Tichy

THE SHOCKOFTHE OLDMIROSLAVTICHYEXPOSED ROMAN BUXBAUM

Opposite4-3-2 P, 2004COURTESY ROMAN BUXBAUMMIROSLAV TICHY

BelowMiroslav TichyPHOTO: ROMAN BUXBAUM

ARE YOU, LIKE ME, one of those dream-ers who rummage about in secondhandshops for a forgotten Van Gogh? Anddo you perhaps believe that there mightstill be some undiscovered old master outthere? If so, you shouldn't miss MiroslavTichy's exhibition at the KunsthausZrich. It's the result of one of thoseart fairytales that should no longer bepossible in our globalized artworld.

You might reply that you've neverheard of Tichy. An emerging artist,but not a rising star? What, he's eightyyears old and his first solo show goesstraight into the main space in theKunsthaus Zrich? He lives out in thesticks, somewhere near Brno in southernMoravia, a place he hasn't left for 50years? His cameras are made from trash.

the lenses cut with a knife from Plexiglas,and he's taken thousands of wonderfulshots? Fifty years, 100 photographs everyday and he's never shown them to anyone,all just for himself? Sorry, he can't be real.Someone's having you on!

Miroslav Tichy embarked on an artis-tic career like any other artist of his day.Once he had finished school he enrolledat The Academy of Fine Arts in Prague

in 1945. In his year-group he had a reputation for being good atdrawing. His paintings and drawings from the 1940s and 50sfollow in the modernist tradition and were devoted exclusivelyto one theme: the female figure. In fact, Tichy has concentratedon this sole motif ever since.

The Communist putsch in Czechoslovakia in 1948 broughtradical change to the academy. The young Tichy refused tokowtow to the new authorities and had to leave. As the countrybecame a dictatorship he responded defiantly, then retreatedfrom cultural life and society. He became a dissident, a hermit,a 'dropout' ofthe first order. He (the son of a gentlemen's tailor)wore tattered clothes, which he mended in a makeshift way withwire when they fell apart completely. He grew a beard and lefthis hair uncut. He went on painting and drawing, but neverparticipated in any exhibitions. The regime was not preparedto tolerate his sort. In the 1960s and 70s he spent a total ofeight years in prisons and clinics. Early in this period Tichyhad arrived at a watershed in his production: 'I'd painted thepictures I wanted to paint, and I'd drawn the drawings. Whatwas I supposed to do? Just wander about in the town? So I tookan old camera and pressed the button. I never thought muchabout it, it just happened as I was wandering about.'

Tichy's desire for complete independence and his lack ofmoney meant it was impossible for him to buy the photographicequipment he needed. So he fabricated his own cameras, enlarg-ing equipment and lenses. Once he had carved a lens from oldPlexiglas, using no more than a knife, he would fit it into acardboard tube, then make the housing from wood. Sometimesif he found an old Russian camera in ajunk shop he wouldadapt it to his needs. With these monstrous, yet technicallycunning, devices he was also able to take shots from a consid-erable distance without anyone bothering him. He uses thesame equipment and approach today: 'The lens decides what's

Tichy

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4-95,2004C0URTE5Y KUNSTHAUS ZRICHMIROSLAV TICHY

interesting. I see everything through thelens. Taking photographs is all aboutseeing - the camera is your eye - and it allhappens so quickly that you don't haveto see anything yourself. By the eveningthere are usually three films, a hundredshots. I've never done anything except letthe time pass. I'm an observer, not onlyof women, that's just one motif, I observethe world. In the evenings I developedthe films and looked at them under theenlarger. If there was something there,if there was something like the world,then I printed them on photo paper. Butwhat is the "world"? In any case it's onlyan illusion. We see what we want to see.The world as will and imagination, asSchopenhauer put it.'

Cut off from everything, Tichy has freed himself fromaesthetic convention. He never shows his photographs toanyone and doesn't worry about photographic quality control.Just one of Tichy's 'faults' would be enough to prompt anyself-respecting photolab technician to throw his prints into thewaste-paper basket: prints that are flat because they are overex-posed or dark because they have been underexposed, alwaysblurred, scratches on the negatives, on the paper - cut usingonly his eye as a measure or even ripped with his bare hands

- dust, dirt, small creatures everywhere: in the camera, on thefilm and in the darkroom, the photographer's fingerprints andhairs, brown specks of bromide, bits eaten away by silverfish.In one case, 4-3-269 (2004), a fly has even been immortalised,having decided to take a nap on the photo paper.

