Zahradní ateliér / Garden Atelier
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Václav Brodský - Forfest 2004
ATELIÉR 18/2004 - Summary
The Mobius Center in Boston produces more than one hundred new projects on the national and international scale every year. Its multimedia activities include music, dancing, performance, sound and visual installations and video art. The participation of the experimental Mobius Group Boston in the Forfest 2004, represented by Milan Kohout (1955), Jed Speare (1954, Man Novotny-Jones (1947) and Tom Plsek (1954), had the form of a loose series of performances presented during the festival week in the historical town of Kroměříž, Moravia. The presented series evidenced the differences between the American type of thinking and the Central European tradition. Brodský’ was particularly impressed by the contributions by Milan Kohout (Massachusetts College of Art), focused on the subject of human rights, particularly rights of Roma, and totalitarian capitalism and fundamentalist religions. Brodský was absolutely enchanted by Kohout & Novotny-Jones’ performance, presented under the title Weight at the courtyard of the museum. The messages, mediated by the projects by Kohout’s colleagues, were sometimes obscured, despite the communicative character of their concepts and the complexness of their realizations. The Forfest 2004 included 28 performances, concerts, exhibitions, workshops etc. Brodský finds particularly noteworthy the following projects: the musical-visual performance by Markéta Dvořáková (1975), the exhibition of meditative landscapes by French painter of Czech descent Ladislav Schovanec (1942), large-sized paintings by Václav Vaculovič (1957) and the exhibition of Dutch painter Walther Smeitink-Mühlbacher (1963). Works by Smeitink-Mühlbacher echoed the inspiration by the Chinese and Japanese calligraphy and re-consideration of the lnformel elements. Smeitink-MUhlbacher’s abstract paintings were distinguished in the insight in the inner nature of things, expressed through the work with colour matter and inner light.
