Planning Warhol in Prague: Part II

Kafka & The "Refounding" of the Prague Culture House
About two weeks after opening day Rik and I arrived at Asylum to discover, along with Jason, an enterprising, energetic Australian and one of Asylum’s two founders, that the entrance locks had been changed. It’s probably not too difficult to imagine the consternation we all felt.

Who was it? The police? The neighbors? It turned out to be the theatre school, DAMU, that held the lease on the space with the assistance of the police, but we only found that out much later. At the time we had no clue. No one was there to meet us or confront us. No one was there to tell us to go away. There was no sign of a hostile presence. The locks looked just like the ones that had been there the night before. Nothing at all particularly looked much different. But put your key in the lock and try to twist it. You couldn’t. Give it a little yank; maybe it needs a little grease? Still nothing. And then a little twist of the eyebrow and you understood. It wasn’t a sudden light bulb kind of understanding. Nor was it a languid Homeresque rosy pink fingers of dawn kind of understanding. No, it was definitely a twisted brow kind, the kind of understanding that has to knot its way around the bridge of your nose and over your eyebrow into consciousness. Quite simply and quite inexplicably the locks that had been in place the night before were no longer the locks that were in place today.

To put it succinctly, we were freaked out as hell.

Look at an old 19th Century Italian landscape painting and you might think “Wow! What unique vision those Italians had! Look at the gem-like fragile clarity of the leaves and their sparkling translucence. Look at those elongated spidery trunks! ” Then you go to Italy and look at the actual landscapes and the actual trees and you realize those painters were simply painting what they saw. That’s what it looks like.

To read Kafka is a similar experience. “The Castle” and “The Trial” are not the twisted mad ravings of a genius, but simply faithful recordings of the daily Czech experience with authority. That day was the first, but certainly not last, day I think I truly understood that. Rik felt it too. And that understanding came upon us this time not in a twisted brow knowledge kind of way, but more in a brown coal smog, nowhere-to-get-away-from-it, kind of way. Except that instead of being everywhere all at once, it’s nowhere all at once which is so… Czech. So… passive aggressive.

But that nowhere-ness is no less terrifying for not being actively aggressive and no less felt as an ominous presence for not being something you can touch or breathe. In terms an American might more readily understand, take away Freddy Krueger’s razor-bladed claws and press start on the Elm Street Nightmare pinball game of the imagination, and you’re starting to get close. The danger flashes and flickers and flits through awareness, and it lurks around every cobble-stoned corner, within every darkened building corridor, and beneath every Skoda (“It’s a Pity”) car like some half unfinished “Boo!”

Understand that Kafka-esquean ethos, a generalized existential dread, generally all the time, 24/7, inescapable, mostly vague but sometimes pointed as a migraine headache, and it’s not such a difficult matter to understand and forgive [redacted]’s reaction to the whole episode, namely, to hop the first stagecoach clanging, caterwauling and galloping its way out of Dodge. Not only had he and Karel Umlauf, a Czech theatre student, been the ones to break into the Asylum space, but they had also had the temerity to take a sledgehammer to a wall and break through to an adjacent empty room in the building next door. It’s no accident we referred to the café fondly as our little “hole in the wall”. That’s exactly what it was. Karel, meantime, had already left for a job in New York City at the U.N., so [redacted], not unreasonably, feared he might be left alone holding the bag.

The only problems were that, first, in his haste, [redacted] neglected to tell anyone he was leaving, and second, presumably under the impression that the gig was up for Asylum and that he himself was Asylum, perhaps confusing, understandably so, personal risk with ownership, [redacted] also had with him the entire Asylum bankroll when he left. It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough, representing two weeks worth of work. Apparently, at that moment in time [redacted] failed to understand in a light bulb, Homer, twisted brow or even brown coal smoke kind of way, that he had played a critical role in giving birth to something that was now larger now than just him. An entire community and an entire set of ideals were at stake.

