I wanted to ask about the idea of archiving in your work, because you were from the beginning collecting everything you did and other artists' work and documenting everything you did, this is the idea of observation of what you do and documenting it at the same time which appears from the 1960s and now you are trying to make the archives and this is interesting because it is very special, I don't know many other artists who would have from the very beginning had the idea that they should collect and document everything and maybe now you have certain ideas what to do with that material, not only video but also that analogue instruments or tools?
It's not that hard to understand, because when I understood what the time and energy does, and when we already started, I am talking, this is the generational enterprise, it was like early film and it was generational effort made out of mainstream filmmaking, I understood this contribution of this particular generation in this particular time slot, especially when the analogue world breaks through into this digital domain, I understood that this was the historical, not historical but cultural historical, this is both. It was the historical meeting of the analogue world as we know it into the digital world which we don't really know but it's representing the reality and so I understood this was the pivotal movement or moment in the history and that's how I understood it and we both understood it, with Steina and many other people, that it's worth of our selfsacrifice.
So you have to say, O.K., there'll always be a Picasso here and there, because that's what they dialled by the muses that control our cultural life, and there were, like Bill Viola decided that he was the new Picasso, consciously, and of course Garry Hill was a divine, he was this young man that could understand and he, first his early works which I knew were magnificent but now their life and carrier is completely not interesting to me. In that place they contributed but they were not interested in the rest of the world, they were self-elected heros of the generation which they are.
But I come from this background of the Czech, even Moravian thinking about that this meeting with the history that's much more interesting than what you actually do in this kind of personal struggle to develop yourself into indispensably individual as artist. And anyway, what I do as archivist I still do it for the same purpose, I what to know, what's the commonality of that effort, which of these things that are living in the shadow in fact have a great significance. That's kind of the only ambition I have, that is more or less secretive because it's the curatorial treatment of these things that I am interested in and contextualizing these things, why they happened, again it becomes a different type of laboratory. And I was always lucky and of course Steina always helped to this effort very significantly, to curate things, it's not the first time the last year that we would curate anything, we made certain curatorial work all our life, you know, since the Kitchen which was in a way titled Live Audience Testing Laboratory, which has both ends, you test the audience and test the laboratory. And then we made at least three or four shows that had this commonality, like Eigenwelt and this show and something in between, so this was in a way an impulse, it was actually more complicated than producing art; because producing art you can do it here on the table but to produce show is vastly complicated thing. But I like the complications because it's just the nature of my interest where is the boundary of an individual, how far you can go as an individual and how much you need the society or other people to mediate it. And I experience both, one in the art where you can really take a sound source and produce composition of audio of some form, later you may not be educated, in video we had to go the whole generation thru process of education and that's one thing that painters go also thru, from childhood some, other in the middle of the life, but you have to learn some kind of a craft because there is no art without craft unless you are poet and then art and craft go thru your mind and it can be then spoken but the connection between your mind and the medium of the speech is enclosed in your own body, you don't even need to
write it down.
This was actually question about the archives, what's your ideal of the archive...
It's also some duty, my mother eventually wrote the history of the clan, of the families, and she went to archives and villages and churches and I understood that I inherited this but I am not so sure if she also got some inspiration from my work, because I mentioned that to her. But of course I take some pride in informing her about literature and poetry, cause she was just this what you would call the simple peasant girl that came with basic education to the world and then grew thru her, a lot had to do with her born-again incident, but she invented it into whole narrative way thru painting and writing. And she wrote that from the same source of duty. I don't know where that source of duty comes from, my sister didn't do it, my sister didn't any of that, so it must be something either some kind of rubbed zone,
because me and my mother had very special relationship since childhood, our value system is total identical, including altruistic work for the public like her seeding some flowers next to the highway, and she would be telling about the truck drivers that go by from Turkey and everywhere to Prague, they should see some flowers on their long run on the the highway when they are sleeping half. And people would come to her saying, 'why do you do it mother, paní, proč to děláte, vždyť to nikdo nevidí tady', she would not relinquish the social service. So there is something strange about it, that I must admit. I like to kind of waste my life in some kind of general purpose of life. And I love to be supported, I don't want to make money, I find it completely inappropriate, to live by sort of working. I think you live by
being ornament on the body of society. And once they recognize you being an ornament, they help you to live. And that should be a good prescription for artist's life. But anyway, it's a different world.
