The Langhans Gallery Prague

Photographs from the 1980s. Libuše Jarcovjáková, Jiří Poláček

Jarcovjáková’s photographs are intimate records of lives of the Vietnamese in the “fraternal” Socialist state of Czechoslovakia and testimony to life in the T-Club, Prague, which was popular with homosexuals. Together with Poláček’s colour impressions of the Smíchov and Žižkov districts of Prague at night, these photos evoke the early 1980s in Prague.

“Fraternal” Assistance by Libuše Jarcovjáková, 1982-84     
The early 1980s, Normalization (the policy of hard-line Communism reinstated after the crushing of the Prague Spring of August 1968) had become normal, and even life had generally become too normal for words. But for me it was a world full of adventure.
  I spent weekdays in dormitories for Vietnamese, where I taught Czech to gaunt boys from Asia. They sat there on benches – Thong, Minh, Khoa, Viet, Thanh, and others.
 I spent my nights in underground Prague – in gay the company of gay men and women, at the “Téčka,” (Full-stop or Dot) and “Pekáč” (The P or Roasting Pan). Téčko was the T-Club and Pekáč was the winebar U Petra Voka (Petr Vok’s).
  I spent the day in the classroom. “This is a train,” I would say loud and clear. “This is a train,” repeated the class. “This is a table, this is a house, this is a chicken, this is rice. The food tastes good.” Primitive sentences from a quickly mimeographed Czech-language textbook for Vietnamese workers in the CSSR, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.  I should use it, but the book is useless. I showed pictures, performed theatre, thought up scenes, improvised. We didn’t have a common vocabulary. We didn’t have a language with which we would reach an agreement, and so we tried even harder; we communicated even more without words.  They watched intently, as if by watching one could learn everything – I was the gate through which they entered this amazing world outside. From the first day I was permitted to use a camera. They all wanted to be photographed – at parked cars, at the black board, in their new clothes, in the room to which I was invited on my break, at their little parties.  The camera helped us to communicate.
  When I began the job in spring 1981 I didn’t have a clue about teaching. I was looking for part-time work, and became a teacher of Czech in courses for Vietnamese workers. Every three months I got to know a new group. In Prague and elsewhere. I was present when the Prague dormitories began to fill up with the first groups of Vietnamese. They arrived well prepared. They had their indoctrination behind them. It was international collaboration between countries in the Socialist camp, fraternal assistance, solidarity between nations. The first ones really believed that, at least for the first few weeks. When they went out into the streets, when they began to understand a bit, they lost their illusions.
  Logistically everything had been prepared, thought of, planned. Buying clothes in the Kotva or Máj department stores, going for check-ups at the doctor’s, their room and board, school. After three months of language training they started their jobs, at building sites, in factories.
 It was supposed to work perfectly. But it didn’t work at all. They found the food in the factory cafeterias inedible.  They found the winters unbearable. Czech cannot be learnt in three months, especially without the proper textbooks. And the main thing was that the Czechs didn’t want any “rákosníky” (rattan people). No Asians, no people of colour. And they made that clear. The Vietnamese met with unconcealed animosity. They lost their names. They became “You!”  and “Hey, you, over there!” for the porters and cleaners in the dormitories, sales staff, ladies in the Metro, workers on the construction sites, the whites, the master race, arrogant majority society. Whites Only! said a sign some Vietnamese brought to me from the factory cafeteria after lunch one day. Was I supposed to explain it to them? I didn’t have to explain anything to them. They had a pretty good idea what it meant.
  More and more arrived. Disillusion, sadness, embitterment, those were feelings I met with every day. The motivation to teach diminished sharply.  “Why should I learn, if it means I’ll understand how they curse me?”  they often asked me.
 Teachers of Czech were often the first Czechs and also the last to treat the Vietnamese as equals.  During the months of daily communication important relationships developed; I would even say “friendship,”  “fellowship,” which we created together.
 I felt guilty, ashamed of those louts, ashamed of our racism. My guilty conscious did not save the Vietnamese community. It did not help even the few dozen Vietnamese whom I had the honour of sharing a bit of life with.  The only force that could gradually solve the “Vietnamese Question” was the unsinkable Asian business spirit, and that remains to this day.
 Sewing machines appeared in the dormitories, and shortly after that the first businessmen appeared. Bespoke tailoring, fast and cheap, thus it began.  The ability to work hard and tirelessly, the finesse, and the hunger of the grey economy – those were the instruments that worked.  The money and ideology, which gave meaning to the fraternal cooperation.

