Action ǀ Retraction: Czechoslovak Art and Philosophy in the International Context, 1945–1989

In view of the historical revisionism increasingly manifest in recent years within post-socialist countries and beyond, it is necessary to re-engage Europe’s material, visual and philosophical culture in all of its complexities, and contradictions. The project on Czechoslovak Art and Philosophy in the International Context seeks to broaden the canon of art historical and philosophical research and to shed light on traditions, narratives, and networks which have been largely overlooked until now. Despite adversity, there remained an active and reciprocal exchange between the ČSSR and the West – including Italy, France, and the Federal Republic of Germany.

In addition to workshops, teaching activities, and translations of little circulated texts, the essential outcome of the project is the manuscript Aesthetics of Freedom. Unofficial Visual Culture and Philosophy in the ČSSR. The book questions to what extent unofficial art and philosophy were understood as practices of resistance: practices which circumvented censorship and opened up spaces of aesthetic, as well as ethical, freedom. Spanning forty years of totalitarian and post-totalitarian reality and cultural politics, the book traces a spectrum of subversive aesthetic and philosophical strategies in Czechoslovakia, from the earliest artistic happenings in the 1950s and ‘feminist’ experimental films in the 1960s, to philosophical living-room seminars and radical body art in Prague in the 1970s, to the sharp-tongued critiques of ‘political art’ in the 1980s. The book also explores the seductive idealisations of the figure of the ‘underground’ and offers a historical and discourse-critical reflection on this phenomenon. Last but not least, the protagonists of the book and their artistic, aesthetic, and philosophical work invite a rethinking of concepts which are still relevant today – such as censorship, freedom, protest, and resistance – and a systematic analysis of the possibilities and limits of political art as well as ethically-engaged art history and philosophy.