The Forbidden Gaze
There are photographs that easily find their way into books, galleries and the academic community. They are deemed by fate to comprise another chapter in the history of photography. But there are many others whose path to light becomes constantly hindered by obstacles. Scattered within trashy studios, dusty thrift shops and forgotten family albums they call out for attention as hidden treasures ready to confide their secrets to us. Even if faded and in bad shape, the encounter with these old photographs produces tremendous joy. In our excavation-like attempt, we feel like archaeologists digging into the past. What the journey will bring is rarely certain, but, before a handful of photographs literally “stained” by years of adventures within boxes soaked by damp, everything comes into place. We can feel the shutter of the camera, not to say the aura of lives, stories and shared emotions. We can feel what Roland Barthes once described as the dreamful transportation of the “then” into the “now”–the past reviving into an eternal present.
Travelling through bits and pieces, our gaze is after the unseen, the unknown, the non-appreciated. We are longing for this magic revelation of the invisible to take place before our eyes. It is precisely this “unfinished business”—the “to-be-unfolded” fate of thousands of photographs—that renders the whole thing so enchanting to us. This is what photography is clearly all about: a story without an end. Throughout its history pretty much has happened, much more is to be discovered and, what's more, there are infinite ways to tell the same story. In this respect, photographs, when contemplated in different eras and contexts, become “reactivated” as distinct beings, embellished with novel visual properties. In doing so, not only they but also the human eye behind the camera is conferred, even if late, the posthumous glory it deserves on the shelves of history.
Miroslav Tichý: the man with the trimmed suit, a Diogenes-like figure, emerging out of oblivion… For over fifty years he lived in total reclusion in Kyjov, a small Moravian town. Unknown to most, he assumed the role of the misfit. For decades, neighbours avoided him, while the Communist regime's police paid him frequent visits. In his non-conformist way, Tichý embodied the opposite of the Socialist Man—a reactionary dissident, an Eastern-block hippy who was constantly turning his back on the political and social system that surrounded him. If others worked, Tichý would spend his day on the roof of his mother's house enjoying the sun. If others claimed their ideological integrity, he would simply not care. Yet, despite appearances, Tichý has never been just another lost soul. On the contrary, he has meticulously “carved” his path in life. Choices and decisions were aptly adopted a long time ago.
Born in 1926, Miroslav Tichý studied in the Academy of Arts in Prague, but after the Communist takeover in 1948, he sensed that the way things had turned was simply not for him. He retreated to his hometown, pursuing a solitary, poor existence away from public lights, exhibitions and the espionage paranoia of the Stalinist era. In the fifties, Tichý led a relatively normal, quiet life at his parents' house: he kept working on his modernist figural paintings and even participated in a group show in 1958, the only one ever; but in between, intervals for psychiatric treatment in clinics were beginning to become a routine. Then, in the early 1960s, the final rupture took place. Tichý progressively started neglecting his appearance and disregarding any rule of personal hygiene—he, the son of a tailor, would let his hair and beard grow and dress in a ragged black suit. As the chasm between him and the world grew bigger, so too did the repression exercised upon him by local authorities.
Miroslav Tichý spent a total of eight years in jail and suffered all kinds of persecutions just for being different. However, nothing would put his artistic spirit down. By the time of his eviction from his studio in 1972, Tichý had already dropped “painting” for “painting with light”. With the help of old, recycled cameras and lenses adapted with Plexiglas and tins he began photographing the leitmotif of his economical figure drawings: women! The yard of the family home provided the space for a laboratory and darkroom. Every day Tichý would walk for hours pressing the button whenever the lens asked him to. The streets became his studio. By nightfall he would be back home, developing his rolls of film. If essential photographic equipment and chemicals were missing, he looked for them among disregarded materials. The rest was fabricated out of paper tubes, plastic drain-pipes and cardboard. That was daily routine from the late 1960s until 1985, when Tichý gave up any involvement with photography for good.
