Chief Complaint: “Spider Bite” Jill R. Tichy, PGY III 10/2/2009.
Approaching the Stuff of Miroslav Tichy, or Possible Uses for a Coat
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Transcript of Approaching the Stuff of Miroslav Tichy, or Possible Uses for a Coat
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Approaching the Stuff of M iroslav Tich
or
Possible Uses for a Coat
byAndrew Philip Hobden
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from Miroslav Tich published by Steidl & ICP (2010, p.309)
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Czechoslovakian painter, photographer and printmaker, Miroslav Tich, polarises opinion. The
combination of his extreme marginality in relation to his social setting, his propensity for psychotic
episodes and his soiled and wild appearance have led most readings and appraisals of his artistic
work. Who was this Miroslav Tich? A type of the romantic notion of the artist: inspiration in
solitude, dislocated from greater society? A garden-variety beggar common to every town and city? A
voyeur who watches and photographs the women of his hometown with the phallus of a camera he'd
deftly whip out from under the hem of his sweater? A madman who ought to have been
institutionalised? A dissident? A holy mendicant? A flneur ? (Wallis, 2010, p.15) How do we
approach or place Tich in the midst of this spectrum of dismissive to mythopoeic descriptors? I
propose that we simplify our analytic gaze (avoiding any reductionistic oversimplification) to one
component of his practice: his coat. What could be revealed about Tich by imaginatively transposing
ourselves into his coat (his embodied position), by donning and doffing it or holding it up to consider
the concealed Tich through its holes & frayed ends? What may come to light by shaking or smelling
it, by an attempt to decipher its composition? Clothing obfuscates yet reveals. An analysis of the
significance of Tich's coat allows us to speculatively grapple with the substance, the stuff that makes
up his unique, artistic vision, while also orienting him within his social context.
Reader, let us imagine that we are walking through a boreal woodland and spy some
indeterminate thing protruding from the forest's detritus. At first glance it doesn't seem out of place
surrounded by decay, but we also realise that it doesn't belong there. Regardless, we have found it,
we are confounded by it as an object, and out of a desire to make sense of it, we unearth and hold it
from our body in order to get a better view of it. This is what we see: a mass of grey to soiled brown
materiality. After a minute's observation, we notice that there are sleeves and an opening at the front
and ascertain that it is a garment, perhaps a coat or jacket of some sort, and the perceived material is
mostly cloth. But the sleeves and back of the garment appear to be covered by something akin to fur
or feathers the cloth is snagged, unravelled, a network of threads and wisps of frayed ends. The
overall impression is that it is made out of the hide of some mythic hybrid of a creature, such as a
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griffin. With closer scrutiny, we notice that it has been patched with expertise and, surprisingly, in
among the frayed and outspreading threads, it is also held together by wires. From this we deduce an
intentionality in its construction that the designer wished the garment to appear as it does.
From this initial, fictive encounter with Tich's coat, the first thing that strikes us is its
indeterminate nature. In Claire Pajaczkowska's essay, On Stuff and Nonsense: The Complexity of Cloth ,
while relating cloth to "stuff" or "unspecified materiality," she writes that cloth is experienced "...as
neither object nor subject, but as the threshold between, as a liminality where meaning decomposes
into materiality, and threatens nonsense." (Pajaczkowska, 2005, p.221) Considering Tich's coat in
light of this "unspecified materiality" of cloth, Tich goes a step further. He takes something that is
already indistinct and makes it even more vague. He intentionally obfuscates the stuff of cloth and
makes a nonsense; he undermines the expected appearance of a coat and reinvents the notion of a
coat and invests it with new significance by modifying it with the first person, singular, possessive
pronoun: "my coat," adding a hidden, autobiographical meaning. Tich sets out to purposively
conceal beneath a nonsensical appearance, and this obfuscation characterises Tich's entire life and
practice, which is enveloped by this same intentional indeterminateness.