That’s something I think [redacted] came to understand only later on, when he returned to Prague during the Spring and Asylum was still going strong. Once he realized that, I don’t know if he was more nonplussed coming to terms with the circumstances of his departure or the fact that Asylum could function without him. Either way I think he was justifiably proud of the fact that he had been the driving force behind the creation of something truly beautiful and communal. Any mistakes aside, without [redacted]’s entrepreneurial spirit, Asylum never would have happened. I believe also that exactly what Asylum became is exactly what [redacted] had dreamed of having it become, but perhaps doubted it could.

In any case, all intrigue aside, the one indisputable fact is that upon [redacted]’s departure Rik and I were left, almost by default, as the caretakers of Asylum. As many people as were involved, there was simply no one else left around to do what needed to be done on a day to day level. Yet we knew we couldn’t do it alone.

Almost immediately, subsequent, of course, to changing the locks back again (ah the defiance of youth!), we called an emergency meeting of all those who had shown consistent interest in the project to that point. As an aside, I don’t know why, or why this seems at all relevant or worth mentioning, but for some reason I have this odd memory of it being a Tuesday. Strange, isn’t it, the things we remember and the things we don’t? Anyway, Peter Dubois, who staged Asylum’s first dance movement piece, Bez Masky (Unmasked), was at the meeting, along with his Danish performance partner, Morton Nielsen. Brits Clare Godard and Victoria Jones, co-founders of English language theatre company Small & Dangerous were there also, along with perhaps one or two others. At that meeting, held in the space heater-warmed, chilly, but cozy hole-in-the-wall confines of the Asylum café on a bitterly cold night in January 1993, we agreed, via a process of consensus, upon an organizational structure going forward.

Our own prior issues with [redacted] played a large role in Rik’s and my approach to that meeting. Before the lock-changing incident, [redacted] had expressed his desire to financially structure Asylum in such a manner that only he and no one else received a salary. That notion was one that Rik and I, who were putting in just as much time as he, quickly disabused him of and he backed down. But only to a point. He offered Rik and myself a share of the profits, but no one else, maintaining, not without merit, that the work we three put in was equal to that of everyone else put together. Rik and I accepted his offer as far as it went, but under protest, and with a high degree of uneasiness. We felt, not that his position was “wrong” in any objective way, but that it was wrong based on the spirit of the enterprise.

Our uneasiness was not simply “do-gooder” ideology. We felt, in a very pragmatic way, that a collaborative enterprise could only be as good as those who chose to be involved in it. We didn’t feel you could sign people up for what seemed like a purely communal undertaking, as had been the case before, and then shift the ground underneath their feet without them noticing or minding. Pay some people and not others without even asking if it was okay and, no matter the rationale or intent or justification behind it, people would feel increasingly suckered and become less and less inclined to get involved. And make no mistake, idealistic, artistic folk are very sensitive to this idea of being taken advantage of, if only because they so often are.

Bearing all that in mind, Rik and I made what we regarded at that time as a business decision, idealistically inspired as it may have been, to try to push for the restructuring Asylum in accordance with a business model founded upon a spirit of inclusion, the expectation of shared reward for shared effort, financially as well as spiritually, and a desire to create win-win situations. We proposed that the cafe each night thereafter have two managers and a bartender. At the end of the night inventory would be taken and the profit calculated. Of that profit, 1/2 would go to the theatre and one-half to pay "salaries;" salaries we thought of as more thank you than anything else, but they were not bad by Czech standards, and we felt they would go a long way towards building the collaborative environment we sought, not just in principle, but also in actuality. Not surprisingly, we didn’t have much trouble at all getting other people to go along with the idea.

I don't remember what the actual manager teams were, but pretty much all who were at the meeting became managers and remained involved with Asylum to the very end, albeit with varying degrees of commitment and dedication. Rik and myself, who had been running the café every night to that point along with [redacted], reduced our role to three nights a week, not just to share the “wealth,” minimal as it was, but also at least in part so that we might have time to address big picture issues such as legalizing Asylum, programming events, dealing with planned renovations, bringing in other stakeholders and the like.