The photographic oeuvre of Miroslav Tichý became the focus of international attention thanks to Roman Bauxbaum. Back in the sixties, when Bauxbaum was still a young child, he used to share much of his time with his peculiar neighbour. The Bauxbaum family was something of a patron for Tichý. Roman's uncle was a university friend and psychiatrist of Tichý, while his grandfather rented him the family attic room as a studio. It was there where Tichý would show young Roman how to fabricate pinhole cameras out of shoeboxes. Shortly after the Prague Spring, the Bauxbaum family emigrated to Switzerland and contact was lost with Tichý. Then in 1981, Roman—now a psychiatrist and artist with a Swiss passport—came back for a visit, the first of many to follow during which he befriended Tichý, spending hours going through his photographs and negatives.
Acknowledging the artistic integrity of the man and his work, Bauxbaum decided to take the task upon his shoulders and to let the art world know about it. In 2004 the Foundation Tichý Ocean was created. Since then, a series of publications and exhibitions in Seville, Arles, Zurich, London, alongside last summer's retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and this winter's show, “The essence of Forbidden Photography”, at the recently launched venue of Ivory Press Art+Books in Madrid, have caused sensation, and Miroslav Tichý is now considered to be one of the most significant discoveries of the last few years. In the meantime, life goes by peacefully in the small provincial town of Kyjov. Tichý has not come out of his village for the last fifty years nor does he plan to, less so when it comes to attending his own shows. He prefers to be “a prophet of decay and a pioneer of chaos” at home.
Women everywhere: at the bus stop, at the square of the church, in the pool; young girls and women walking, chatting, sun-bathing. Scenes from everyday life without any special charm obtain an exceptionally lyrical dimension through the camera of Miroslav Tichý. With their dreamful, ghostly quality they are diluted in the atmosphere, erasing dullness and ugliness in a way only words are capable of. It is impossible, given the era (1960s-1985) during which the whole of Tichý's photographic work was produced, not to connect these pictures with the prevailing historical circumstances. It is impossible, when watching time inscribing its stains on their texture, not to think of Tichý's fellow Czech and near-contemporary Milan Kundera, who, better than anyone else, captured the emotional alienation of the individual in Communist Czechoslovakia.
Semi-obsessive individuals on the fringes of resignation, mechanically executing their duties… Kundera's characters have a lot in common indeed with the female figures emerging subtly from the weary surface of Tichý's prints. These photographs are uneasy to read. Sensual and human, banal and profound at the same time, they carry with them an “unbearable lightness of being”. Should their interpretation lack an historical and political value, this is purely because Tichý has always been very far from the expressly political. Likewise, within Tichý's gaze there is no pleasure principle at work. Here again, voyeurism and desire become another mere excuse to define the bars of the cage that has always irremediably separated Tichý from reality, while taking on the dimensions of a much more generic argument specific to his era: the fundamental alienation among the human being and its historical present.
A sort of inevitable misperception of the external world imbues these pictures in their formal defects. Female bodies behind fences and silhouettes evoking the nurses of the balnearies who appear in the novels of Milan Kundera; the act of surrendering oneself to boredom and triviality; wrong people in wrong places who, deemed to suffer a misrecognition and displacement of their roles, choose trivial stories, trivial loves, and trivial endings as substitutes for life. Sensual women, aged and young, skinny and plump, aware and unaware of being gazed at—what difference does it make when the very gaze is damaged? Deviating to a non-consumed voyeurism, facing oneself with a desire that even if it were to be consumed, it would be as to discover the absence of desire behind the desire: “A woman, for me, is a motif. Nothing else interests me”, says Tichý. Far away from the fetish of the “éternel féminine”, this is all about women of Socialist Realism—women comrades. Tichý's wistful look abides them: “The erotic is just a dream anyway. The world is only an illusion, our illusion”. And so are ideologies. The horror before the mechanization of human consciousness and emotions is what finally clashes with these very images of bodies lying about Tichý's studio—rats and mice eating away their material relics. For the artist this is the fate that all his work should encounter, the challenge of surviving the waste-paper basket the same way he does. What is left now from all this past of fear are just these “small objects of obsession”. In the memory of Miroslav Tichý there is nothing else left save a tangible nothingness.
