You're an artist, educator, managing director of Flusser Photo Studio, podcast host, and avid cyclist. Who else is Peter Dub, and how do all of these levels complement each other for you?
To begin with, I should say that I personally don't necessarily see dividing lines between the categories. My life has been connected to art for the last twenty years. Working at the Academy of Fine Arts feels like a natural phase of life for me, looking at what agreement on art really means beyond the individual artist's thinking, and for similar reasons I ended up running the Skutek Society for five years. In the podcast, I try to talk about topics that don't get much space in the classroom but are integral to the artistic enterprise. Studio Flusser, on the other hand, brings me back down to earth from the academic heights (or rather from elite isolation), because our clients are mostly large architectural studios, based on the real need for interdisciplinary collaboration, which, despite all kinds of proclamations, does not flourish much in art. In a nutshell, I'm not exactly a paragon of modesty, but I'm always looking to learn and grow, which relativizes at least my relationship with cycling, as it takes me two hours in the morning to finally convince myself to get on a bike. My surroundings think of me as a workaholic, but maybe I'm a pretty lazy person who's afraid that if he stops, his world will fall apart. At the same time, my Instagram stories don't necessarily describe my entire life.
Your latest series is called Memes and Totems. What themes do you explore in it?
Memes and Totems is all about belonging to the language of different social bubbles, about information overload and the creation of related symbolic shortcuts. In my career, like many of my peers, I feel myself standing somewhere in the middle of life. There is no going back and the front is very blurry, or worse - too clear. I regularly come to a similar realization at various intervals over the years, when I become too dominant in a specific art form in my work, subsequently panic about possible mannerisms, and flip the record. But in the end one always runs into oneself and one's own limits. At the same moment, I am fascinated today by the disappearance of the artistic canon I grew up on as a student. I often think about how to convey its foundation to our students or simply to people who are interested in art. There is a decent gap between the way my generation gained experience and what shapes the mindset of the zoomers or the alpha generation. Just for the record. I'm not talking about a generational conflict, but primarily about the apparent shift of attention from brick-and-mortar galleries to the virtual universe of the boundless internet. Personally, I see the change as highly problematic for art, but I take it as a given that we all have to learn to work with.
The works in the Memes and Totems series bear titles such as Funeral Joy, Deep Selfie, or Happy Death at Last? Is hyperbole and irony important in your work? And how can the title help the viewer read the work?
The origin of the series comes from when I read Neil Gaiman's American Gods. I was fascinated by the metaphor of the struggle for world domination. On the one hand there is Odin, a somewhat faded representative of the old gods, and on the other there are new deities like technology, media and globalisation. Odin is clearly past his zenith, a bit of a backstabber, and he is fighting a battle that cannot be won. Yet the reader's sympathies remain with him. I think the book is a beautiful metaphor for how we as humans don't change much, we tend towards the old order or security, while what really scares us is change and the uncertainties that follow from it. Of course, a similar argument takes place in the institution of art, with the added paradox that art automatically contains the expectation of innovation, but at the same time, it is true that not many new truths about the world can be found in art anymore. Contrary to optical appearances, it is not art itself that changes, but above all its status and the language we use to talk about it. And as for irony, the one closest to me is therefore the Socratic one, which pretends ignorance and keeps asking whether our truisms are still valid. In the matter of the title of a work, I am convinced
that if it is absent from a work, the work is left open to the dangerous possibility of misinterpretation. Moreover, John Berger argues that the notion of innocently approaching images, may inevitably lead to remaining unconscious. At the same moment, I realize that I am establishing a contradiction in terms, as I try to program most of my works so that they can be perceived, at least to some extent, purely through sensory experience and without knowing the context of their creation. In fact, I have long been fascinated by the ambivalence between the two values.
You run a painting studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. What do you consider key when working with young people and what approach do you try to take in your teaching?
