A01=Sam Cermak
aesthetics and politics of performance art
Aktual
Alex Mlynarcik
artistic strategies of resistance
Author_Sam Cermak
Category=AFKP
Central Europe
centre and periphery
control and policing of art
decolonial art history
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implicit censorship of the art market
Jan Mlcoch
Karel Miller
Local contexts
Luba Lauffova
performing populism
Petr Stembera
pluralising history of art
Prague troika
Prazska trojka
revisionist geography
rural context
Product details
- ISBN 9781526190697
- Weight: 676g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 17 Mar 2026
- Publisher: Manchester University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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This book traces the early history of performance art in the former Czechoslovakia, which developed in the 1960s and 1970s amid the Prague Spring and the subsequent Normalization period marked by censorship, prosecution, and state pressure on artists. Drawing on Czech and Slovak scholarship, as well as archival research, interviews, and fieldwork, it challenges Anglophone misinterpretations of the region’s visual and cultural languages. Although the Soviet Bloc is often associated with repression and limited artistic experimentation, performers in Socialist Czechoslovakia used public, semi-public, and clandestine spaces to create influential works. By examining artists such as Aktual, Alex Mlynárcik, Petr Štembera, Jan Mlcoch,, Temporary Society of Intense Living, and the Crusaders School of Pure Humour with No Jokes, the book shows how performance persisted—and sometimes thrived—through local resistance, artistic networks, and alternative interpretations of socialism.
Sam Cermák is a Lecturer in Contemporary Art Theory at the University of Edinburgh
