/Sculpture, everything between timelessness and duration/
Concentrate, they told the person with ADHD

I am standing on a hill in the countryside.
“Time is a point, I can feel it. I look at the landscape and I am in it. I see a statue, I perceive space. I am standing in the statue.”

The lecture is a personal reflection on Czech sculpture over the last eighty years, with a special emphasis on the period 1948–1989 and its repercussions after 1989. It traces how ideological pressure, craft traditions, the influence of strong personalities, and the disrupted continuity of the field have been reflected in both creation and teaching. It asks whether Czech sculpture of the second half of the 20th century and the present day carries with it, alongside its strength, a certain cultural or messianic complex.

The lecture does not look at the Czech environment in isolation, but in tension with the broader global context, in which tradition, institutional authority, and the need to redefine the very meaning of sculpture similarly clash.

A typical example is Bourdelle’s critical stance towards Rodin: “I was his student. Today, I am Rodin’s opponent. I owe him a lot, a lot in terms of technique, but that’s all. He killed, he killed all his students. I got rid of his influence… and then he said to me: Bourdelle, why are you looking for something else? And he was angry. He thought he had worked his way to perfection, he thought he had brought the art of sculpture to its final stage.”

It is precisely in this oscillation between heritage and the need to find one’s own language, between continuity and resistance, between discipline, dogma, and freedom, that Czech thinking about sculpture may still be forming today.

In Bohemia, you mustn’t croak, you must sing. (Demartini)

Professor’s lecture: doc. akad. soch. Vojtěch Míča – Time is a Point

Time is a Point