Tichý is looking at us through the fence. Even today when the old enemies are gone—among them, the policemen who on Communist holidays would knock on his door and take him to the asylum for “provisional normalization”—even today when international recognition has been achieved, the eighty-year old Tichý still opts for maintaining a safe distance, and, from this distance, he mocks us sardonically for paying homage to the artist and his work. “I am a star! A big star!” he laughs. And he is right to. Before a contemporary art panorama ruled by the aphorisms of market-strategists and pseudo-intellectuals, such a posture of activism and subversion becomes more current than ever.
Is Miroslav Tichý a photographer? Is he a painter? His art does not obey any strict categorization. It is not mere photography, painting or drawing, but rather a life-long performance: a kind of bio-philosophical approach, an exhibition of self-constructing madness and personal obsession, far more compromised, consistent and original than that of many others. Tichý has been done with photography since 1985. One day, he was through with it in the same way he had been with painting back in the late sixties. He was already on his way to the final touch, he had finally solved the mystery: the actual piece of work is himself!
Blurry pictures versus rotten frontiers and identities: their uncanny effect brings to our mind the out-of-focus visual universe of Bill Jacobson, the Pictorialists, even the screaming agony expressed in the self-lived diaries of Antoine d'Agata. The blurry images of Miroslav Tichý are not derivatives of a programmatic production. Under-developed and full of technical and formal shortcomings, they are the result of pure impulse, neglectful handling and a primitive photographic technology. And yet, their uniqueness resides precisely in their strikingly unusual formal properties. Maybe, after all, sharpness is all worn out; maybe this has always been the lens of the world—a lens made out of tins, eaten out by mice and silverfish, disrupting vision with its filthiness. Paradoxically, when we find ourselves looking at the surviving old photographs of Tichý, which show him as a perfectly normal young man enjoying the company of his fellows in the university years, their clearness scares us. An uncanny displacement of topos takes place, as if the world was heading irremediably towards the opposite direction.
One of the first solo shows dedicated to Tichý suggested a kinship between him and Jacques Henri Lartigue. Gaze and women do admittedly link the two artists, yet each one is positioned in opposite poles within the social hierarchy. The gaze as joy of life, this is Lartigue. What by contrast, predominates in Tichý is an obsessive self-confinement in one's mind. There is no way out, no space for feelings or any emotional expression whatsoever. Tichý definitively does not belong to the world he captures with his camera the way Lartigue did. His is a constant struggle to bridge the gap, to produce an order of elementary likeness so that an elementary communication can take place between us and his pictures. “Look for the closest thing to reality”, this is what Tichý is looking out for.
Bikinis and shorts, female bodies and then the hand which improves contours with a pencil, or which uses hand-made mats and frames as a way of putting things together. Even in the chaos there is a need for order! Blurs, spots, errors... “The worse the technique, the better the art!” That is the secret of Miroslav Tichý. “And for that, you need a bad camera. If you want to be famous, you have to do whatever you’re doing worse than anyone else in the whole world!” argues Tichý, but should we believe him? Rather than “defect”, maybe the secret of his work could well be this frenetic self-exile, whereby the artist's life lies at the mercy of Art. Hence the artist as a living piece invalidating life; hence, the hermit life of Tichý. The key is silence and self-withdrawal in order to trap the song of this world. Let us suspend thought for a moment and wonder: how many artists are able to take this compromise so far today?
