This story starts with the mail lady. The time is the spring of 1984, the place a block of sooty apartment buildings in Prague. The elderly mail lady drags two shopping bags full of little packages. Each box is roughly the size of a small stack of CDs. Some feel light, some are heavy. Most have been sent as registered mail; all are addressed to one Joska Skalnik, an abstract painter.
“I know how hard this has been for you, ma’am,” Jana says, catching up with the woman down the street. “You’re so wonderful to be putting in all this extra effort. I’d like to thank you so much, ma’am.” The haggard woman clutches her worn mail bag, startled by the candy and flowers. “This is just a small token of our appreciation. I know how tough it’s been. But the end is in sight, believe me.”
Eleven years have passed since those strategic carnations had wilted in the mail lady’s vase. Czechoslovakia has ceased to exist–the 60 Slovak artists who took part in the project now live in a different country. But while the maps of Europe quickly became obsolete, the beech-wood boxes kept their power. Jiri Zlebek’s Orator still hits its target: a loudmouth bureaucrat barks banalities, while parts of him are filed down to fit the dimensions of the tiny enclosed space that could easily stand for his state of mind. In Bedrich Dlouhy’s Irresolution, the fat fly stares from its tiny chair at a chunk of red meat hanging over a mysterious drum set. The folding cube in Jan Wojnar’s Book of a Geometrical Shape tempts your fingertips to lift its feathery layers and create a phantom paper box inside the wooden one. Why do these images linger in the mind? Where does their power come from?
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“My idea at the time was to take a sort of a snapshot of the state of the Czech culture because so much of it was invisible, underground,” explains Joska Skalnik, in town recently to open Minisalon, an exhibition of the boxes at the Chicago Cultural Center (through April 2). “You certainly couldn’t get any sense of what people were doing in the official galleries.”
The beech-wood boxes were beautifully crafted by an old Slovak carpenter whom Skalnik never met. The man was obviously “an ace craftsman,” but he was only the first in a long string of people whose anonymous help had made the project possible. “Most of the boxes were hand delivered to the artists by various Jazz Section members. I’d hear that someone was going to Bratislava and I’d ask them to take my letter and three or four boxes to some painters there.”
The police were looking for subversive literature, letters, documents of any contacts with the West, or anything having to do with the Jazz Section. Joska Skalnik was the secretary of the cultural organization, working closely with its head, a good friend by the name of Karel Srp.
“Me, I keep quiet,” says Skalnik. It was a common dissident strategy to refuse to say anything in these interrogations. “So the guy repeats his question. I just look at him. After a while he blows up: “What the hell is this? So you won’t talk at all, or what?’ And I say, “No, no, I’ll talk.’ So he shuts up and we look at each other. But now he’s pissed, so it doesn’t take long before he blows up again: “So what is this? Are you going to talk or are you not going to talk, damn it?’ I remain calm and say, “I told you I was going to talk.’ So he goes, “All right! So can we get around to it this year, you think?’ So I look at him and say, “Do you mind repeating that question? I forgot what you said.”‘