I have been running Painting 4 with Marek Meduna since 2018. At the beginning, we were pedagogically clear that we mainly wanted to act as a discursive duo. But this was an insurmountable problem for the then AVU led by the rector Tomáš Vaňek - despite the ubiquitous discourse about alternatives to master studios - and not only for our pair. It took us more than two years to push through a formal change despite virtually non-existent legislative obstacles, but the principle of our work within the studio has not changed. We believe in a plurality of artistic approaches, substantive critique, and an ordinary concept - work. That is also why today we run a studio that is very diverse both in its composition and foundation. Our youngest student is twenty years old, our oldest student is forty-three. The former is interested in abstract painting and is studying philosophy in parallel, while his classmate paints exclusively realistically and has worked for the Salvation Army for several years. Both of them are good examples of the fact that the key to being selected for M4, besides the complicated category of talent, is one's own disposition and the assumption of honest work. The dominance of our teaching is that we try to inspire and awaken enthusiasm in individuals as much as possible, leaving their natural qualities, outlook on art or even political beliefs entirely up to their own discretion. I think we're much more like pilots helping to navigate unknown waters than we are like helmsmen setting a course. Moreover, we recognize that we are not recruiting exclusively to "our" studio, but to the broader arts community, which is a pretty damn annoying responsibility, because there should be orders of magnitude more people studying at the school, failing miserably, but finding real answers for themselves first and foremost. However, AVU is still an exclusive club with partitions separating individual studios, disciplines and approaches, which is largely evident in the current crisis related to the (non)dismissal of former rector Maria Topolčanská.
Your studio was featured in the documentary by Adela Komrzý and Tomáš Bojar, Examination of Art, which drew criticism of art education from the wider public. How did your personal participation in the documentary affect you and do you think it was a step in the right direction for AVU?
I will start from the end. If AVU had made the documentary within the means of the time, it would most likely have resulted in a six-hour introverted work that would have been at best understandable to a handful of insiders, but more importantly would have hardly crossed the media boundaries of Artalk. It should also be added that Adéla and Tomáš made an authorial statement about what they found most interesting about the school, not necessarily an objectively all-encompassing documentary about AVU. The whole project evoked such a strong response, mainly because the camera and the chosen editing emphasised a certain place on the map of art, but perhaps even more significantly, it drew attention to quite ordinary human confrontations in situations where we are all somehow coming to terms with institutional structures that are an inseparable part of
contemporary art. I'm well aware that this can be a borderline intimate and prickly image if only because the positions of applicants, faculty, and school staff are different, but it's in that human interaction with something as imaginary as the notion of high art that I see the most important value of the entire film. After all, irony, awkwardness, or even unguided moralizing have also been associated, for example, with the work of Václav Havel, whom we often primarily personify and, like Art Exam, perceive in superlatives of black/white. Havel was not the prototype of the action hero, but he certainly cannot be denied his position as an exceptional social glossator of his time. It seems to me that the role of educator, and to a large extent also the role of public figurehead, necessarily entails not only a corresponding degree of responsibility but also a necessary dose of openness. The latter may be uncomfortable on occasion, but it is one of the pitfalls that there is no getting around in the school and within the field. All the more so, in the way the film ultimately resonated, I find it extremely important at the school to cultivate more courage in each other rather than a nurturing hypersensitivity wrapped up in the myth of artistic untouchability, and hence independence from the world beyond the academy.
Since 2022, you've been creating the podcast AFTER AVU, which explores the possibilities of making it in the contemporary art field after graduation. How are you enjoying this new role for you, and is there a universal blueprint for a successful career as an artist after graduation?
PO AVU surprisingly, I enjoy it as much as I enjoy teaching. But it is a different, and necessarily public, sound after all. We try to balance the project thematically, content-wise, and gender-wise so that AVU pays attention to topics that inherently contain personal messages but are essentially universal experiences of different generations or artistic disciplines represented on campus and beyond. Personally, I want the podcast to be informative, institutionally self-critical, but at the same time send a positive message inside and outside the school. Important to me is the knowledge that the alumni community, or the general AVU audience, are much broader entities than the group of recent graduates and alumnae who naturally receive the most attention. And the universal guide to a successful career as an artist after graduation? I'm not sure if there is anything like that, if only because every graduate and alumna imagines something quite different by the term success. And actually, that's kind of okay. For me, anyway, the important thing is to love art and if it doesn't fulfill me, to be able to admit that and pursue something else in my life. It's great when someone manages to answer a similar question in their studies, but I'm afraid the real answer lies in the years after college. In my opinion, the key is to work with real commitment and to expose oneself openly to possible confrontations, because otherwise one risks spending years in an illusion of oneself, which often leads to a suffocating bitterness or to a determined academicism.
