Fascinations: Michael Bielický

For her thesis project, Eva Jiřička decided to plant flowers in the abandoned flowerbed on the sidewalk in front of the Academy of Fine Arts. She later invited the evaluation committee outside and asked them to board a rented bus. The bus then made a full three-hundred-sixty-degree turn on top of the flower bed, involving all of the participants in its destruction. The graduating artist thus confronted herself, the thesis committee, and the head of the studio, Michael Bielický, with the question of the relationship between the students and the institution.

In a performative intervention on the Czech Television show Artóza, Ondřej Brody drew attention to the problematic nature of art evaluation—and this was more than a decade before the art community began to address this topic in connection with the awarding of prizes. Brody was invited to the show by one of the jurors, Michal Pěchouček, who—along with the other jurors, historian and curator Vlasta Čiháková Noshiro and performer Jiří Surůvka—was confronted by a quite immediate physical manifestation instead of an attempt at self-presentation.

In one of his first video studies, Bielický explores the physical limits of video representation. He separates bodily movements into several monitors or lets them be deconstructed through rapid editing and the disruption of the video signal, creating a peculiar type of video-body.

This short film was made during Petra Vargová’s studies abroad at the art academy in Stockholm, Sweden, where she had professional technical facilities at her disposal. Using a virtual set and technical consultants, she embedded herself into footage from the fighting video game Dead or Alive 2. Thus, instead of a generic character, the artist herself fights virtual monsters in the virtual game.

In 1982 Joseph Beuys created one of his fat installations in his studio at the academy in Düsseldorf. Fat Corner consisted of five kilograms of butter placed in the corner of a room five meters above the ground. After his death in 1986, the installation was accidentally removed and destroyed. Bielický’s work refers to this infamous event and is also a tribute to the personality of the eminent artist.

Bielický realized the virtual tele-performance Exodus during his time at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. His journey through the Israeli desert took place simultaneously in the physical and the virtual space using the then pioneering technologies of GPS and satellite internet.

One of Bielický’s first videos, filmed during his studies in Düsseldorf. The recording of spontaneously occurring situations was shot in the studio on Double Super 8 film. However, with its subsequent conversion to video, we watch an unbroken film strip. This creates a new type of spatial communication between the individual frames of film and the action in them.

Although Bielický works with video, he actually understands video as the point of intersection between story, object, and electronic signal. The same is true of his miniature Im Herbst, in which he combines shots of nature, the body, and TV monitors.

Elen Řádová and Tomáš Mašín’s student work draws on the genre of action films, which are characterized by emotionally intense and violent scenes. Excerpts from period blockbusters are supplemented with visual effects and edited in a way that drives the particularities of the action film genre to the point of absurdity. The resulting visual whirlwind thus deliberately escalates—and thereby diminishes—the dramatic impact of the original footage.

In 2003, an international peace conference was held in Ramallah in the West Bank, and Tamara Moyzes, who was studying abroad in Israel at the time, decided to cross the border and attend the conference. She even managed to sneak into a press conference with Yasser Arafat and make a video recording of it, which she then intercut with footage of her difficult journey across the border.

Janka Vidová made this video while studying in the New Media Studio of Michael Bielický. The artist borrowed an analogue video camera from the studio and filmed her visit to the region of her hometown in Slovakia. Using visual effects and instrumental music, she edited the resulting footage into a poetic film that captures the dreamy atmosphere of the snowy countryside.

Rabbi Löw was not only a prominent Kabbalist and alchemist of seventeenth century Prague but also a prophet of new visual media and cybernetics. Bielický’s video composition evokes a world seen through the eyes of Kabbalah. Flowing water merging with television static symbolizes the process of birth, movement, deviation, and the passage of time.

This video portrait of Nam June Paik was made during Bielický’s studies in Düsseldorf. Paik’s gaze steadily confronts the lens of a camera attached to the iconic Paik-Abe video synthesizer, his face dissolving in the mutating video signal.

Perpetual motion is the central theme of this video composition in which Bielický connects various physical and mechanical movements in several layers. It is also the first video in which his characteristic style of video collage is fully established.

In 1990 Bielický returned to the theme of perpetual motion. In Perpetuum Mobile 2 he made use of the at that time new possibilities of video editing and processing to create a complex, rhythmic world of human and mechanical movements.

Tamara Moyzes graduated from the New Media Studio in 2005 with this project consisting of a three-channel video installation, for which she received the award for the best thesis project of the year at the Academy of Fine Arts. She later edited the triptych into a kind of promo video, which highlights her central theme as an artist, namely the sexualization of violence in a political context. The protagonist of the film is Liad, a twenty-six-year-old Jewish citizen of Israel who studies Middle Eastern political science and also makes a living as a dominatrix. Due to her political beliefs and free thinking with regard to sexuality, she often finds herself in conflict with the laws of her own country.

The circumstances surrounding the creation of the work Tamagotchi are not entirely clear. The electronic toy of the same name was released in 1996, but the author and other contemporaries place the film’s creation a few years earlier. The animated dog character in the film calls for the viewer to feed it. The inability to respond to the virtual pet’s needs reveals the nature of the emotions evoked in the viewer by this digital interaction.

This video, in which two men—one of them in a suit, the other naked—engage in their daily morning routine in a shared bathroom, was made by Radim Labuda as his first video performance. Labuda’s early work is characterized by an interest in the dynamics of partner relations as well as broader social relations, in the representation of the power relations of domination and subordination but also subversion. Representations of physicality, including nudity, can imply self-acceptance, sincerity, and decisiveness or at other times inadequacy and insecurity, depending on the context.

The erotic charge of the title is underscored by its visual treatment in the film’s opening, with pink typography evoking the aesthetics of hourly hotels and titillating shows from the 1990s. Instead of sexual imagery, however, the film consists of an animated choreography of two apples, reminiscent of the surrealist stop-motion films of Jan Švankmajer.