebelled and threw off my body red, blue, and white fabric. I untangled myself from the leashes and connected them so that the four bystanders were leashed to each other. Then I escaped from the circle wearing only black again.

1999,2000,MOBIUS, BOSTON, "Individualism contra collectivism"

1999,2000,MOBIUS, BOSTON PERFORMANCE IN THE MOBIUS GALLERY AND ELSEWHERE.
HORIZONTAL OR VERTICAL / FLYING & FLOWING

FILM:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCLVGq-vBQs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7vTMfytNs4

I created this piece in collaboration with David Franklin, another member of the Mobius Artists Group. I transferred my experience living in both collectivist and individualistic societies into this piece. The collective, Socialist society of Czechoslovakia, where I was born and lived for the first thirty years of my life, was based on a horizontal system of communication and socializing between members of the society. Since government controlled all the media, people themselves ensured the flow of true information by "mouth and hand" channels. The information was spread horizontally among people, not via the media that were placed "above " them. One physical copy of an underground, illegal publication was read using this system by hundreds and hundreds of people. This system was very effective because the life-long, permanent members of the society were also close neighbors who knew each other well. I entered the United States after obtaining political asylum for my political activities against the Czechoslovakian Socialist government. I found American society to be made up of atomized individuals communicating via different forms of media. Communication is not carried from "mouth to hand" but through remote media channels. One issue of a particular publication targets just one niche of the society. Communication is oriented vertically by a system made up of individual information droplets. In this performance I wanted to transform these differences into geometrical forms that would accompany different actions, texts and stories. All components (sound, texts, stories, lighting, movements) of the parts of the piece were based either on vertical or horizontal composition and the tensions between them. In one of the pieces David and I attempt to communicate with each other. Together, we play a dominant-position game with an eight-foot stick connecting our mouths. A stick entering each participant's mouth distorts the articulation of language. In this performance, there is always one person lying horizontally on the ground and the other standing in a dominant position. In this way the stick makes a 45-degree angle. When the situation is reversed the geometry of dominance still persists. Communication between the participants is always based on the principle of dominance. In the other piece I work with vertically- and horizontally-situated elastic bungee cords. The horizontal cord represents mutual social bondage (cooperation, collectivism) and the vertical one atomization of the individual (competition, individualism) The Z-axis in this 3-dimensional plot reflects the social force generated by the intersection of the horizontal and vertical coordinates. I tell a story of homeless people and a private doctor offering a free one time medical service. I present my face at each moment of the story in a particular position in this three-dimensional matrix represented by bungee cords I want to create a concept of real life where extremes of any sort can produce tension and pain.

1999, PULA - Croatia INTERNATIONAL ART EXCHANGE

Croatia ,INTERNATIONAL ART EXCHANGE PROGRAM, COLE MINE-LAMPARNA, WORKING CLASS DREAM

I performed in the outdoor "entrance hall" of a gigantic elevator which, when operating, would take the miners down into the coal mine. The space was evocative and brought to mind the last moments before the miners were (as has always happened symbolically in history) carried down by the elevator cage. This may have been the moment when they stood for awhile and thought about their lives, hopes and dreams. I divided the hall using bungee cords, arranging them in a cross parallel to the floor. I then placed my blindfolded head into the space and performed the piece in six sequences. First I pushed the elastic cord up as much as possible referring to a desire of the workers to get help from spirituality. In the second, third, fourth,and fifth parts, I tested the maximum elasticity of the cords in four different cardinal points. And finally, using my head, swung the whole system of crossed cords down to the ground, referring to the repeating patterns of history.

1995,96,97,98, MOBIUS, BOSTON; BERLIN WALL

1995,96,97,98, MOBIUS, BOSTON; INDOOR MULTIMEDIA PERFORMANCE IN MOBIUS GALLERY BERLIN WALL-1, -2, -3, -4

FILM:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Wj4f0CmUrw

Each of these one-season events was a different full-scale performance. They were equal collaborations with Mari-Novotny Jones, another Mobius Artists Group member. The performances were reacting to the newly established world power system where market-oriented, so-called individualistically based societies gripped the victory of "Cold War" over so-called collectivist societies. This performance project lasted for four years, and presented journeys through the idea of collectivism and individualism "as a social order", leaving the audience to decide about future models of society. They examined the extreme polarities that divide people of different philosophical backgrounds, encouraged the creation of a society of thinkers, and questioned how a society does or does not answer the needs of its people. Challenging history, the present and even the future, we wanted to present a number of stereotypical notions and categories governing the world before and after the fall of "collectivist" societies. Using performance as a vehicle, we wanted to prevent a situation in which communication between divided cultures is too often one of mutual monologue disguised as dialog, and where the notion of dialog is sometimes a farce. Martina Pachmanova wrote about the last Berlin Wall performance in ArtsMedia magazine: "When socialism collapsed in the East, most of the people in the post-totalitarian countries expected the overnight arrival of a capitalism which would transform their devastated lives into a kingdom of riches and spectacular consumerism. Even though some historians on both of the former iron curtain consider this historical break as evidence of the validity of the capitalistic system, the collapse of socialism coincided with a protracted global crisis of capitalism in the West. In this sense, the Oedipal figure in Milan Kohout and Novotny-Jones? performance should be interpreted, rather, as an eternal nomadic traveler, disenchanted by his fatal mistake of falling repeatedly in (Incestuous) love with one or other enslaving ideology. He is, thus, forced to wander endlessly between Good and Evil, Left and Right, East and West, in the realm where one's capacity to distingish between polarities leads either to extremism or to a cynical blurring of all values."