Journal for Art, Theory and Related Zones No. 40

In the first study, titled “Political Interventions in the Operation of Art Galleries and Museums in Central Europe,” Ondřej Horák and Andrea Kaňkovská examine the influence of conservative governments on cultural institutions in Poland, Hungary and Slovakia, specifically on changes in their staffing and programming between 2010 and 2025. “Lessons drawn from the cases of the other V4 countries do not lead to a simple conclusion about the need to protect culture from political interference, but rather to the understanding that the cultural field is constantly shaped by power relations that cannot be completely eliminated—only made more transparent, slowed down and distributed in such a way that possible regime changes do not disrupt basic institutional, above all personnel, continuity,” the authors summarize at the end of their contribution.

The following article by Zuzana Krišková is more historical, yet it is still not far removed from the preceding study in time or subject matter. Specifically, it focuses on the normalization period at Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts, examining various kinds of power relations that, at the institutional level, influenced personnel policy in the art world. Why did the post-August purges have a relatively limited impact at the Academy, compared with other art higher education institutions in Czechoslovakia, and why did the Academy therefore retain considerable personnel continuity?

Jiří Melzmuf returns readers to the heated present. In an article on the the transformation of the relation between image information and its medium, he works with a classic Marxist conceptual framework in order to reveal the structural connections behind the seemingly effortless overproduction of visual content with which we are inundated on social networks and digital platforms. According to the author, the apparent immateriality of photography primarily serves to conceal the drastic exploitation of natural resources as well as human labor, making it invisible and more difficult to challenge.

In our society, however, it is not only the reproduction of visual content that is technologically mediated, but also reproduction in a far more intimate sense: the biological continuation of the human species itself. In her text, Denisa Michalinová addresses contemporary artistic projects that in various ways thematize ectogenesis, that is, fetal development outside the body. Through specific examples (the installation UNBORN0X9 and works by the Keiken collective), she traces both the history of and current thinking about this technology, which could serve as an emancipatory tool, or, conversely, as a tool that intensifies traditional inequalities among various disadvantaged groups.

The final study in the issue was written by Eva Skopalová. Inspired above all by Paul Ricoeur and M. M. Bakhtin, she uses the concept of the chronotope to consider the exhibition as a spatial medium. The exhibitions a-Historische klanken (1988) and The Age of Charles IV in the History of the Nations of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (1978), which work with a polytemporal combination of works from different historical periods, are presented by the author as discursive media that enabled the articulation of nonlinear time through a specific constellation of artifacts.

The fortieth issue of Notebook then concludes with Tomáš Murár’s review of Milena Bartlová’s two-volume Dějiny českých dějin umění [History of Czech Art History] (Prague: UMPRUM 2020, 2025). Although Bartlová declared an ambitious theoretical apparatus in the introduction to the publications, according to Murár her account remains closer to a description of institutions, publishing activity and the mutual relationships among individual actors. At the same time, the reviewer acknowledges that this is a relatively widespread problem in the Czech context.