Abnormal peripheries

Slovak and Czech performance art in the 1960s and 70s

Sam Cermak

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781526190697
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526190680
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performance Art

This book traces an early history of performance art from the former Czechoslovakia, which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in the context of the Prague Spring and the subsequent policy of Normalization that brought on cultural censorship, prosecution, and state violence against artists. The book draws on Czech and Slovak scholarship as well as primary research in archives, interviews, and fieldwork to dispel misreadings of visual and cultural idioms in pre-existing Anglophone scholarship about the region. Although the former Soviet Bloc is often equated with repression and lack of experimental art in public spaces, performance artists within the former Socialist Czechoslovakia often used public, semi-public and clandestine spheres to create their performances. By analysing both works of established artists such as Aktual, Alex Mlynárcik, Petr Štembera, Jan Mlcoch, as well as under-theorised practitioners including Luba Lauffová, Karel Miler, Temporary Society of Intense Living, and Crusaders School of Pure Humour with No Jokes, this book analyses how performance can survive and sometimes even thrive on the background of a politically oppressive regime. Cermak tells a unique story of localised resistance to a monolithic public sphere through artistic intervention, a closely knit community, artistic exchange, and agonistic reframing of socialism as a philosophy rather than state ideology.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: towards a peripheral pluralism of performance
• 1 Disappeared Ľuba: Slovak body art and feminist politics in the work of Ľuba Lauffová
• 2 Selfish performances: Marxist humanism as individualism in Czech body art
• 3 Days of joy: the political of public space in the work of Alex Mlynárčik
• 4 Total engagements: policing and artistic co-operation in the work of Aktual
• Conclusion: despite overwhelming greyness
• Bibliography
• Index