Libuše Jarcovjáková, January 2008

The T-Club by Libuše Jarcovjáková, 1983-85 
At night, for me, mindless amusement to a disco beat, endless entertainment, the daily carnival. “The show must go on ... and on ....”  Convulsive laughter and genuine tears. Profound talks and superficial flirtation. A one-night stand and a lifelong love. Beautiful young men, beautiful young women, sashaying “queens“ and also distinguished- looking gentlemen, taking a break from their families. Women footballers, men waiters, taxi drivers, and most probably also secret-police men. Salesmen from the drug store, a postmaster, and the man from the railway. Girls from the Hotel Jalta, just after finishing a night’s work, comparing who earned how much, how many German marks, those crazy wops and disgusting krauts.  The clientele of the only two gay bars in Prague comprised almost all regulars. Those who belonged here were allowed in. They were “part of the family”, as they said.
 Gawkers were not welcome. Ivan, the bouncer, could spot them easily. Downstairs everyone knew each other. Age was not a disease. Age was tolerated. Kobylí hlava (Mare’s Head), paní Baňatá (Madam Onion-dome), Sklenářka (Mrs Glazier), Citrónek (Lemonette), Chrastítko (Rattle), Batoh (Rucksack), paní Bleble (Mrs Blah-blah) – they were all here nearly everyday. They were part of the furnishings, like the black hole of a fireplace with the fake logs, like the strange armour, decor leftover from the First Republic.
Round midnight it was impossible to move. The place was too small. The air was opaque with smoke.
His hands stretched out before him, Džusepe, the waiter, pushed his way through. The dance floor was packed; the bar was draped with regulars. The best view was from the bar; you could see absolutely everything: who was new here, what had changed since yesterday, what was about to happen, who had what up his or her sleeve … Peals of laughter; humour was part of it, caustic, kind and unkind.
 Strobe lights and chilled vodka. In the wee hours the DJ was paid fifty crowns for every additional song.
 I stood mostly by the fireplace, sometimes at the bar. A few months before, I had come here with friends, and realized right away that I had to take photographs here, I simply had to. Now, night after night, I was gradually establishing myself, watching, trying to understand, waiting, listening to stories, and waiting.
  And my time came, at carnivals, parties, New Year’s Eve, fancy-dress balls, celebration of the grape harvest. At those times the usual theatrical atmosphere was even more theatrical. What I had devoured with my eyes in the past months, what I had been amused by, had wanted to understand, I could now record. Quickly, fitfully, in shorthand, at the high points of parties, in the artificial light of the camera flash. It was the extract of many nights, a stenographic record of all the night-time confessions I had heard.  
 Nights and days in the early Eighties. In the wings of grey life under Socialism, in the suffocating smog of the Socialist camp.
 Little islands of minorities, colourful and bizarre, thank you for letting me take part.

Libuše Jarcovjáková, January 2008

Jiří Poláček: Prague 1983-85      
With the assuredness of an experienced master of ceremonies removing a death mask, Jiří Poláček, in his first Smíchov period, transferred into his photographs all the gaping passageways, cracked walls, bashed corners of a smashed-up city, footholds for desperate people wandering in the night, Smíchov Station, the Tatra train factory, Lidice Street, the Zlíchov brewery, and the Radlice footbridge. (Josef Kroutvor once described the experience of walking along that iron talon under which trains interminably thunder as a “feast of poets,” but the footbridge Poláček photographed is more like a springboard into a pit.) In his black-and-white photographs from 1973–79, the Smíchov district of Prague looks like some place after a disaster, a district void of the usual hustle and bustle of people, like secret-policeman’s territory. Above the “cultural sanctuary” of the Maják (lighthouse) cinema in Lidice Street flutters a lone flag, as if on the North or South Pole or a conquered mountain top. The cellars seem like prison cells. The quivering of barbed wire vibrates through the photo. In the forgotten crevices of the town the Bolshevik slogans are missing. The infernal bastards of the People’s Militia are not grinning proudly here, as they do in the work of Lubomír Kotek or Karel Cudlín. Here there aren’t even the grotesque shop windows of Iren Stehli. But these are an exact description of a dark, anxious town. To help him take off the mask, Poláček used an antediluvian Kodak, a gift from the photographer Jan Svoboda. He attached a spirit-level to it so that, as he says, the “pictures became nice and stiff,” and he photographed the written-off working-class district panoramically. From his studio all Smíchov was accessible on foot. In this panoramically spreading-out emptiness and grey probably nothing at all remains of the pathos of the outskirts, the kind depicted by the artists of the Skupina 42 (The 42 Group). In places that have lost their spirit Hrabal’s “pábitel,” the amusing chatterbox, tended to be a dirty word. And it was to these deranged hunting grounds that Jiří set out again.