To illustrate hidden, biographical content
revealed in indeterminate materiality, let us look at
the artist, Chohreh Feyzdjou, who was born into a
Jewish family in Teheran. Pennina Barnett describes
in her essay, Soft Logics and Material Worlds ,
Feyzdjou's work as
...boxes of strange dark forms, like insects orputrified fruit; rolls of canvas and papermounted on great rusty scaffolds or stacked incorners, like cloth waiting to be unpacked, paint-stained rags, scrunched and mounted in neatrows on gallery walls all covered with layers of wax and dark pigment. Her work speaks of
making, process and materiality of stuff. (Barnett, 2009, unpaginated)
Boutique Product of Chohreh Feyzdjou, 1973 -1993 Installation
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Contained within the stuff of Feyzdjou's artwork is a revelation of the reality of living as a religious
minority in a Muslim country; in other words,
her autobiography is infused within her
materials. Barnett continues: "In Feyzdjou's
rolls of canvas we glimpse both textile and text.
For they resemble both the wares of textile
vendors, and the sacred rolls of the Torah, where
meaning is generated, time and time again." (Barnett, 2009,
unpaginated) Like the "my" that, for Tich, modifies his coat,
Feyzdjou appends her name upon these articles of
"unspecified materiality" (which to a Western ear further
mystifies), investing them with concealed, autobiographical
meaning. Like Feyzdjou, Tich also lived under a potentially
antagonistic regime, the Czech Communist state, and a
distrust of the state incurred a need to conceal his identity, just as Feyzdjou concealed and revealed
her identity between layers of materiality, dense with hidden, potential import.
As part of our exegesis of the Torah of Tich's coat, we should consider the frayed edges of
Tich's life and practice. As Roman Buxbaum, a neighbour of Tich's and his principal biographer,
elucidates, Tich s approach did not distinguish between art and life. (Bux baum, 2010, p.312)
Actually, there is an elision between his habit of living and his practice as an artist, the one informing
(or forming) the other, an unspecificity. Although he structured his life around the pursuit of his
practice, the final appearance of the artistic object is reliant on Tich's physical embodiment, his
bodily movement through space and time. For example, Buxbaum describes his infamous
[photographic] postpr oduction methods (Buxbaum, 2010, p.312) as including:
Boutique Product of Chohreh Feyzdjou,
1973 -1993 Installation
BoutiqueProduct of
Chohreh Feyzdjou, 1973 -1993 Installatio
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...sitting on the photographs, sleeping on them, cutting off the edges, improving thecomposition with a ballpoint pen or colored pencils, folding them, using them under a table legto keep the table from wobbling, spilling coffee or rum on them, throwing them out thewindow, forgetting that he threw them out the window (even when it begins to rain), thenfinding them again and saving them, sticking them onto a piece of cardboard, giving them amat, and, finally, noting the TV listings on the back. (Buxbaum, 2010, p.320)
We see here illustrated the indistinguishable interplay of the intentional and the accidental. His
artwork could be perceived as mere byproducts of his habit of living, perhaps even similar to the
generation of physical waste products, but he also intentionally places the artwork-in-the-making in
the way of his daily habit of living. Tich s coat is emblematic of this conflation of the accidental and
the intentional, of life and art, not only by its indeterminate nature but also by the fact that itrepresents Tich's embodied perspective from which he practised his art and that in which he lived
his daily routine.
Actually, Tich perceived his coat as a piece of art in its own right. In the early 1970s, he told a
cellmate that he considered his clothing a work of art and that this was the very latest fashion in
Paris and London, which they called patchwork. (Buxbaum , 2010, p.312) Another tale reports that
he "tried to ensure his ragged coat for 100,000 Czech crowns then the equivalent of a brand new
luxury car." (Buxbaum, 2010, p.312) Here, we have Tich valuing his coat equivalent to the
estimation of a fine art piece of an established artist.
