May 27 24
After I posted the last entry, Brook texted me a correction— she had suggested I add not ‘danger,’ but rather I add ‘risk’ to the substack.
It’s natural that I conflated these, but they have rather different connotations. Her text also made me realize I had forgotten1 something that I had wanted to add to the last post.
The thing I wanted to include was that while I was in conflict with the girl who I called stupid and I was being texted a bunch about how bad and unprofessional I was and so on, Genevieve suggested that maybe I needed to double down on this aspect of the diary- lean into hyperpersonal conflicts, radical honesty, lay bare my mean spiritedeness and petty impulses etc. It was in fact a bit compelling for people when I was having a conflict, and it is unavoidably one of the more interesting possibilities of the diary- especially when it leads to further conflict and meta-narratives about the diary. On the other hand, Brook, last night, noted in her text message that she wasn’t interested in me not having privacy. She also said I ‘deserve’ to feel comfortable but I sort of disagree. I am already much more comfortable than I deserve in several distinct ways, and also it would behoove me personally to be much more uncomfortable. The more uncomfortable the diary is probably the more interesting it becomes.
Nonetheless I take her point- she was trying to say that I should put more of myself on the line- in the page (screen), which is also what I mean by uncomfortable. I would like to do that more, but I think often I think nothing worth mentioning. I end up talking at great length about my insecurities and self loathing and struggle to be optimistic, but that can only go so far as a generator of novelty and things worth remarking upon. I do like retaining the form of a diary as a diary- thinking through problems, reportage on what happens throughout my life and my mental and emotive reactions thereof. I think the challenge is to unite the specificity of the diaristic medium with something more universal, and to be able to crank out a daily personal essay that covers whatever mundanity is going on in my life as well as the grand swirling universal Logos which pervades even my humble little life. I guess what I am suggesting is that I simply Write Better.
I should move on to my personal essay. I’m on the train to Budapest currently, traveling a magical looking route at sunset through the eastern half of Slovakia a magical fog pervades a post soviet landscape. Theres a brook running through the ancient eastern european forest, the source of so many slavic myths.
We didn’t have much time before the train, but we saw some nice Social Realist art, a very amazing modernist church by Plečnik, who is becoming one of my favorite architects2. Afterwards we went to the Žižkov television tower, which stands above the monumental skyline of Prague- a perfect object of high modern utopianism.
Designed and built in the 70s, apparently in large part created in order to jam television broadcasts from West Germany (though I have yet to find information on this function other than passing references), it is currently still in use as a television broadcast station. I think its utterly beautiful, as good an example of an effective modernist aesthetics as the Werkbund on the other side of town but in practice a much more accessible part of the landscape. Of course, everyone in Prague seems to hate everything built by the communists. They blew up most anything Soviet3. The only art from the regime are some murals in few outlying subway stations, and a couple reliefs adorning some municipal police stations. Here’s an example, the social realist art I mentioned a few paragraphs ago.
I don’t know why the police stations have the communist proletarian stuff on them (it seems politically ironic), but it might just be because the city doesn’t care to spend money on blowing up the facade of a police station. I’m not surprised that Prague didn’t want to dynamite the gargantuan futurist metal tower which also lets everyone watch television. The compromise that they seem to have come to was to add babies to it.
There are these horrible crawling babies all over the otherwise perfect object. You might be wondering what disturbing rational exists behind the addition of little black infants to the sheer metal walls, which I am unable to tell you, but I do know that they’re the brainchild[ren] of Prague’s number 1 public artist David Černý. Černý first gained notoriety for painting a war memorial of a Soviet tank pink and adding a middle finger in 1991 (2 years after the “velvet revolution” which liberalized and made independent the Czech Republic and therefore 2 years after the artistic gesture mattered politically at all).
The tank of course represents the Red Army liberating Prague from Nazi occupation4, which in my opinion demands that art criticism of the symbology be a bit more complex than an obscene gesture.
Černý has similarly infantile and boring art all over the city. He clearly thinks of himself as still the punkish rogue who is painting tanks pink because his website’s tagline is “Czech sculptor, an artist of civil disobedience.”
His disobedience is against good taste!!!!! His sculptures suck. I already am really skeptical of people who like to rebel, and in particular I don’t think “rebellion” as such is definitionally aesthetically interesting, nor as some vulgar aesthetics maintain, one of the fundamental purposes and utilities of cultural production, which appears to me to be a common aesthetic fetish.
Every so often you would find something in a guide or see something walking down the street and be stricken with utter aesthetic confusion and a kind of depression. Each time the answer to my questions of what this vaguely political, ugly, incoherent sculpture was doing the answer was Černý. When talking to Radek, our new Czech friend, Černý came up, and he affirmed what I would have guessed, which is that Černý is loathed as an embarrassment by the cool art kids of Prague.
