Here Be Dogs: Documenting the visual culture of the Czech Indie scene

Abstract

The eye has always been suspect in rock culture, after all, visually, rock often borders on the inauthentic ... It was here--in its visual presentation--that rock often most explicitly manifested its resistance to the dominant culture, but also its sympathies with the business of entertainment. (Grossberg 1993:195) For Saturday Night Live he wore the same clothes from the previous two days: a pair of Converse tennis shoes, jeans with big holes in the knees, a T-shirt advertising an obscure band, and a Mister Rogers style cardigan sweater. He hadn't washed his hair for a week, but had dyed it with strawberry Kool-Aid, which made his blond locks look like they'd been matted with dried blood. Never before in the history of live television had a performer put so little care into his appearance or hygiene, or so it seemed. Kurt was a complicated, contradictory misanthrope, and what at times appeared to be an accidental revolution showed hints of careful orchestration ... He obsessively--and compulsively--planned every musical or career direction, writing ideas out in his journals years before he executed them, yet when he was bestowed the honors he had sought, he acted as if it were an inconvenience to get out of bed. (Cross 2001:2) In May 2011 I went to an opening party at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York City, where Hollywood stars and celebrities, including Mickey Rourke, Quincy Jones, and Naomi Campbell mingled near a mish-mash of Eastern European-related artworks, including Robert Crumb's comic book rendition of Kafka's Metamorphosis, Vladimir Tatlin's statue Monument to the Third International, and an exhibition called Revolutionary Film Posters, a trove of Russian constructivist imagery from between the wars. (1) It was a bizarre sight for me, a person who grew up in 1980s Czechoslovakia, a satellite nation in the Soviet Bloc. In the 1980s, Czechoslovak cultural policy, theoretically and declaratively (if not always in practice) respected the norms of socialist realism, and it was in the name of the very ideals promoted by these posters that Western popular culture (and Kafka, for that matter) were banned as bourgeois and decadent imperialist propaganda. Here in the spectacle of a Chelsea gallery, the stars of Hollywood--the most visible exponent of American capitalism--celebrated the repurposing of political propaganda into aesthetic objects, as if theatrically reasserting capitalism's victory over the ideologies of the Soviet Bloc. This victory is not always that absolute in the former Czechoslovakia, and although its been more than twenty years since the ideologies were officially abandoned, the impact of their pre-1989 influence can still be traced in many areas of life in the Central European region. My aim here is to confront some of the issues raised by the above situation, especially attitudes towards art, fashion, and popular culture in the context of post-totalitarian Czech Republic. My focus will be the relationship of members of the 1990s and contemporary Czech independent music scenes to visual presentation of their own and others' musical objects and performances. As a cornerstone I am going to use Zde jsou psi/Here Be Dogs, a Czech/ English book about visual culture of Czech independent music scenes that I edited in 2010. (Fellow Czech journalist Martina Overstreet served as a producer for the book). The book features thirty-two musical projects now active in the Czech Republic, each introduced by a) a studio portrait of its personnel by the photographer Adam Holy, b) a representative set of the project's visual communications--costumes, album covers, booklets, flyers, posters, documentary and promotional photographs, video projections used during performances, merchandise, banner ads, computer wallpapers, buddy icons, etc., and c) a short text written by a third party author familiar with the Czech music scene. The image of the visually compelling part of the indie scene is complemented by Dusan Tomanek's documentary photographs, which were taken of Czech audiences in the past four years at festivals, clubs, and various other venues. …