Let us reveal more biographical significance latent in the substance of Tich's coat. His father,
the tailor of Tichs hometown of Kyjov, fabricated the coat. Buxbaum writes that it is "a piece of
clothing the son never took off a coat for life. Day and night, he would stay in the same clothes,
fixing them with wire and string when they began to fall apart." (Buxbaum, 2010, p.312) Tich's coat
is a symbolic gift from tailor father to fabricator son, symbolic of a trade passing from father to son, a
trade that Tich practises in reverse: for as a tailor makes functional garments of socially accepted
appearance from the "unspecified materiality" of cloth, Tich tailors art objects enveloped in
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from Miroslav Tich publishedby Steidl & ICP (2010, p.310)
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"unspecified materiality" by undoing socially recognisable objects and forms and reinventing or
masking their functionality.
Now let us consider the coat's liminal quality, "the 'second skin' of..." his coat "...that literally
and metaphorically envelops..." his "...body and identity". (Pajaczkowska, 2005, p.233) Joanne
Entwistle in her essay, The Dressed Body , refers to
clothing as forming "part of our epidermis it lies on
the boundary between self and other." (Entwistle,
2007, p.93) Entwistle speaks of the outer limits of the
body as "'leaky' the body is semipermeable, open
and therefore must be managed by culture."
(Entwistle, 2007, p.96) So dress is also experienced as
a thing alien to us, that it "does not only belong to our
bodies but to the social world as well." (Entwistle,
2007, p.93) Given this tension of the dual nature of
clothing, Tich's coat could be perceived as being
inside out, that the unquantifiable underside of
embodiment (that which is indefinite or 'leaky' or
indeterminate) is made visible as his projected, social persona.
Reader, let us return to the forest and our experience of the coat. Our arm is tiring, for we have
been holding the coat aloof to scrutinise it as an object, but let us now subjectivise our experience of it
and don it. As we put our right arm through the sleeve, we are aware that this garment is strange to
our body, that it suits someone else's: the wire pokes us randomly through the cloth and the length
(generally) does not match our arm. We put our left arm through the second sleeve and feel the same
constraining discomfort along that arm and our back and shoulders. We are conscious of it as foreign,
but it also incurs an "epidermic self-awareness," a phrase coined by Umberto Eco, quoted by
Entwistle. (in Entwistle, 2007, p.93) It causes an acute awareness of our own body by the fact that it
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is unsuited to our body but constructed for another frame, for Tich's. While visually we are partly
obfuscated or disguised by the coat, in a sense, the coat seeps deeper into our being: a conflation of,
or perhaps it is a dialogue between, our body and his is now occurring.
An additional element forces an awareness of the embodiment of the coat's prior owner: its
smell. (We'll assume that since Tich is not long past deceased, that the coat has only recently been
discovered and discarded in the woodland and still bears the former wearer's scent.) Malodorous
indeed it is, for as we have mentioned the wearer never took it off, and the resultant stench produced
by his declining hygiene still clings to the cloth and impinges upon our olfactory sense. His coat
perhaps exceeds the metaphor of a "second skin": the fabric is comprised of more than the usual
quantity of epidermal dead cells and oils, the typical products of our body's "leaky" nature; this
furthers our experience of its indeterminate materiality, for it borders on becoming a hide or a flayed
skin. Once our repulsion is mastered, we are sharply contrasted with, but equally physically
proximate to (in places almost skin to skin), Tich's embodied essence. Not only does this imagined
experience of the coat place us in proximity to the recently deceased Tich's embodiment (a
netherworld, so to speak), it also postures us toward his social context.
Now, what happens if we leave the solitude and safety of the forest and go about our normal,
daily business while wearing Tich's coat? Suddenly our experience of the coat is dramatically
altered, for we become aware of the quizzical looks, the averted eyes, the concealed whispers-to-
neighbour's-ears of our impromptu audiences. To our audience, our social persona is obfuscated,
disguised; we are virtually invisible. For us, strangely abstracted from ourself, the coat is now a
costume, and we are performing a hybrid of our persona and Tich-once-removed.
