Aesthetics of Freedom: Unofficial Art and Philosophy in Prague 1948-1989

Creative idleness in a workers’ state, resistance through napkins, participatory happenings in the old town and opulent collages vividly depicting the Soviet invasion: These were the varied and ingenious strategies used to critically engage with contemporary life in the ČSSR despite state censorship and to open up spaces of aesthetic and ethical freedom.  

Behind the Iron Curtain, the ‘unofficial’ Prague scene was by no means cut off from trends and debates in the West, but rather actively helped shape them. For instance, the artist Jiří Kolář took part in documenta 4 in 1968, and the philosopher Jan Patočka, who had been forced out of the university, hosted popular living-room seminars in the early 1970s, where, much like Michel Foucault, he reflected on self-care.

Hana Gründler recounts the remarkable story of this parallel culture: from the enfant terrible Václav Havel and the hopes for socialist reform of the 1960s, through the brutal suppression of the Prague Spring in August 1968, to Charter 77 and the Velvet Revolution of 1989. She paints an unusual portrait of the city of Prague as a refuge for the underground and explores the relevance of these subversive aesthetic practices today.