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Abstract
Petr Štembera’s first performance Narcissus No. 1 (1974) was staged as a religious ritual of self-acceptance. During the performance, the artist used a combination of Greek mythology and Christian Eucharistic ritual as a basis for the action during which he consumed detritus from his body while looking at a portrait of himself. This method of arguably self-indulgent individualism was at the core of his broader practice as a pioneer of Czech Body Art. Using Czech philosophical writings on Marxist humanism, this article seeks to reframe individualism, selfishness, and self-indulgence not as pejoratives that are used to dismiss performance works but as a productive basis for a theory of performance-making strategy. Štembera used Zen-Buddhism and phenomenological approaches to contest the political aspects relating to the body in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia. His performance was purposefully selfish, self-indulgent, and individualistic and he strategically refused to share the specifics of his experience with his audience. Instead, he used his performance to offer permission to his audience to perform similar acts of self-indulgence, which in the context of the collectivist Socialist regime of the 1970s functioned, I argue, as a politically subversive act.
Notes on Contributor
Sam Čermák (he/him) is a LAHP (AHRC) funded PhD candidate in the Drama Department at Queen Mary University of London. His research interests focus on Slovak and Czech performance art practices from the 1960s to 1989 with an emphasis on disentangling national identities within art historical narratives.
Notes
1. I would like to thank Dominic Johnson for his valuable comments and conversations that helped guide me through writing this article.
2. Fintan Walsh, ‘On Generous Performance’, in It’s All Allowed: The Performances of Adrian Howells, ed. Deirdre Heddon and Dominic Johnson (London and Bristol: Live Art Development Agency and Intellect Books, 2016), 232–246 (232).
3. Adrian Heathfield, ’Alive’, in Live: Art and Performance, ed. by Adrian Heathfield (London: Tate Publishing, 2004), 6–15 (11).
4. Dominic Johnson, The Art of Living: An Oral History of Performance Art (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 1.
5. Ana Vujanović and Alexandra Jovicević, Úvod do performatívnych štúdií (Bratislava: Divadelný Ústav, 2012), 48. Author’s own translation.
6. Christian Viveros-Fauné, ‘Why the Art World’s Raging Narcissism Epidemic Is Killing Art’, artnet, 2015, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/art-world-narcissism-epidemic-373139 (accessed July 28, 2022).
7. Deborah Perlberg, ‘Martha Wilson: The Kitchen’, ArtForum, February 1978, https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/197802/martha-wilson-68535 (accessed July 28, 2022).
8. Jennifer Doyle, Hold it Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (Durham and London: Duke University Press), xi.
9. Ibid., 3.
10. Elizabeth Hess, ‘Self- and Selfless Portraits’ in Village Voice 34, no. 39 (1989): 93.
11. Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 174.
12. Ibid., 176.
13. Pavlína Morganová, Czech Action Art: Happenings, Action, Events, Land Art, Body Art and Performance Art Behind the Iron Curtain (Prague: Karolinum Press, 2015), 24.
14. Jindřich Chalupecký, Na hranicích umění (Prague: Prostor, 1990), 138. Author’s own translation.
15. Morganová, Czech Action Art, 163.
16. For the purposes of this work, I distinguish between Czech(-ia) when I refer to the Czech nationality as culturally and historically contingent and Czechoslovakia when I refer to the government, state organization, or official politics.
17. Klara Kemp-Welch, Networking the Bloc: Experimental Art in Eastern Europe 1965-1981 (London: The MIT Press, 2018), 325.
18. Excerpt from the text was reprinted in Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966-1972 (London: University of California Press, 1997), 169–70.
19. Kemp-Welch, Networking the Bloc, 325.
20. Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. Brookes More (Boston: Cornhill Publishing Co., 1922). http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:latinLit:phi0959.phi006.perseus-eng1:3.337-3.434 (accessed January 14, 2023).