Buxbaum briefly mentions the performed aspect of Tich's work and life, that he has a
"propensity for the Gesamtkunstwerk " (Buxbaum, 2010, p.312) or a tendency toward, as J. A. Cuddon
translates the Wagner-coined term, the "complete art work" (Cuddon, 1998, p.342), which synthesises
disparate components and implies a performability and theatricality due to its all-encompassing
scope. In 1950, a few years before the fabrication of Tich's social persona in the guise of his coat and
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soon after the Communist takeover, like many intellectuals who fled Prague for the safety and
anonymity of small town life, Tich returned home to Kyjov, the confines beyond which, from 1958
until his death in 2011, he never willingly went. It was in the early 1950s that Tich exhibited a
penchant for the theatrical and the dramatic. Working for amateur dramatic groups in Kyjov, he
"painted stage sets and built giant marionettes, which he could make dance beautifully. He was
known as srandista , or the jester." (Buxbaum, 2010, p.308) The concept of
the Gesamtkunstwerk contextualises Tich's lack of distinction between art
and not-art, between the practice of art and the habit of living. If he
deliberately performed life in an adopted costume, then everywhere
becomes his set, and everything, that he is engaged with on this ubiquitous
set, becomes either a prop for his performance or a part of the dramatic
action (which has symbolic significance within the greater narrative).
Hence, the quotidian is transformed into a grand, all-enveloping, theatrical
performance, a Gesamtkunstwerk , containing a concealed narrative, embedded with hidden meaning.
Gen Doy writes of the implications of Gilles Deleuze's trope of the baroque fold: "the subject is
dissolved into a 'chaosmos', co-existing with its environment in a 'play of folds'. There is no
distinction between the self and environment... ." (Doy, 2002, p.150) So, the fugitive identity of the
individual subject is intrinsically indeterminate in nature; it co-exists inextricably with its social
context. Can we see any evidence of this dependence of identity upon its social context, this "play of
folds", in such a socially marginal character such as Tich's? We shall assert that tailored into the
folds of Tich's coat (which is a costume for the Gesamtkunstwerk and into which his identity is
infused) is an anticipation of the reception of its appearance by his audiences. But who were Tich's
intended audiences; in other words, from whom did he disguise himself in the costume of his coat?
We shall posit that Tich had three distinct audiences: the Czech Communist authorities, the
inhabitants of Kyjov and himself. And his coat functioned quite differently depending on the audience
Tich as a young manphotographed with an actressfrom Miroslav Tich publishedb Steidl & ICP 2010, .306
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concerned. Given the parameters of this essay, we shall principally concern ourselves with one of
these the Czech Communist authorities.
What is the "operative function" (Deleuze, 1993, p.3) of Tich's coat in relation to the macro-
social structure of Czech Communism? There's an oppositional function tailored into his coat, and in
order to fully appreciate Tich as dissident, we should turn our attention to Tich's activities prior to
his massive psychotic breakdown of 1957. Tich was one of the "Brno Five...: five painters who dared
to oppose the official doctrine of socialist realism in favor of modernist, and particularly expressionist,
ideals." (Buxbaum, 2010, p.308) The Czech Communist authorities of the 1950s generally equated
appearance and form with substance; in short, appearance reveals intention and ideology. [And it is
this propensity with which Tich plays.] After the death of Stalin, the Brno Five planned an exhibition
in Prague. This daring act precipitated Tich's massive psychotic break, which compelled him to turn
on his dissident friends as "fascists" (Buxbaum, 2010, p.308) and which, in turn, occasioned the
gradual fabrication of Tich's performed social persona. However, Tich's activities in the Brno Five
commenced his cat-and-mouse game with the Communist authorities, a game continued privately in
his Gesamtkunstwerk of the ostensible a confounding, complex "'play of folds'" of the apparent and
the concealed. Buxbaum writes that Tich "became the living antithesis of progressive thought, of the
Marxist theory of history moving in a straight line." (Buxbaum, 2010, p.312) Tich's appearance so
galled the local, Communist authorities that they commissioned
...a sixty-page 'expert's report on hygiene.' ...The report was read in full during [a court] trial.
