approaching the stuff of miroslav tichy, or possible uses for a coat

8/12/2019 Approaching the Stuff of Miroslav Tichy, or Possible Uses for a Coat

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Approaching the Stuff of M iroslav Tich

or

Possible Uses for a Coat

byAndrew Philip Hobden


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from Miroslav Tich published by Steidl & ICP (2010, p.309)


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Czechoslovakian painter, photographer and printmaker, Miroslav Tich, polarises opinion. The

combination of his extreme marginality in relation to his social setting, his propensity for psychotic

episodes and his soiled and wild appearance have led most readings and appraisals of his artistic

work. Who was this Miroslav Tich? A type of the romantic notion of the artist: inspiration in

solitude, dislocated from greater society? A garden-variety beggar common to every town and city? A

voyeur who watches and photographs the women of his hometown with the phallus of a camera he'd

deftly whip out from under the hem of his sweater? A madman who ought to have been

institutionalised? A dissident? A holy mendicant? A flneur ? (Wallis, 2010, p.15) How do we

approach or place Tich in the midst of this spectrum of dismissive to mythopoeic descriptors? I

propose that we simplify our analytic gaze (avoiding any reductionistic oversimplification) to one

component of his practice: his coat. What could be revealed about Tich by imaginatively transposing

ourselves into his coat (his embodied position), by donning and doffing it or holding it up to consider

the concealed Tich through its holes & frayed ends? What may come to light by shaking or smelling

it, by an attempt to decipher its composition? Clothing obfuscates yet reveals. An analysis of the

significance of Tich's coat allows us to speculatively grapple with the substance, the stuff that makes

up his unique, artistic vision, while also orienting him within his social context.

Reader, let us imagine that we are walking through a boreal woodland and spy some

indeterminate thing protruding from the forest's detritus. At first glance it doesn't seem out of place

surrounded by decay, but we also realise that it doesn't belong there. Regardless, we have found it,

we are confounded by it as an object, and out of a desire to make sense of it, we unearth and hold it

from our body in order to get a better view of it. This is what we see: a mass of grey to soiled brown

materiality. After a minute's observation, we notice that there are sleeves and an opening at the front

and ascertain that it is a garment, perhaps a coat or jacket of some sort, and the perceived material is

mostly cloth. But the sleeves and back of the garment appear to be covered by something akin to fur

or feathers the cloth is snagged, unravelled, a network of threads and wisps of frayed ends. The

overall impression is that it is made out of the hide of some mythic hybrid of a creature, such as a


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griffin. With closer scrutiny, we notice that it has been patched with expertise and, surprisingly, in

among the frayed and outspreading threads, it is also held together by wires. From this we deduce an

intentionality in its construction that the designer wished the garment to appear as it does.

From this initial, fictive encounter with Tich's coat, the first thing that strikes us is its

indeterminate nature. In Claire Pajaczkowska's essay, On Stuff and Nonsense: The Complexity of Cloth ,

while relating cloth to "stuff" or "unspecified materiality," she writes that cloth is experienced "...as

neither object nor subject, but as the threshold between, as a liminality where meaning decomposes

into materiality, and threatens nonsense." (Pajaczkowska, 2005, p.221) Considering Tich's coat in

light of this "unspecified materiality" of cloth, Tich goes a step further. He takes something that is

already indistinct and makes it even more vague. He intentionally obfuscates the stuff of cloth and

makes a nonsense; he undermines the expected appearance of a coat and reinvents the notion of a

coat and invests it with new significance by modifying it with the first person, singular, possessive

pronoun: "my coat," adding a hidden, autobiographical meaning. Tich sets out to purposively

conceal beneath a nonsensical appearance, and this obfuscation characterises Tich's entire life and

practice, which is enveloped by this same intentional indeterminateness.