It is difficult to place ourselves honestly before the artistic artifacts of Tichý. We like these pictures because they come out of the other world. Old photographs in their hand-made mats and hand-decorated wooden frames, these are the objects we carry with us, the ones we treasure. We like them as specimens of a reality that provides space for reflection and imagination. We face them with relief precisely because we know that it is us here and him there. Desire, disclosure, a pleasant suffocation; art keeps its treasures for a few. The frontier that separates us grows bigger. At the end of the day there is nothing left. Tichý becomes lost in the depth of the horizon…
All pictures: © Miroslav Tichý / Foundation Tichý Ocean
Represented by:
Foundation Tichý Ocean
Text by Natasha Christia
There are photographs that easily find their way into books, galleries and the academic community. They are deemed by fate to comprise another chapter in the history of photography. But there are many others whose path to light becomes constantly hindered by obstacles. Scattered within trashy studios, dusty thrift shops and forgotten family albums they call out for attention as hidden treasures ready to confide their secrets to us. Even if faded and in bad shape, the encounter with these old photographs produces tremendous joy. In our excavation-like attempt, we feel like archaeologists digging into the past. What the journey will bring is rarely certain, but, before a handful of photographs literally “stained” by years of adventures within boxes soaked by damp, everything comes into place. We can feel the shutter of the camera, not to say the aura of lives, stories and shared emotions. We can feel what Roland Barthes once described as the dreamful transportation of the “then” into the “now”–the past reviving into an eternal present.
Travelling through bits and pieces, our gaze is after the unseen, the unknown, the non-appreciated. We are longing for this magic revelation of the invisible to take place before our eyes. It is precisely this “unfinished business”—the “to-be-unfolded” fate of thousands of photographs—that renders the whole thing so enchanting to us. This is what photography is clearly all about: a story without an end. Throughout its history pretty much has happened, much more is to be discovered and, what's more, there are infinite ways to tell the same story. In this respect, photographs, when contemplated in different eras and contexts, become “reactivated” as distinct beings, embellished with novel visual properties. In doing so, not only they but also the human eye behind the camera is conferred, even if late, the posthumous glory it deserves on the shelves of history.
Miroslav Tichý: the man with the trimmed suit, a Diogenes-like figure, emerging out of oblivion… For over fifty years he lived in total reclusion in Kyjov, a small Moravian town. Unknown to most, he assumed the role of the misfit. For decades, neighbours avoided him, while the Communist regime's police paid him frequent visits. In his non-conformist way, Tichý embodied the opposite of the Socialist Man—a reactionary dissident, an Eastern-block hippy who was constantly turning his back on the political and social system that surrounded him. If others worked, Tichý would spend his day on the roof of his mother's house enjoying the sun. If others claimed their ideological integrity, he would simply not care. Yet, despite appearances, Tichý has never been just another lost soul. On the contrary, he has meticulously “carved” his path in life. Choices and decisions were aptly adopted a long time ago.
Born in 1926, Miroslav Tichý studied in the Academy of Arts in Prague, but after the Communist takeover in 1948, he sensed that the way things had turned was simply not for him. He retreated to his hometown, pursuing a solitary, poor existence away from public lights, exhibitions and the espionage paranoia of the Stalinist era. In the fifties, Tichý led a relatively normal, quiet life at his parents' house: he kept working on his modernist figural paintings and even participated in a group show in 1958, the only one ever; but in between, intervals for psychiatric treatment in clinics were beginning to become a routine. Then, in the early 1960s, the final rupture took place. Tichý progressively started neglecting his appearance and disregarding any rule of personal hygiene—he, the son of a tailor, would let his hair and beard grow and dress in a ragged black suit. As the chasm between him and the world grew bigger, so too did the repression exercised upon him by local authorities.
Miroslav Tichý spent a total of eight years in jail and suffered all kinds of persecutions just for being different. However, nothing would put his artistic spirit down. By the time of his eviction from his studio in 1972, Tichý had already dropped “painting” for “painting with light”. With the help of old, recycled cameras and lenses adapted with Plexiglas and tins he began photographing the leitmotif of his economical figure drawings: women! The yard of the family home provided the space for a laboratory and darkroom. Every day Tichý would walk for hours pressing the button whenever the lens asked him to. The streets became his studio. By nightfall he would be back home, developing his rolls of film. If essential photographic equipment and chemicals were missing, he looked for them among disregarded materials. The rest was fabricated out of paper tubes, plastic drain-pipes and cardboard. That was daily routine from the late 1960s until 1985, when Tichý gave up any involvement with photography for good.
