Čestmír Suška

"Well, I did finish my studies, I did my thesis, which I did on the subject of the figure, in time. I worked with the whole 3D space. The figure had realistic proportions, but it didn't have some of the details, for example, it didn't have a face. And it didn't have genitals. It was a symbol of a figure that stood in a 3x3x3 meter space, and there were three different shadows coming from its legs, which depicted real moments. One shadow was like in shadow theatre, when you make animals with your hands, a kind of allegory. The other shadow was like when the sun is setting, long and drawn out. And the third was a real shadow. And the committee came and they looked at it, Professor Bradáček already suspected some kind of trouble, so he said that he had nothing to do with it, that I was a kind of strange, gifted, but going in a strange direction that he didn't understand. That's how he covered his back. Anyway, the committee said I deserved a C. So I passed the thesis. Then there was a graduation ceremony, so the parents of the students came. For my parents, it was significant for them; they didn't go to university, so they were happy that I graduated, that I became an artist. They had business cards printed that I was an academic sculptor. We were given tubes with these diplomas. I was called up, I got the tube, I went to the back, I opened it there, but there was no diploma inside. It was a scam, a hoax. I went to my professor, this Bradáček, and I said, 'What now? When am I going to get my diploma?' He said that, in short, a decision had come from above, from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, that I couldn't get the diploma, that the figure didn't have a face or genitalia, so it was unfinished. And it turned out that there was a sculptor, Kolůmek, who allegedly called the Central Committee, saying that they were giving out diplomas for this strange imperialist art. So I didn't get the diploma on that account, and Bradáček told me that if I finished the figure in sculptural detail, they would give me the diploma."

"It was secret, but it was actually legal. The organiser was the Nerudovka Theatre, where contemporary art exhibitions were held, yes, and it was partially tolerated, it was a little theatre, so let them put something up. There was an exhibition of Kurt Gebauer or Magda Jetelová. And there was the epicenter of the whole exhibition where we had some smaller things and you could get a map of all the yards. There was an opening and still not much was known about it. But then the word spread, and a lot of people came. It was amazing at the time, something like that hadn't been done in Prague for twenty years, so people were excited. The police found out about it and started to deal with it. They closed the Nerudovka Theatre, but they couldn't close the exhibition itself because it was held in the backyards of the houses where people lived. And for some reason they didn't dare to liquidate the buildings. I guess to keep it unknown. But the word spread because Short Film did a weekly feature on the exhibition. At that time, every cinema had a weekly short before every film. That means that at the time when they were trying to close the exhibition, people who came to the cinema saw that the exhibition existed, and the State Security missed it. After that, there were really crowds of people who wanted to see the exhibition, secretly reproducing plans on Xeroxes. On the doors of the houses where the exhibition was, there were originally officially issued posters, but the State Security tore them down, so we would put them up again or draw the symbol of the exhibition with chalk. It became an amazing battle, with an undercover officer standing next to every house trying to find out who the artist was."