21. Harvey Giesbrecht and Levin Charles, Art in the Offertorium: Narcissism, Psychoanalysis, and Cultural Metaphysics (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), 13.
22. Ibid., 12–13.
23. Morganová, Czech Action Art, 154.
24. Petr Štembera, Narcis č. 1, 1974, https://www.artlist.cz/dila/narcis-c-1-3594/ (accessed February 15, 2022). Author’s own translation. Original punctuation.
25. Lara Weibgen, ‘Performance as “Ethical Memento”: Art and Self-Sacrifice in Communist Czechoslovakia’, Third Text 23, no. 1 (2009): 55–64 (63).
26. Giesbrecht and Charles, Art in the Offertorium, 9.
27. Ibid., 10. Original emphasis.
28. Ibid., 13.
29. Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Routledge, 2005), 8.
30. Ibid., 9.
31. Ibid., 10.
32. Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London: Verson, 2013), 7.
33. RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (London: Thames & Hudson, 2011), 214.
34. Amy Bryzgel, Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 3.
35. Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe 1945–1989 (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 14.
36. Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), 129. Original emphasis.
37. Jindřich Chalupecký, ‘Intelektuál za socialismu’, in Tíha Doby, ed. Jindřich Chalupecký (Olomouc: Votobia, 1997), 2–5 (5).
38. Morganová, Czech Action Art, 153.
39. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘An Unpublished Text: Prospectus of His Work’, trans. Arleen B. Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 3–11 (5).
40. Ibid.
41. Ovid, Metamorphoses.
42. Ibid.
43. Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject, 40. Original emphasis.
44. Karel Kosík and Robert Kalivoda are perhaps the most well-known Czechoslovak Marxist humanists. Kosík’s work gained more traction internationally due to his work being translated amongst others to Italian (1965), German (1967), Spanish (1967), French (1970) and English (1976).
45. Karel Kosík, Dialectics of the Concrete: A Study on Problems of Man and World (Boston and Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing, 1976), 1.
46. Ibid., 2.
47. Ibid.,119. Emphasis in original.
48. Ibid., 137. Emphasis in original.
49. Ibid., 49.
50. Ibid., 2.
51. Petr Rezek, ‘Encounters with Action Artists’, in Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s, ed. Laura Hoptman and Tomas Pospiszyl (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2002), 220-225 (223). Originally published in Czech in 1977.
52. Ibid., 221. Original emphasis.
53. Ibid. Original emphasis.
54. The Catholic church was viewed by the Party as the only viable opponent of the regime. Jaroslav Krejčí and Pavel Machonin, Czechoslovakia, 1918-92: A Laboratory for Social Change (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 45.
55. Narcissism is often psychoanalysed as libidinal self-love with homoerotic undertones. This homoerotic charge was at odds with the official Soviet policies that barred queer modes of expression across Eastern Europe. See Bryzgel, Performance art in Eastern Europe, 282.
56. See Ladislav Kudrna and František Stárek Čuňas, Kniha v Barvě Krve: Násilí komunistického režimu vůči undergroundu (Prague: Academie, 2020).
57. Jana Oravcová, Ekonómie tela v umeleckohistorických a teoretických diskurzoch (Bratislava: Slovart, 2011), 12. Author’s own translation.
58. Rezek, ‘Encounters with Action Artists’, 223.
59. Rezek, ‘Encounters with Action Artists’, 223.
60. Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-Garde in Eastern-Europe, 1945–1989 (London: Reaktion, 2009), 371.
61. Tracey Warr, ‘Image as Icon: Recognising the Enigma’ in Art, Lies and Videotape: Exposing Performance, ed. Adrian George (London: Tate, 2003), 30–37 (30).
62. Ibid., 31.
63. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), 146.
64. Warr, ‘Image as Icon’, 36.
65. He was able to present his work in the US, France, or Poland.
66. Kemp-Welch, Networking the Bloc, 81.
67. Morganová, Czech Action Art, 154.
68. Warr, ‘Image as Icon’, 36.