To illustrate hidden, biographical content

revealed in indeterminate materiality, let us look at

the artist, Chohreh Feyzdjou, who was born into a

Jewish family in Teheran. Pennina Barnett describes

in her essay, Soft Logics and Material Worlds ,

Feyzdjou's work as

...boxes of strange dark forms, like insects orputrified fruit; rolls of canvas and papermounted on great rusty scaffolds or stacked incorners, like cloth waiting to be unpacked, paint-stained rags, scrunched and mounted in neatrows on gallery walls all covered with layers of wax and dark pigment. Her work speaks of

making, process and materiality of stuff. (Barnett, 2009, unpaginated)

Boutique Product of Chohreh Feyzdjou, 1973 -1993 Installation


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Contained within the stuff of Feyzdjou's artwork is a revelation of the reality of living as a religious

minority in a Muslim country; in other words,

her autobiography is infused within her

materials. Barnett continues: "In Feyzdjou's

rolls of canvas we glimpse both textile and text.

For they resemble both the wares of textile

vendors, and the sacred rolls of the Torah, where

meaning is generated, time and time again." (Barnett, 2009,

unpaginated) Like the "my" that, for Tich, modifies his coat,

Feyzdjou appends her name upon these articles of

"unspecified materiality" (which to a Western ear further

mystifies), investing them with concealed, autobiographical

meaning. Like Feyzdjou, Tich also lived under a potentially

antagonistic regime, the Czech Communist state, and a

distrust of the state incurred a need to conceal his identity, just as Feyzdjou concealed and revealed

her identity between layers of materiality, dense with hidden, potential import.

As part of our exegesis of the Torah of Tich's coat, we should consider the frayed edges of

Tich's life and practice. As Roman Buxbaum, a neighbour of Tich's and his principal biographer,

elucidates, Tich s approach did not distinguish between art and life. (Bux baum, 2010, p.312)

Actually, there is an elision between his habit of living and his practice as an artist, the one informing

(or forming) the other, an unspecificity. Although he structured his life around the pursuit of his

practice, the final appearance of the artistic object is reliant on Tich's physical embodiment, his

bodily movement through space and time. For example, Buxbaum describes his infamous

[photographic] postpr oduction methods (Buxbaum, 2010, p.312) as including:

Boutique Product of Chohreh Feyzdjou,

1973 -1993 Installation

BoutiqueProduct of

Chohreh Feyzdjou, 1973 -1993 Installatio


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...sitting on the photographs, sleeping on them, cutting off the edges, improving thecomposition with a ballpoint pen or colored pencils, folding them, using them under a table legto keep the table from wobbling, spilling coffee or rum on them, throwing them out thewindow, forgetting that he threw them out the window (even when it begins to rain), thenfinding them again and saving them, sticking them onto a piece of cardboard, giving them amat, and, finally, noting the TV listings on the back. (Buxbaum, 2010, p.320)

We see here illustrated the indistinguishable interplay of the intentional and the accidental. His

artwork could be perceived as mere byproducts of his habit of living, perhaps even similar to the

generation of physical waste products, but he also intentionally places the artwork-in-the-making in

the way of his daily habit of living. Tich s coat is emblematic of this conflation of the accidental and

the intentional, of life and art, not only by its indeterminate nature but also by the fact that itrepresents Tich's embodied perspective from which he practised his art and that in which he lived

his daily routine.

Actually, Tich perceived his coat as a piece of art in its own right. In the early 1970s, he told a

cellmate that he considered his clothing a work of art and that this was the very latest fashion in

Paris and London, which they called patchwork. (Buxbaum , 2010, p.312) Another tale reports that

he "tried to ensure his ragged coat for 100,000 Czech crowns then the equivalent of a brand new

luxury car." (Buxbaum, 2010, p.312) Here, we have Tich valuing his coat equivalent to the

estimation of a fine art piece of an established artist.

Let us reveal more biographical significance latent in the substance of Tich's coat. His father,

the tailor of Tichs hometown of Kyjov, fabricated the coat. Buxbaum writes that it is "a piece of

clothing the son never took off a coat for life. Day and night, he would stay in the same clothes,

fixing them with wire and string when they began to fall apart." (Buxbaum, 2010, p.312) Tich's coat

is a symbolic gift from tailor father to fabricator son, symbolic of a trade passing from father to son, a

trade that Tich practises in reverse: for as a tailor makes functional garments of socially accepted

appearance from the "unspecified materiality" of cloth, Tich tailors art objects enveloped in


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from Miroslav Tich publishedby Steidl & ICP (2010, p.310)


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"unspecified materiality" by undoing socially recognisable objects and forms and reinventing or

masking their functionality.

