Michal Blažek

“When I was at grammar school, they told me they could recommend me for university only after a year of practical experience. When I tried to apply to the Academy for the third time, it didn’t seem to matter any more. I later found out why: Helsinki was being prepared, and the Communists wanted to brag at the conference that they even allowed the children of expelled party members to study. When I was accepted to the Academy on the third try, they summoned me and two friends to the student affairs department and asked: ‘Were your fathers expelled from the Party?” We tried to dodge the questions as best we could: ‘We don’t know, we’d have to ask...’ And the student coordinator said: ‘No, don’t worry! We need it, we won’t throw you out, on the contrary!’ That had me staring, how things kept changing...”

“The Communists had it planned out nicely economically: they worked out that we had five thousand artists here, they reckoned that the average pay was two thousand crowns a month, they came up with a law that for every construction, half a percentage had to be spent for artistic activities, and they calculated that artists can thus earn ten million crowns. When they divided ten million by the number of artists, it worked out to two thousand, which was the average pay. But of those ten million, nine were taken by the two hundred members of the Union of Visual Artists [UVA], and one million was left for the other five thousand people. [Q: It would probably be good to point out that the union decided about everything, right? You couldn’t just organise your own exhibition...] You could do whatever you wanted to, but you couldn’t exhibit in all galleries. In Brno there was the Socialist Youth Union club Trněný, where they held exhibitions, the cultural secretary for Prague 10 organised exhibitions in the cultural centre... [Q: And when you wanted to buy art equipment?] You could, but there was an awful lack of it. The UVA members knew what would be in stock, they bought it up, and there’d be nothing left for you. You couldn’t even get plaster back then! When I came to Holland, I said that for me, democracy means being able to get plaster. There was no plaster! You wanted to make statues, but you couldn’t because there wasn’t any plaster to be had. Say for a month.”