Let's hear it for Soul!

After a pretty fantastic fall break, I was thoroughly exhausted for Halloween. I stayed in and studied; the Czechs don’t do Halloween anyway. Which, as I attempted to explain to a classmate earlier today, makes sense because our ‘Hallow’s Eve’ is not their ‘Hallow’s Eve’. They celebrate All Souls Day on November 2 rather than the first.

Once I was caught up on my work, I walked to the grocery store and spent a whopping 250kc on groceries because we have no food in the apartment. This is called post-vacation empty-fridge syndrome. (As a side note, if you do the conversion and decide that I’m being sarcastic, know that that’s a cheap bill in NYC but a moderate one in Prague and a seemingly steep one after I spent so little on break.) I bought a pumpkin, and last night mashed up half of it with a potato to feed myself and some friends. Yum.

I fell back into my classes very easily. I even remembered where we were supposed to meet for History of Architecture! We went to the Rudolfinum to start talking about historicism. The Rudolfinum is a neo-renaissance building that houses a concert hall—which I was in at the beginning of the semester when I saw the Philharmonic—as well as a gallery space. The current exhibition has actually generated quite a buzz around NYU because one of our professors is the curator. Otto Urban put together Decadence Now! based on the idea that decadence has been a strong influence in modern art. My professor explained that Decadence is the name of movement in writing and art historically associated with the 19^th century. I’m obviously not an art historian (or else I should have known this), but seeing as styles seem to build off and react to each other, it made sense to me that Urban would see the influence of Decadence attitudes carrying over. I was interested to see how he would use the exhibit to point out its role in current art.

The concept of the exhibit was interesting. The pieces were grouped around 5 excesses and their manifestations. Excess of the self, for example, is depicted as pain. Excess of beauty becomes pop, of mind becomes madness, of body becomes sex, and of life becomes death. I don’t know anywhere near enough about art theory to agree or disagree…although I wonder if the same kinds of motifs can be found in pre-Decadence art as clearly. If so, the argument that Decadence influenced contemporary art by establishing these relationships might have to be reworked to consider where Decadence got those ideas from originally. Regardless, I thought the exhibit was organized really well. Aside from the unusual and interesting concept for arranging the pieces, the whole exhibition just flowed very well.

With my family coming to visit soon, I keep thinking about where to take them. I’ll probably leave this exhibit off the itinerary. Here’s my reasoning: The original artists of the Decadence movement were all about breaking taboos. Sure, Félicien Rops had some racy works…but his paintings were original. One might even call “Pornocrates” amusing. The original Decadents were artists who were making fun of the Victorians for 1) taking themselves too seriously and 2) pretending to be squeaky-clean and proper all the time. Maybe I would consider taking my parents to an exhibit with such pieces as those Rops made…the violence and eroticism had a target (of sorts) and was creatively presented. It’s interesting. As far as the pieces from Decadence Now! go, there were very few that would merit a pause. Personally, a sculpture with taxidermied animals having an orgy on a teeter-totter just does nothing for me. This isn’t the same as saying ‘I didn’t like the painting of the fairies having oral sex.’ I didn’t like it, but there are plenty of pieces of art that I don’t like, yet can appreciate. These really weren’t even pieces I could appreciate. Most of these works didn’t even strike me as effective pieces of ‘shock art,’ though you could tell with some that they were trying. Really they were.

Lest I sound too terribly negative, I did really enjoy one of the large portraits in the first gallery. I didn’t write down the artist’s name, but the portrait was a really dynamic one of the head of a person wearing a black S&M mask screaming against a stark white background. Maybe not the most aesthetically appealing content, but the photo itself was striking. Farther on in the exhibit were photographs by Ivan Pinkava, a painting by Josef Bolf and a fantastic skeleton-wheel sculpture by Steven Gregory, all of which were appropriately morbid (they were in the death room). I found these to be the most remarkable of the gallery’s works…aside from the architectural details of the gallery itself.

Since November 2^nd fell on a Tuesday, I was able to take the time after IR and go to Olšanské Cemetary. I wanted to see how All Souls day is marked in the Czech Republic, and the city’s largest cemetery seemed the place to do it. There are over a million people buried there, and I entered through a back gate into one of the older corners. There were a few people milling around. Some placed candles and flowers; some were just walking. Overall it was pretty quiet. With the autumn colors of the trees and the hanging birdfeeders by some graves, I felt like I could have been in a city park. The Flora Palac mall is built set into one corner of the cemetery, so I strolled between graves while the IMAX sign glowed overhead. That was a little surreal feeling. Then I stumbled into one of the newer sections and suddenly there were people everywhere. They were sweeping away leaves and dust, placing flowers, lighting candles, re-painting guilding on headstones…There were old women matter-of-factly straightening out the sites of their family graves (most were family graves). There were sad looking old men holding their hats, children running and playing games, and heaps of wreaths piled on a few of the freshest graves. One of the candle-dispensing machines had a sign on it saying, I think, that it was out of candles. Jan Palach’s grave was, of course, glowing from its blanket of candles. As I walked out the main entrance, I wound through booths and tables selling everything one could think of to leave at a loved one’s grave.

Personally, I prefer graveyards this way. It makes me sad to think how color-less and cold the few I’ve been in back home are without the bunches of Chrysanthemums and red-glassed votive candles. One of my friends joined me after her class and commented that she avoids even the funerals of family members because ‘it’s just too much.’ This makes me terribly sad. So maybe the dead don’t care how many flowers they receive or how many people come to their funeral. That’s not what such things are about. Visiting the cemetery is a way of paying respect to the lives lived by those who are buried there and celebrating the lives they touched. Attending a funeral is about both of these things, and further it is about standing with the others who have been left behind as well. You pass on the stories of the dead and you keep living to craft your own stories. That sounds rather like a certain conversation between Sam and Frodo…Guess I read too much Tolkien growing up.