Pavel Kreml

“‘The region where I live and work’ was its title. That was the assignment. So I painted a picture. It was a gypsy girl, but a blonde one, a portrait. And then a map of the republic, the North Bohemian Region, with beer caps. So of course they didn’t exhibit me. They even told me that those beer caps were insulting. And they scratched the gypsy. There was a cut across the face. One of them told: ‘Oh, someone here said it wasn’t painted, so he tested it like that.’ So they just ruined it. Then they couldn’t exhibit it, seeing that it was ruined. So that was there excuse.”

“Everything, what we did, why we did it. They kept searching for the context - what was behind it all. But there was nothing. Pataphysics [a kind of humorous pseudo-science of the absurd - trans.] was a kind of leitmotif, which we’d been introduced to by Eda Vacek - that makes the impression of trouble, but it’s not - it’s just a different perspective on a given subject. But pataphysics was hard for them to swallow. We had things like research on the audibility of a person going to the toilet in a block of flats. Silly stuff like that. It was just pataphysics; trying to make it out as some kind of source of resistance was total nonsense, that wasn’t its purpose at all.”