Ludvík Hlaváček

“One day the school headmaster, Jiří Musil at the time, called me to his office. Sitting there were four American girls asking me if I didn’t want to found and run the Soros Center for Contemporary Art. I told them that, first of all, I didn’t even know what that was. They explained it a little bit until I told them I was interested and by all means yes. The next day we were assigned a big space to work in. I brought the Englishwoman Pavla Niklová with me and we started the center. We had to wait a half year to get any money because American bureaucracy is maybe even worse than ours. At the end of the year everything got going. We got computers and files with instructions on what to do. They included detailed descriptions on how to announce a grant, but also how to inform applicants that they got one or not.”

“Charlotta and I went to the [Church of] Saint Voršila on Národní Street. We got permission to go in through some institute of the academy. We said that we were there to ring the bell and two workers in white coats joined us. We climbed up to the attic above the vault where I fastened the cord to the bell and at the right time we started to ring it. Suddenly, shots were fired and someone started yelling from below. A moment later, Russian soldiers were climbing up the ladders after us, shooting their guns into the air. The four of us climbed down to the rear part of the vault and tried to hide ourselves. Of course, the sniffed us out immediately and shoved us down all the way to the refuge island by the trams, where the interrogation began. The guys in the white coats said that they were only taking care of the structure itself, that it was their job. One way or another, Charlotta managed to convince them that she was there with them, and then all of the suddenly I was all alone. Luckily, two cops in blue uniforms happened to pass by who said they would deal with me. The Russians handed me over to them and they took me around the corner and let me go.”

“I had studied art history since 1965, but I didn’t know anything about philosophy. In the mid-1960s, I met the professor himself through Honza Patočka [Junior], and my first wife and I started visiting him. He always treated us to punch that he liked to prepare. It was a crucial moment for me. The moment I started to come into contact with phenomenology and had only just started to scratch its surface, I said: Boy, you’ve just wasted another five years of university studies. From how I saw it, it was a total revolution in what thinking and art was supposed to be. Again, I was back at the beginning. Later on, it was a bit different and ten years later I ended up going to, just for pleasure, some lectures by Professor Pešina, his beautiful diapositives, and then I realized that everything was far more complicated. But, Patočka’s lectures were fantastic irrespective of the fact if they took place at the university or in apartments. Still today I compare it to being part of a great biography. At the end, one had to stand up, legs quivering, and go back to the real world. It was in those moments that I realized that thinking had to be something more than remembering the dates and names of works of art.”