"What sort of debut are we talking about?"

Why did you decide to bring out your debut prose work this late?

I wouldn’t really consider it to be my “late debut prose work”. I’ve learnt in the Czech underground – or have been forced to by circumstances – to interconnect art with life to near perfection. With such an outlook on life, all borders of the specific art forms completely dissolve and thus cannot be compartmentalized into literature, music or art. Besides, therein lies the crux of my definition of performance art as a form of unity of life, politics (understood as concern for tribal matters) and art. It’s a kind of a multimedia primordiality, a primeval harmony.

As long ago as in the days of the Czech underground, I would interlink everything together having written, drawn and delivered several life’s statements. So what sort of debut are we speaking about? It‘s only on the surface that it seems like a form that is different to the performance expressed through my body, sound or image. It has been a long-known fact that language has been an innate and inherited part of us and that various languages are one and the same thing, ostensibly articulated through different sounds. If you sweep a brush held by a performance artist, triggering a swishing sound, signs describing the performative swishing of the said brush and the sound of the wind will subsequently appear on a page...

Is an English translation of your book in the pipeline? Perhaps it would strike a chord in an English-speaking environment even though it is also faring well in the Czech Republic (having reached the third place in the book sales chart of the Czech distribution company Kosmas).
I’ve mentioned some of the stories from my book to someone who works at the Harvard Review and she was begging me to let it have translated. She gave me contacts for a New York-based company. I had been trying to get in touch with them for two weeks and eventually got through to an agent who asked me how many copies of the first edition had been sold in the Czech Republic. I was instantly sick to my stomach and felt like throwing up into her crafty business ear. I sent her all the details and haven’t heard from her since.

Actually I’m quite glad because I felt as if I was selling my own negation of moral values. I felt like a hypocritical prostitute who does something completely different to what he writes. But that’s probably the fate of all of us living in today’s deplorable totalitarian capitalism, which distills everything from love to friendship into cold hard cash. One of the schools I teach at is the New England Institute of Art and I have a colleague there, a friend who teaches poetry. After that experience, I asked him if he would help me with the translation and he was thrilled. We’ve already started working on it. It’s similar to the old underground times and the second culture – do it yourself at home and fuck the “first culture professionals". I send him my rough English and he then changes it into something that sounds better. Initially he wanted to poetize it but we then agreed to leave it in that rugged English.

Will you continue to write?

As I’ve said before I’ve never stopped and never will stop “writing” – performing. It only depends on the occasion if it materializes into writing, an event or sound of the word or movement, an installation or a drawing, political activism or prose work.

Which topics are you dealing with as an artist right now? What are your plans?

I don’t really plan things and try to live in the present as much as possible. I’ve learnt this from the Roma, my brothers. Even though some things are indeed planned out such as my readings in the Czech Republic in May. But if you insist on a certain topic it would probably be the effort to shift the weight of art into a moral level and bolt from aesthetics and cognitivity as much as possible.

You’re set to appear at the Pilsen performance festival which is organized by the young artist Michal Krysl aka Anonymous. You do visit Czech Republic then and surely also come here on private occasions. What is your impression of the political and social development of this country in the wake of the revolution?

I think the Velvet Revolution was hijacked by hustlers – both local and foreign - who had been already lurking behind during the former “totalitarian regime”. A moronic restoration of capitalism followed and we´d almost had a chance to expel it from the system. We lost the revolution. There‘d been a chance to develop something more human and instead we are under the thumb of “capitalism“ – as today’s metamorphosis of the perennial slavery calls itself. We have definitely not freed ourselves, to the contrary. And if somebody considers slavery with a longer and slightly more lax chain leading to the nearest shopping centre a better situation than the communist regime, he probably – as memorably proclaimed by Albert Einstein - “has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice“.

I nurtured my moral values in the Czech underground of the so-called second culture. Nobody wanted to compete, nobody was interested in rivalry or selling art as a piece of meat. Nobody cared about a career or getting rich. We wanted to live authentically, be in the present, honour art as the most crucial spiritual quintessence of life, eschew censorhip of both thought and word, champion solidarity and genuine friendship, ceaseless socializing, instill limitless freedom and accept the fact that we are only humans who fuck, eat, shit and piss and have immense fun while doing it. When I tell my university students about these principles of the Czech second culture they always ask me: And why were you against the communists when you were actually communists yourselves? We need another revolution.

Have you considered moving back to the Czech Republic after the Velvet Revolution?
Perhaps I’ve become an anarchist person of the “world” and going back in time is not possible anyway. I might go for a walk to the land that is “private and privatized by nouveau-riche pigs“, which is scattered with Czech trees and rivers. Though I will never comprehend how can anybody privately own a land anywhere. In this respect I have become an American Indian who will never accept the “western“ cultural idiocy and philosophical perversity which always leads to wars – even the most recent ones.

Do you follow contemporary Czech literature?
Rather than the current international literature I tend to follow language and text in contemporary performance including the Czech one. Timeless and experimental writing by Milan Kozelka and Petr Štengl or Guma Guar’s work with language and sound, Milena Dopitová’s feminist performances or the spiritual and conceptual events courtesy of Vladimír Havlík and František Kowolovski and others are all brilliant.

Interview by Jaroslav Balvín

Photo Jan Bloch

Milan Kohout’s readings in the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 2011 – confirmed dates

13. 5. – Polička – Theatre Club
16. 5. – Bratislava – Hopkirk
17. 5. – Olomouc – Theatre Tramtárie
18. 5. – Opava – Art klub
19. 5. – Nová Paka – Novopacké sklepy
20. 5. – Prague

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