Great are the tribulations awaiting the photographs evenafter they have left the darkroom. For years they are left lyingabout, until they are covered in dust and their characteris-tic 'Tichy' patina has developed. The main 'post-production'methods in Atelier Tichy involve sitting on the photographs,sleeping and walking around on them, cutting out unnec-essary bits with a pair of scissors, improving the contoursand the composition with a pencil or ball point pen, foldingthem and putting them under a table leg to stop it wobbling,pouring coffee and rum over them and letting mice nibblethem, throwing them out of the window, leaving them lying inthe rain, then finding them again, rescuing them and stickingthem onto a piece of card. The crowning glory of this process

- which can take years - is the making of an artM passepartout.Photography is a discipline that tends towards an obsessivedesire for perfection. Tichy's works, which are sometimes closerto drawing than photography, are the very opposite. As he putsit: 'Photography is painting with light! The blurs, the spots,those are faults! But the faults are part of it, the faults make

THE FAULTS AREPART OE IT, THEEAULTS MAKE THEPOETRY. AND EORTHATYOUNEEDASBADAOAMERAAS POSSIBLE'the poetry. And for that you need as bada camera as possible! If you want to befamous, you have to do whatever you'redoing worse than anyone else in thewhole world,'

Tichy says 'The worse the technique,the better the art!' and that is theparadox of his work. The intentionalflaunting ofthe ideals of cleanlinessand purity in photography leaves itsmark on his work not as inadequacy orcoarseness but as heightened sensuality.The bad treatment he metes out to hisphotographs casts his female figures ina soft - strangely uncontrived - impres-sionist light. The contours may beblurred but the atmospheres are all themore precisely defined. The grabbing offorbidden fruits in the hunt for picturesis matched by a cavalier attitude to thephotographic materials. The outcomeis images of women that are immenselypoetic without ever descending into thekitschy illusory world of a men-onlymagazine. Their essence, their innermostbeing, is not presented realistically, asa perfect likeness, but as a negation. InTichy's photographs reality is an illusion,a chimera. Beauty becomes a dream, 'Forthat you don't only need a bad camera,you also need a different view oftheworld,' The out-of-focus lens changes theworld. Scratches become surreal struc-tures and meta-levels, dust and specks ofbromide mark time's passage. And theneven ugly things look wonderful, Tichy'scompositions imbue all that is ill-formed,ugly and dull about the daily round ofprovincial life with an undeserved glow.

At the same time as Arnulf Rainer,Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, Tichywas exploring the idea of drawing on andalienating photographs. In 1992 ArnulfRainer visited Tichy, The two of themtalked, drank and, in the end, swappedworks. The Swiss artist Annelies Strbaalso set out in search of Tichy, Shelooked all over Brno in camera shops,asked in drugstores and trawled the

Tichy

local art scene. But no-one in Brno knewMiroslav Tichy even though he onlylived 50 kilometres away. As an artistand former neighbour, I was one ofthefew who was aware of his activities andbegan introducing him to others. Despitethis recognition from artists, for manyyears Tichy refused to part with any ofhis works for exhibitions. But, suddenly,in summer 2004 the moment had come, Irang Harald Szeemann: 'Tichy says yes.He's agreed to do the Biennial in Seville,He liked your beard,' When I'd first toldSzeemann about him he'd responded:

'He says the whole world is just an illusion and then he makesa thousand shots of it. I like it!' That was the beginning

- Miroslav Tichy's debut on the international art stage. Onceagain Szeeman showed us all what was what, and, for one lasttime, presented an sirtist that virtually nobody had heard of.

Tichy is still a dropout. He wants nothing to do with the artbusiness, nor with the comforts of modern life. He gets by withminimal funds. He does have running water and electricity inhis small house but has neither a bathroom nor a kitchen. Forover 50 years he has been reluctant to go any further from hishouse than his feet would take him. He doesn't even travel toexhibitions, which he regards as superfluous. In his opinion, ifsomeone wants to see his art then 'let them come here'. And hewon't be at the exhibition in Zurich, His neighbour will go onhis behalf. She will tell him what it was like, TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY FIONA ELLIOTT

Miroslav Tichy has soloshows at KunsthausZrich, Rencontresde la PhotographieArles (both until 18September) and GalerieArndt & Partner, Berlin(until 8 August)

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