Now let us consider the coat's liminal quality, "the 'second skin' of..." his coat "...that literally

and metaphorically envelops..." his "...body and identity". (Pajaczkowska, 2005, p.233) Joanne

Entwistle in her essay, The Dressed Body , refers to

clothing as forming "part of our epidermis it lies on

the boundary between self and other." (Entwistle,

2007, p.93) Entwistle speaks of the outer limits of the

body as "'leaky' the body is semipermeable, open

and therefore must be managed by culture."

(Entwistle, 2007, p.96) So dress is also experienced as

a thing alien to us, that it "does not only belong to our

bodies but to the social world as well." (Entwistle,

2007, p.93) Given this tension of the dual nature of

clothing, Tich's coat could be perceived as being

inside out, that the unquantifiable underside of

embodiment (that which is indefinite or 'leaky' or

indeterminate) is made visible as his projected, social persona.

Reader, let us return to the forest and our experience of the coat. Our arm is tiring, for we have

been holding the coat aloof to scrutinise it as an object, but let us now subjectivise our experience of it

and don it. As we put our right arm through the sleeve, we are aware that this garment is strange to

our body, that it suits someone else's: the wire pokes us randomly through the cloth and the length

(generally) does not match our arm. We put our left arm through the second sleeve and feel the same

constraining discomfort along that arm and our back and shoulders. We are conscious of it as foreign,

but it also incurs an "epidermic self-awareness," a phrase coined by Umberto Eco, quoted by

Entwistle. (in Entwistle, 2007, p.93) It causes an acute awareness of our own body by the fact that it


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is unsuited to our body but constructed for another frame, for Tich's. While visually we are partly

obfuscated or disguised by the coat, in a sense, the coat seeps deeper into our being: a conflation of,

or perhaps it is a dialogue between, our body and his is now occurring.

An additional element forces an awareness of the embodiment of the coat's prior owner: its

smell. (We'll assume that since Tich is not long past deceased, that the coat has only recently been

discovered and discarded in the woodland and still bears the former wearer's scent.) Malodorous

indeed it is, for as we have mentioned the wearer never took it off, and the resultant stench produced

by his declining hygiene still clings to the cloth and impinges upon our olfactory sense. His coat

perhaps exceeds the metaphor of a "second skin": the fabric is comprised of more than the usual

quantity of epidermal dead cells and oils, the typical products of our body's "leaky" nature; this

furthers our experience of its indeterminate materiality, for it borders on becoming a hide or a flayed

skin. Once our repulsion is mastered, we are sharply contrasted with, but equally physically

proximate to (in places almost skin to skin), Tich's embodied essence. Not only does this imagined

experience of the coat place us in proximity to the recently deceased Tich's embodiment (a

netherworld, so to speak), it also postures us toward his social context.

Now, what happens if we leave the solitude and safety of the forest and go about our normal,

daily business while wearing Tich's coat? Suddenly our experience of the coat is dramatically

altered, for we become aware of the quizzical looks, the averted eyes, the concealed whispers-to-

neighbour's-ears of our impromptu audiences. To our audience, our social persona is obfuscated,

disguised; we are virtually invisible. For us, strangely abstracted from ourself, the coat is now a

costume, and we are performing a hybrid of our persona and Tich-once-removed.