The photographic oeuvre of Miroslav Tichý became the focus of international attention thanks to Roman Bauxbaum. Back in the sixties, when Bauxbaum was still a young child, he used to share much of his time with his peculiar neighbour. The Bauxbaum family was something of a patron for Tichý. Roman's uncle was a university friend and psychiatrist of Tichý, while his grandfather rented him the family attic room as a studio. It was there where Tichý would show young Roman how to fabricate pinhole cameras out of shoeboxes. Shortly after the Prague Spring, the Bauxbaum family emigrated to Switzerland and contact was lost with Tichý. Then in 1981, Roman—now a psychiatrist and artist with a Swiss passport—came back for a visit, the first of many to follow during which he befriended Tichý, spending hours going through his photographs and negatives.
Acknowledging the artistic integrity of the man and his work, Bauxbaum decided to take the task upon his shoulders and to let the art world know about it. In 2004 the Foundation Tichý Ocean was created. Since then, a series of publications and exhibitions in Seville, Arles, Zurich, London, alongside last summer's retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and this winter's show, “The essence of Forbidden Photography”, at the recently launched venue of Ivory Press Art+Books in Madrid, have caused sensation, and Miroslav Tichý is now considered to be one of the most significant discoveries of the last few years. In the meantime, life goes by peacefully in the small provincial town of Kyjov. Tichý has not come out of his village for the last fifty years nor does he plan to, less so when it comes to attending his own shows. He prefers to be “a prophet of decay and a pioneer of chaos” at home.
Women everywhere: at the bus stop, at the square of the church, in the pool; young girls and women walking, chatting, sun-bathing. Scenes from everyday life without any special charm obtain an exceptionally lyrical dimension through the camera of Miroslav Tichý. With their dreamful, ghostly quality they are diluted in the atmosphere, erasing dullness and ugliness in a way only words are capable of. It is impossible, given the era (1960s-1985) during which the whole of Tichý's photographic work was produced, not to connect these pictures with the prevailing historical circumstances. It is impossible, when watching time inscribing its stains on their texture, not to think of Tichý's fellow Czech and near-contemporary Milan Kundera, who, better than anyone else, captured the emotional alienation of the individual in Communist Czechoslovakia.
Semi-obsessive individuals on the fringes of resignation, mechanically executing their duties… Kundera's characters have a lot in common indeed with the female figures emerging subtly from the weary surface of Tichý's prints. These photographs are uneasy to read. Sensual and human, banal and profound at the same time, they carry with them an “unbearable lightness of being”. Should their interpretation lack an historical and political value, this is purely because Tichý has always been very far from the expressly political. Likewise, within Tichý's gaze there is no pleasure principle at work. Here again, voyeurism and desire become another mere excuse to define the bars of the cage that has always irremediably separated Tichý from reality, while taking on the dimensions of a much more generic argument specific to his era: the fundamental alienation among the human being and its historical present.
A sort of inevitable misperception of the external world imbues these pictures in their formal defects. Female bodies behind fences and silhouettes evoking the nurses of the balnearies who appear in the novels of Milan Kundera; the act of surrendering oneself to boredom and triviality; wrong people in wrong places who, deemed to suffer a misrecognition and displacement of their roles, choose trivial stories, trivial loves, and trivial endings as substitutes for life. Sensual women, aged and young, skinny and plump, aware and unaware of being gazed at—what difference does it make when the very gaze is damaged? Deviating to a non-consumed voyeurism, facing oneself with a desire that even if it were to be consumed, it would be as to discover the absence of desire behind the desire: “A woman, for me, is a motif. Nothing else interests me”, says Tichý. Far away from the fetish of the “éternel féminine”, this is all about women of Socialist Realism—women comrades. Tichý's wistful look abides them: “The erotic is just a dream anyway. The world is only an illusion, our illusion”. And so are ideologies. The horror before the mechanization of human consciousness and emotions is what finally clashes with these very images of bodies lying about Tichý's studio—rats and mice eating away their material relics. For the artist this is the fate that all his work should encounter, the challenge of surviving the waste-paper basket the same way he does. What is left now from all this past of fear are just these “small objects of obsession”. In the memory of Miroslav Tichý there is nothing else left save a tangible nothingness.