The flash blazes into all the corners, grabs the light, exorcises ghosts. The new collection from Smíchov and Žižkov dates from 1983–85. This time in colour. About 60 photographs. Jiří has not seen them all yet. Those selected by the Langhans curators are lying on the wooden floor, enlarged and framed. Some are leaning up against the side of the bed. Through an open window some winter birds twitter, and dampness creeps in. Ten years ago Poláček and his wife left Smíchov. “Too expensive, too hectic,” says the photographer about the place he once captured in its death throes. Jiří, tall, aristocrat-looking, often making quite cynical jokes, once escaped the Communists by going to America. But the Americans needed him for Vietnam, so he bolted back to this country. “For a hippie, sad old Prague was a shock, a grind, a vice grip.” Today, the Poláčeks live in a wooded, fairy-tale valley below Křivoklát Castle. From ruins they rebuilt a mill several hundred years old, with their own hands of course. In the kitchen, whisky sparkles golden in a cut-crystal decanter, and from the oven wafts the smell of a roast. The table, set for gourmets, glitters luxuriously. Today, food is being photographed here. Everywhere hundreds of plates, spoons, bowls, all kinds of objects perfectly aligned, discovered at flea markets or simply found or received as presents. Valuable pieces and junk as well. The photographer’s flour mill in an eternally dusky valley is a warehouse of props, a magic scrapheap. His wife  Blanka now deftly cuts the meat. And their son Jirka prepares his father’s lens and lights. “Taking photographs for cookery books pays for things like our utilities bills, whisky, and bread,” says Jiří, explaining the family division of labour.

In the Carrefour shopping centre at Anděl passers-by once stumbled without warning upon panels with Poláček’s photographs. The choice of the place had its own logic; after all, this modern pleasure palace was erected on the ruins of the former Tatra factory. As a little joke, Jiří placed a photo that almost reeked of heavy industry exactly where a monstrously large press used to roar. Today, however, pretty little majorettes smirk and Santa Claus leaps about here. “I really like the interpenetration,” says the photographer joyfully. The exhibition, at a place usually reserved for “cool new things,” came as a shock. Special technology was used to keep the photos in the Carrefour from being torn down. But who would have torn them down? “I can understand that my rotten walls might anger shoppers.” But people who remembered the places and collectors were also interested in the photos. “In any case, this exhibition must have been seen by about half a million people,” says Jiří with a bit of malicious glee. It was in the Carrefour exhibition that he added work from the new colour collection to the 1970s set. A blue car that remained after civilization had ended, a car repair shop at the end of the earth, a garage attacked by extraterrestrials, when the world freezes at the Laktos dairy, Vltavská – an ordinary place, which became horribly anxious, because the body of a murder victim had just been taken away. In the night-time pictures from the colour set we may have an inkling of people sitting in cars, but what is more important is the source of light. “The flash brings out the differences. White comes to the surface, black is weighed down.” The small light-bulbs of peaceful homes surprisingly casts light like giant torches, the house in Kališnická Street is suddenly covered in aggressive mould, removals vans become fortresses charged with light, the trees above the wooden enclosures glow with energy, which before our eyes is sucked into the asphalt. Poláček heads into the streets in the last glimmers of daylight, wanders about with no particular destination in mind, presses the shutter release at the most ordinary places. “It’s a game. I don’t know how the photo will turn out. I don’t see the colours till I’ve developed the photos.” Today the persistent night-time flaneur uses a Sinar camera with a Japanese lens. “I picked up a pole in the gutter, wrapped an adhesive bandage round it, bent it, and immediately had a handy camera,” he adds. But why the most ordinary places?
“Because they look so special.”

Jáchym Topol for the exhibition at Langhans Gallery Prague, January 2008

We thank the Film & Sociology Foundation for lending the documentary Cuộc sống o Ubitovna for our accompanying event. For their generous support we thank the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, Prague City Hall, and Prague 1 Borough.