In addition to established artists like Krištof Kintera and Kateřina Šedá, you also interview recent graduates. What difference do you perceive in the approach of these generations?
The conditions in which today's students study and enter the scene have changed significantly. Our generation entered the scene with no illusion of ever making a living from art, simply because the art market was virtually non-existent. There was no hit or miss with the running of art institutions, so naturally a number of alternative spaces and projects were created that now seem impossible, or at least unsustainable over time. Following the communist nightmare, we tended to avoid large collectives rather than expect the state to organise them through grants. Our planet was much dirtier, but it did not suffer from climate anxiety. Dictionaries were less correct, punk more punk, beer more beer, and turpentine considerably cheaper. I could write an endless list that, like "nostalgia for the AVU of our youth," goes nowhere, because every generation has its challenges, benefits and woes.
In 2020 you exhibited with Josef Mladejovsky at the Telegraph Gallery. With then chief curator Jan Kudrna and exhibition curator Domenico de Chirico, you put together an exhibition called Tabula Rasa Breach. What role did this project play for you?
It was a truly memorable exhibition for me in many ways. I deliberately invited Pepa to the upcoming exhibition after being approached by Honza Kudrna. I have liked his work very much for a long time. Moreover, at a similar time we both began to radically cross the boundaries of the hanging picture, which eventually led to an agreement that the common motif of the exhibition would be "the column". Domenico, on the other hand, I hardly knew and I was interested in the possibility of importing someone from abroad to the Czech Republic, not the other way around, as is usually offered. The Telegraph was a fairly new and unglamorous space at the time, and outside of Prague, where I was always interested in exhibiting to interact with new audiences. However, by openly collaborating with Robert, I also poured gigabytes of internet hate on my head. With a rather naive delay, I realized for the first time on that occasion how emotions work and arguments don't work in the echo chamber, but also how much we are now simultaneously pushing ourselves into identity bubbles. Cynically, one could say that I underwent all of this for a one-week exhibition (given the first coming wave of COVID, the ensuing quarantines and cancellations of cultural programs). But the truth remains that this particular exhibition was a major formal turning point in my current work.
The Telegraph's stairwell space currently houses your works from the Porn Star Selection series from the Robert Runtak Collection. How is the viewer supposed to associate the works with the theme of the porn industry specifically?
Porn Star Selection is somewhere between René Magritte's oil paintings from the Key to Dreams series from 1930 and Jan Šerých's series of paintings called Indexes from 2008. Magritte shows in a surrealistic way the conflict between image, language and reality, while Indexes refers in short to categorized lists of pornographic websites, while among the entries the author excluded all items that can be understood as explicitly sexual. I knew Magritte's paintings mostly from books, and first saw Indexes live at Honza's exhibition Best of All Bad Solutions at Galeria Blansko. Together with the subversive title of the exhibition, they kept me awake for several years. My series was inspired by the artistic names of porn actresses whose nicknames often include motifs of different colours: Sarah Gold, Sasha Grey, Alexis Silver, Tori Black, Delta White, etc. In addition to the fact that the surfaces of the individual circles are made in metallic colours, the soft circles also refer to the physicality of our bodies. The result is a hypertrophied, lascivious image and thousands of unwitting clicks to my website in search of pornography, not art. In 2021, my next series, titled Palindrome: PAIN & GAIN, followed the series and focused on female black bodybuilding and its ideal of beauty. But more on the stench of gyms, the glare of the spotlight, and Vera Mikulcova's portrayal next time...
Jana Bernatova & Petr Dub: The Asymmetric Equation (Etcetera ART), 2023