Tichý is looking at us through the fence. Even today when the old enemies are gone—among them, the policemen who on Communist holidays would knock on his door and take him to the asylum for “provisional normalization”—even today when international recognition has been achieved, the eighty-year old Tichý still opts for maintaining a safe distance, and, from this distance, he mocks us sardonically for paying homage to the artist and his work. “I am a star! A big star!” he laughs. And he is right to. Before a contemporary art panorama ruled by the aphorisms of market-strategists and pseudo-intellectuals, such a posture of activism and subversion becomes more current than ever.
Is Miroslav Tichý a photographer? Is he a painter? His art does not obey any strict categorization. It is not mere photography, painting or drawing, but rather a life-long performance: a kind of bio-philosophical approach, an exhibition of self-constructing madness and personal obsession, far more compromised, consistent and original than that of many others. Tichý has been done with photography since 1985. One day, he was through with it in the same way he had been with painting back in the late sixties. He was already on his way to the final touch, he had finally solved the mystery: the actual piece of work is himself!
Blurry pictures versus rotten frontiers and identities: their uncanny effect brings to our mind the out-of-focus visual universe of Bill Jacobson, the Pictorialists, even the screaming agony expressed in the self-lived diaries of Antoine d'Agata. The blurry images of Miroslav Tichý are not derivatives of a programmatic production. Under-developed and full of technical and formal shortcomings, they are the result of pure impulse, neglectful handling and a primitive photographic technology. And yet, their uniqueness resides precisely in their strikingly unusual formal properties. Maybe, after all, sharpness is all worn out; maybe this has always been the lens of the world—a lens made out of tins, eaten out by mice and silverfish, disrupting vision with its filthiness. Paradoxically, when we find ourselves looking at the surviving old photographs of Tichý, which show him as a perfectly normal young man enjoying the company of his fellows in the university years, their clearness scares us. An uncanny displacement of topos takes place, as if the world was heading irremediably towards the opposite direction.
One of the first solo shows dedicated to Tichý suggested a kinship between him and Jacques Henri Lartigue. Gaze and women do admittedly link the two artists, yet each one is positioned in opposite poles within the social hierarchy. The gaze as joy of life, this is Lartigue. What by contrast, predominates in Tichý is an obsessive self-confinement in one's mind. There is no way out, no space for feelings or any emotional expression whatsoever. Tichý definitively does not belong to the world he captures with his camera the way Lartigue did. His is a constant struggle to bridge the gap, to produce an order of elementary likeness so that an elementary communication can take place between us and his pictures. “Look for the closest thing to reality”, this is what Tichý is looking out for.
Bikinis and shorts, female bodies and then the hand which improves contours with a pencil, or which uses hand-made mats and frames as a way of putting things together. Even in the chaos there is a need for order! Blurs, spots, errors... “The worse the technique, the better the art!” That is the secret of Miroslav Tichý. “And for that, you need a bad camera. If you want to be famous, you have to do whatever you’re doing worse than anyone else in the whole world!” argues Tichý, but should we believe him? Rather than “defect”, maybe the secret of his work could well be this frenetic self-exile, whereby the artist's life lies at the mercy of Art. Hence the artist as a living piece invalidating life; hence, the hermit life of Tichý. The key is silence and self-withdrawal in order to trap the song of this world. Let us suspend thought for a moment and wonder: how many artists are able to take this compromise so far today?
It is difficult to place ourselves honestly before the artistic artifacts of Tichý. We like these pictures because they come out of the other world. Old photographs in their hand-made mats and hand-decorated wooden frames, these are the objects we carry with us, the ones we treasure. We like them as specimens of a reality that provides space for reflection and imagination. We face them with relief precisely because we know that it is us here and him there. Desire, disclosure, a pleasant suffocation; art keeps its treasures for a few. The frontier that separates us grows bigger. At the end of the day there is nothing left. Tichý becomes lost in the depth of the horizon…
All pictures: © Miroslav Tichý / Foundation Tichý Ocean
Represented by:
Foundation Tichý Ocean
Text by Natasha Christia
Published in Eyemazing 02/09