On the Czech side of the equation, we enlisted the support of a number of English-speaking Czech student journalists involved with the European Journalism Network (EJN), founded by Scott Alexander, who had been a classmate of mine at Vassar. With respect to what it did to support the development of a free press in Eastern Europe, EJN, is probably worthy of an entire book all by itself. I don't know the figures, but EJN, funded by conservative American-based groups such as The Heritage Foundation, established student newspapers in just about every state formerly within the sphere of influence of the former Soviet Union. In so doing, EJN did its hefty part to train an entire generation of journalists. A clear victory for the right, which if you know my progressive tendencies, that's saying a lot for me to admit that.

But their victory was our victory as well. Essentially, what Asylum did was to tap in to a network of super smart, on-the-ball, extremely motivated students that Scott had put together. In spite of Scott’s reservations -- he was more than a little concerned that his staff’s interest in Asylum might spread them a bit thin -- the EJN office became the de facto Asylum office. We used their computers, printers, telephones, etc. as Ground Zero in our bid to turn Asylum into a legitimate legal entity.

In any case, any issues of thinly spread talent aside, morale and dedication markedly improved almost immediately once the number of committed stakeholders increased, and a renewed sense that people were building something together emerged, a spirit that Rik and I had observed coming under increasing siege in the form of behind the scenes grumbling and complaints by Asylum volunteers prior to the lock-changing episode. On some level, one could argue in retrospect that it was at that meeting that night just after the changing of the locks, that Asylum, if not founded, was refounded.

more to come...

Planning Warhol in Prague: Part I

The Asylum Culture House & The Warholesquian Sensibility

Rewind memory back to Winter and Spring 1993 and fast forward the mind’s eye across the wintry waves of the Atlantic, the snow covered slopes of the Alps and the viscous chilling pour of the Rhine. Keep right on going until you spot in the distance the brown coal smoke hovering lazily above the gently rolling landscape. A hundred or so miles into the haze the shimmering outlines of a thousand Gothic and Baroque spires emerge slowly into view. Pass above the ankle deep shattered New Year’s champagne glass and spent bottle rockets coating the main square and circle around to make a final sweeping approach from the North, following the twisting, turning banks of the Vltava River and come to rest in the heart of the sodden gray but always Golden City of Prague, capital of the newly established Czech Republic.

There, behind an unassuming black door, a mere stone’s throw away from one of Europe’s oldest bridges, Karluv Most, built by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV in 1357, you will find Asylum, a collectively run squat theater, café and art gallery that arose Phoenix-like from the ashen cinders of a dead totalitarian state betwixt and between the crumbling concrete and brick facings of a long abandoned Salvation Army outpost.

The Asylum of cultural myth, for those who were in Prague and in the sub-cultural know during that winter and spring of 1993, lingers in memory as a crazed Bacchanalian Warholesquian happening, even if, public nipple piercings and simulated urination aside, a generally less explicitly sexual version. One minute you might go into the café, a smallish cave-like hole-in-the-wall we always thought of as the Soul of Asylum, and there would be a bongo, guitar and violin foot-stomping Celtic jam. Ten minutes later there might be a cultural film about Rodin flickering across the wall, and another half hour after that you might find a wanna-Kerouac poet spouting Beat banalities or diamonds across the room and over the cheers or heckles of his temporarily captive audience.

Cross the hall to the art gallery on any given night and you might find unframed paintings and drawings taped to the wall or moody black and white Czech student photography. Head on down the broad steps into the cavernous theatre space with three-quarter concrete balcony and you might encounter anything from the haunting zen koan wailings of a Didjeridoo to a black-panted, white-masked dancer bathing his feet in a pool of rippling, sparkling water, to a nurse sticking his tongue through a condom to teach a Czech/English audience about safe sex.