Buxbaum briefly mentions the performed aspect of Tich's work and life, that he has a

"propensity for the Gesamtkunstwerk " (Buxbaum, 2010, p.312) or a tendency toward, as J. A. Cuddon

translates the Wagner-coined term, the "complete art work" (Cuddon, 1998, p.342), which synthesises

disparate components and implies a performability and theatricality due to its all-encompassing

scope. In 1950, a few years before the fabrication of Tich's social persona in the guise of his coat and


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soon after the Communist takeover, like many intellectuals who fled Prague for the safety and

anonymity of small town life, Tich returned home to Kyjov, the confines beyond which, from 1958

until his death in 2011, he never willingly went. It was in the early 1950s that Tich exhibited a

penchant for the theatrical and the dramatic. Working for amateur dramatic groups in Kyjov, he

"painted stage sets and built giant marionettes, which he could make dance beautifully. He was

known as srandista , or the jester." (Buxbaum, 2010, p.308) The concept of

the Gesamtkunstwerk contextualises Tich's lack of distinction between art

and not-art, between the practice of art and the habit of living. If he

deliberately performed life in an adopted costume, then everywhere

becomes his set, and everything, that he is engaged with on this ubiquitous

set, becomes either a prop for his performance or a part of the dramatic

action (which has symbolic significance within the greater narrative).

Hence, the quotidian is transformed into a grand, all-enveloping, theatrical

performance, a Gesamtkunstwerk , containing a concealed narrative, embedded with hidden meaning.

Gen Doy writes of the implications of Gilles Deleuze's trope of the baroque fold: "the subject is

dissolved into a 'chaosmos', co-existing with its environment in a 'play of folds'. There is no

distinction between the self and environment... ." (Doy, 2002, p.150) So, the fugitive identity of the

individual subject is intrinsically indeterminate in nature; it co-exists inextricably with its social

context. Can we see any evidence of this dependence of identity upon its social context, this "play of

folds", in such a socially marginal character such as Tich's? We shall assert that tailored into the

folds of Tich's coat (which is a costume for the Gesamtkunstwerk and into which his identity is

infused) is an anticipation of the reception of its appearance by his audiences. But who were Tich's

intended audiences; in other words, from whom did he disguise himself in the costume of his coat?

We shall posit that Tich had three distinct audiences: the Czech Communist authorities, the

inhabitants of Kyjov and himself. And his coat functioned quite differently depending on the audience

Tich as a young manphotographed with an actressfrom Miroslav Tich publishedb Steidl & ICP 2010, .306


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concerned. Given the parameters of this essay, we shall principally concern ourselves with one of

these the Czech Communist authorities.

What is the "operative function" (Deleuze, 1993, p.3) of Tich's coat in relation to the macro-

social structure of Czech Communism? There's an oppositional function tailored into his coat, and in

order to fully appreciate Tich as dissident, we should turn our attention to Tich's activities prior to

his massive psychotic breakdown of 1957. Tich was one of the "Brno Five...: five painters who dared

to oppose the official doctrine of socialist realism in favor of modernist, and particularly expressionist,

ideals." (Buxbaum, 2010, p.308) The Czech Communist authorities of the 1950s generally equated

appearance and form with substance; in short, appearance reveals intention and ideology. [And it is

this propensity with which Tich plays.] After the death of Stalin, the Brno Five planned an exhibition

in Prague. This daring act precipitated Tich's massive psychotic break, which compelled him to turn

on his dissident friends as "fascists" (Buxbaum, 2010, p.308) and which, in turn, occasioned the

gradual fabrication of Tich's performed social persona. However, Tich's activities in the Brno Five

commenced his cat-and-mouse game with the Communist authorities, a game continued privately in

his Gesamtkunstwerk of the ostensible a confounding, complex "'play of folds'" of the apparent and

the concealed. Buxbaum writes that Tich "became the living antithesis of progressive thought, of the

Marxist theory of history moving in a straight line." (Buxbaum, 2010, p.312) Tich's appearance so

galled the local, Communist authorities that they commissioned

...a sixty-page 'expert's report on hygiene.' ...The report was read in full during [a court] trial.