Radek also talked to us about his shock to learn that nothing in America is public- that there is no funding for the arts from the government. This was also remarked upon by the people in Vienna I spoke to. This is assuredly distressing to someone trying to make a living doing arts type stuff, but Černý is an illustrative example of the problematic tastes of public arts funding. The particular anecdote which illustrates this point is Černý’s ugly and dumb Kafka head. Radek told us that there was a kind of Kafkamania at one point following a large endowment in Prague earmarked for Kafka related stuff, which is where the funding for the head came from. The whole Kafka thing around Prague was distressing. I think the museum they have about him is really stupid, and I particularly think that Černý’s high-tech rotating sculpture is stupid. Why does it look like that? Why does it rotate? Is it Kafkaesque?
The Kafka head is a perfect example of the stupidity of Art – the Kafka fund is attractive to Prague because Kafka is a recognizable name, so art about him is good for tourist infrastructure, Černý, along with many other galleries and artists who didn’t necessarily have anything to say about Kafka bastardized whatever they were already trying to make to add a sliver of a Kafka theme to try to get a little bit of sweet sweet public money to actualize something. The end result is an ugly sculpture outside of a stupid museum which discredits a wonderful writer and part of the historical cultural legacy of the city.
The other funny thing we learned about Černý is that he created, out of his own pocket, his own museum with the embarrassing title Musoleum. It was something we saw on our first sleep deprived day walking around- it has two mammoth mechanized butterfly/plane hybrid things flapping their wings lazily. He seems to like large mechanical objects- a very obtrusive medium which costs a lot of money to look cheap and silly.
I don’t have a strong conclusion to my thoughts on Černý, other than to say I don’t like him and he folds into my general impression of cultural decay. There were weed shops everywhere, people wore stupid t shirts with English on them, ugly fat tourists were crawling around one of the former magisterial seats of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.
I felt guilty being able to speak English with so many people, and I felt disgusted by recognizing reproduced capital extraction methods. The worst feeling was being catered to specifically, because it took any illusion that there was an exotic element to our travels. Exoticism has been steamrolled over by globalization. I have long been disabused of a naive metric for ‘authentic experiences.’ I realized at some point that the only inauthentic experience is one in which you are lying to yourself about whats happening- and even then maybe every single experience is “authentic”, including delusion. I also believe that chasing ‘authenticity’ probably leads you primed for getting taken for a ride and ripped off.
Nonetheless I would like to see something untouched, or at least not completely ripped apart by the spread of the Western monoculture. I think I have to travel farther east and/or farther south, into parts of Africa and the Middle East, to see that. I also imagine that aspects of Southeast Asia and China would feel novel and unfamiliar. Japan would probably be interesting as a culture shock, though this would be a culture shock of a different aspect.
I guess I can’t really blame Černý for the cultural flattening of the western world- he didn’t have anything to do with the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Napoleonic and nationalist revolutions against the same, nor with the industrial revolution, soviet mass construction, nor the liberalization/financialization of the past couple decades. Nonetheless he seems symbolic of its ugliness- cheap and stupid and historically illiterate, but desperate to sell you something vacuated of all meaning while also overloaden with a kind of political and emotive semantics which signify only themselves.
I know I said I would start editing, but I didn’t edit.
He has an amazing house he built for himself in Ljubliana that I saw last year. He’s a very weird and compelling and intense guy. Extremely catholic, no political ideology to speak of, and had a maid who was ordered to stay so out of his way that he never saw her
We were shown the remnants of the titanic sculpture of Lenin on the highest point overlooking Prague (extremely baller place both geographically and historically for an autocrat to have such a big statue), which was exploded with dynamite. It has since become a popular place for skateboarding and used to be a place where they threw underground raves inside the dilapidated structure. Prague seems like it was very cool in the 90s
The Czechs seem to dislike the Communist regime more than the Nazis, I’m sure in part because they were a Soviet state for longer than they were occupied by the Reich military, and in particular the generation of 90s provocateurs like Černý had only known Czechia as a Soviet subsidiary. I felt this contrasted with Poland, who had much less anti-communist stuff (other than the more or less openly right wing and extremely dinky Victims of Communist museum) despite having arguably just as much reason to dislike the communists, especially in Warsaw. On the other hand they very clearly hated the current Russians-- many menus had changed offerings of Peroigi Rusky (filled with potato and cheese) to Peroigi Ukraini-- a kind of polish Freedom Fries, but this was all related obviously to the war just across the border. Yet to see how the Hungarians today feel about the Soviets, but I know there has been some spats with them and the Commies in the past.