...The expert witness had concluded his report with the following determination: Tich'sclothes were 'with certainty discovered to have contained two lice and a cockroach.' When thejudge asked him what he had to say to the accusation, Tich replied: ' Summon them aswitnesses !' (Buxbaum, 2010, p.312)
We can hear the " srandista " giggling to himself in that imperative. But there is something in Tich's
undermining of Czech Communist bureaucracy that is reminiscent of the nonviolent resistance of the
Czech citizen's response to the Soviet quelling of the Prague Spring of 1968: they refused to provide
water or to feed foreign soldiers and "chang[ed] or remov[ed] directional road signs" to confuse the
invaders. (Wallis, 2010, p.13)
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from Miroslav Tich published by Steidl& ICP (2010, p.318)
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However, beyond an implicit indictment of Communism, Tich's performed appearance
possesses something of the post-apocalyptic in it: a performing of a fictive, future existence after the
disintegration of all social superstructures and ideologies. An element of this performance of life after
social disintegration is an extreme self-sufficiency, foraging what he needs from the natural or from
what society regards as refuse. So, Tich's performed life (made apparent in the guise of his coat) not
only indicts the Marxist ideal of progress, but it could equally be an indictment of the materialism of
capitalism.
Briefly, let us consider the underside of this ostentatious, oppositional function of his coat. Due
to his marginal status manifested by the appearance of it, his coat functioned as a carapace or a cloak
of invisibility that enabled him to uninhibitedly practice his art, unobserved by both the local Czech
Communist authorities and the residents of Kyjov. Dismissed as eccentric, they could not perceive
him as engaged in anything serious.
We have no illusions that this essay about Tich's coat is merely an approach to, a first
impression of, the stuff of Miroslav Tich's life and practice. Indeterminateness characterises not only
his coat but also his practice as an artist and his habit of living, a "chaosmos" that makes it impossible
to distinguish the intentional from the accidental or the found from the created. As Tich performed
this indeterminateness in the costume of his coat, he transformed the quotidian into a grand, all-
enveloping, theatrical performance, a Gesamtkunstwerk , that simultaneously functioned to oppose the
Czech Communist authorities and to enable him to pursue his practice as an artist unobserved a
dual purpose of drawing attention to his appearance and the concealment of his practice. Before we
end this introduction to the stuff of Tich's art and life and then look for ourselves at his photographs,
paintings and art objects, let us end with some of his self-commentary, koan-like in quality by
confounding yet stimulating thought:
"I'm a samurai. My sole aim is to destroy my enemies." (Buxbaum, 2010, p.312)
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"A mistake, a mistake. That's what makes the poetry, gives it the painterly quality. Philosophy is
something abstract, but photography is concrete, a perception. The eye, what you see." (Buxbaum,
2010, p.319)
"I am the prophet of decay and a pioneer of chaos, because only from chaos does something new
emerge." (Buxbaum, 2010, p.313)
from Miroslav Tich published by Steidl & ICP (2010, p.313)
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from Miroslav Tich published by Steidl & ICP(2010, p.314)
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Bibliography
BARNETT, Pennina (2009). Soft Logics and Material Worlds. Second Skins: Cloth and Difference .Symposium at Goldsmiths, University of London, unpaginated.
BUXBAUM, Roman (2010). Miroslav Tich: Tarzan Retired. In Miroslav Tich . Gttingen:International Center of Photography and Steidl, pp. 306-322.
CUDDON, J.A. (revised by C.E. PRESTON) (1998). Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and LiteraryTheory . 4th edn. London: Penguin Books.
DELEUZE, Gilles (2006). The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque . (Tom Conley. Trans.) London:Continuum. (Original work published 1993)
DOY, Gen (2002). Drapery: Classicism and Barbarism in Visual Culture . London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd.
ENTWISTLE, Joanne (2007). The Dressed Body . In L. WELTERS and A. LILLETHUN (Eds.). The FashionReader . London: Routledge, pp. 93-104.
PAJACZKOWSKA, Claire (2005). On Stuff and Nonsense: The Complexity of Cloth. Textile , vol. 3, issue3, pp. 220-248.
WALLIS, Brian (2010). What Happens When Nothing Happens: Miroslav Tich and the Mysteries ofEveryday Life. In Miroslav Tich . Gttingen: International Center of Photography and Steidl, pp. 11-20.