...The expert witness had concluded his report with the following determination: Tich'sclothes were 'with certainty discovered to have contained two lice and a cockroach.' When thejudge asked him what he had to say to the accusation, Tich replied: ' Summon them aswitnesses !' (Buxbaum, 2010, p.312)

We can hear the " srandista " giggling to himself in that imperative. But there is something in Tich's

undermining of Czech Communist bureaucracy that is reminiscent of the nonviolent resistance of the

Czech citizen's response to the Soviet quelling of the Prague Spring of 1968: they refused to provide

water or to feed foreign soldiers and "chang[ed] or remov[ed] directional road signs" to confuse the

invaders. (Wallis, 2010, p.13)


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from Miroslav Tich published by Steidl& ICP (2010, p.318)


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However, beyond an implicit indictment of Communism, Tich's performed appearance

possesses something of the post-apocalyptic in it: a performing of a fictive, future existence after the

disintegration of all social superstructures and ideologies. An element of this performance of life after

social disintegration is an extreme self-sufficiency, foraging what he needs from the natural or from

what society regards as refuse. So, Tich's performed life (made apparent in the guise of his coat) not

only indicts the Marxist ideal of progress, but it could equally be an indictment of the materialism of

capitalism.

Briefly, let us consider the underside of this ostentatious, oppositional function of his coat. Due

to his marginal status manifested by the appearance of it, his coat functioned as a carapace or a cloak

of invisibility that enabled him to uninhibitedly practice his art, unobserved by both the local Czech

Communist authorities and the residents of Kyjov. Dismissed as eccentric, they could not perceive

him as engaged in anything serious.

We have no illusions that this essay about Tich's coat is merely an approach to, a first

impression of, the stuff of Miroslav Tich's life and practice. Indeterminateness characterises not only

his coat but also his practice as an artist and his habit of living, a "chaosmos" that makes it impossible

to distinguish the intentional from the accidental or the found from the created. As Tich performed

this indeterminateness in the costume of his coat, he transformed the quotidian into a grand, all-

enveloping, theatrical performance, a Gesamtkunstwerk , that simultaneously functioned to oppose the

Czech Communist authorities and to enable him to pursue his practice as an artist unobserved a

dual purpose of drawing attention to his appearance and the concealment of his practice. Before we

end this introduction to the stuff of Tich's art and life and then look for ourselves at his photographs,

paintings and art objects, let us end with some of his self-commentary, koan-like in quality by

confounding yet stimulating thought:

"I'm a samurai. My sole aim is to destroy my enemies." (Buxbaum, 2010, p.312)


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"A mistake, a mistake. That's what makes the poetry, gives it the painterly quality. Philosophy is

something abstract, but photography is concrete, a perception. The eye, what you see." (Buxbaum,

2010, p.319)

"I am the prophet of decay and a pioneer of chaos, because only from chaos does something new

emerge." (Buxbaum, 2010, p.313)

from Miroslav Tich published by Steidl & ICP (2010, p.313)


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from Miroslav Tich published by Steidl & ICP(2010, p.314)


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Bibliography

BARNETT, Pennina (2009). Soft Logics and Material Worlds. Second Skins: Cloth and Difference .Symposium at Goldsmiths, University of London, unpaginated.

BUXBAUM, Roman (2010). Miroslav Tich: Tarzan Retired. In Miroslav Tich . Gttingen:International Center of Photography and Steidl, pp. 306-322.

CUDDON, J.A. (revised by C.E. PRESTON) (1998). Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and LiteraryTheory . 4th edn. London: Penguin Books.

DELEUZE, Gilles (2006). The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque . (Tom Conley. Trans.) London:Continuum. (Original work published 1993)

DOY, Gen (2002). Drapery: Classicism and Barbarism in Visual Culture . London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd.

ENTWISTLE, Joanne (2007). The Dressed Body . In L. WELTERS and A. LILLETHUN (Eds.). The FashionReader . London: Routledge, pp. 93-104.

PAJACZKOWSKA, Claire (2005). On Stuff and Nonsense: The Complexity of Cloth. Textile , vol. 3, issue3, pp. 220-248.

WALLIS, Brian (2010). What Happens When Nothing Happens: Miroslav Tich and the Mysteries ofEveryday Life. In Miroslav Tich . Gttingen: International Center of Photography and Steidl, pp. 11-20.

approaching the stuff of miroslav tichy, or possible uses for a coat

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