But, paradoxically, a lot of hard work went into giving people precisely that experience of creative freedom and anything-can-happenness. That kind of controlled chaos doesn't just happen by accident. Just staying open as long as Asylum did, about half a year, was a huge achievement in and of itself that required not just the constant bobbing and weaving through a Kafkaesquian bureaucratic landscape so bizarre that according to city records our building didn’t even exist, but also demanded the contributions of a multitude of people with competing desires, goals and ambitions and competing ideas and notions of how things should work.

Erica “Rik” Soehngen and I, as Co-Directors of Asylum from two weeks into the project until the end were really just that; we were directing and orchestrating all these different stakeholders, doing our on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown bests to keep the whole whirling dervish of an enterprise from imploding. Those efforts, at times, got us a bit into trouble, because despite our best attempts to generate consensus, there were some who viewed us a bit as dictators.

The list of operating procedures we gave managers is one example of something many didn't like. To some this list of "rules" seemed antithetical to the experimental vibe we were trying to create. The point was made on more than one occasion that we should just let whatever might happen, happen, let the cards fall where they may, even if that meant getting shut down. I can’t say the people who felt that way didn’t have a point.

At the same time, however, an awful lot of people liked Asylum and wanted it to stay open, and that the hedonistic impulses of a few could have spoiled everything for a lot of people much sooner than turned out to be the case. To this day, I feel bad for the kids at Skola Hrou who had a big Children’s Art exhibit planned for June. “No, I know we promised you we have permission to be here and the Children’s exhibit will definitely happen,” we told the two teachers who were organizing the event, “but it can’t happen after all.” The memory of their disapproving looks still sting to this day. At that moment in their eyes we may as well have been the Grinches who had stolen Christmas.

And if you want to avoid moments like those -- and I’d give ten to one that even the most entropically oriented of the Asylumites would have gladly avoided such moments -- you can’t, for instance, have people using the street outside as a bathroom. That’s a problem. You’d think that would be common sense, but you’d be awfully surprised how uncommon common sense actually is at times. So, at least until we got a toilet installed, about a month and a half in, we had to make it a policy, for instance, to have managers direct people to a pub one block away or, and I kid you not, at least to the conveniently located construction site at the end of the street.

Or, for example, there were those who viewed Asylum as primarily expat-run and thought, well, since the Czechs aren't getting involved, we should really cater more just to expats, not understanding that the proverbial "bridging of cultural barriers" was as seminal a mission of the enterprise as providing space to disenfranchised groups, and that, anyway, from a pragmatic standpoint, without Czech support we would be doomed to failure.

It was all pretty exhausting and draining, truth be told, 12 hours a day, seven days a week, and as a consequence of that, Rik and I were actually somewhat relieved when the whole tenuous house of cards the Asylum enterprise was balanced upon came crashing down. The shy side of half a year may not seem like a very long time for a venue to exist, but if you consider the whole of Asylum in some sense as one long staged Happening, then it’s no wonder some of the historical retellings of Asylum have extended the duration of its existence to as long as three years. It feels that long in memory.

In any case, given the psychological, if not the actual, fact of a three year experience compressed into less than half a year, it also ought come as no surprise that while Rik and I were disappointed to be sure, knowing we had given Asylum our best shot, we were not at all beside ourselves at the prospect of moving on to new and different things. We were just kids ourselves then practically and we felt as if we had been playing chess against a far more experienced shadowy Grandmaster coalition opponent comprised of dark Knights and Queens of the old order, a King who kept hiding by handing off his crown to the other pieces, and a legion of pawns cast in our own youthful and enthusiastic, but also collectively clueless and self-destructive, images. In all truth, Asylum was probably in Czechmate from the start and we were just too dumb to know it, but it was a hell of a fun game while it lasted.

I wonder at times: Does the actual Warholesquian myth itself have a similar reality, an underlying intelligent design lurking behind the historical hyperbole of mad chaotic experiment? I can’t say for certain. I wasn’t there, but I can’t say as I’d be surprised if it did. For my part, I can only say I’d love to talk to those people who made it happen in a pragmatic way on a day to day level, if they existed; and I’d love to learn a thing or two from them to understand better just how they played the game and how it is they were able to stay in the game so long.