Jiří Valoch
Jiří Valoch numbers among the key figures in the city of Brno’s cultural life as it took shape after 1945. He viewed himself as following in the footsteps of the interwar international avant-garde movement, of which Brno was a hub—as is borne witness to even today by a number of buildings in the International Style, with Mies van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat being the most prominent example. Valoch demonstratively alludes to this in his use of the lowercase lettering promoted by a generation of radical typographers from or close to the Bauhaus. He was consistently international in his activities despite the world’s long
period of bipolar division during which, for a citizen of Czechoslovakia, acquiring information about what was happening on the other side of the Iron Curtain entailed overcoming numerous hurdles and restrictions. Beginning in the mid-1960s, Valoch systematically built up a global network of contacts that featured proponents of neo-avant-garde tendencies. His own point of departure was experimental poetry, which he created from 1963 onward. But the scope of his interest then rapidly widened to encompass all artistic activities that tended toward experimentation, dematerialization, and intermedia. From the very start, he was active in the mutually inseparable triple-role of artist-theorist-collector. But despite his unquestionable theoretical and heuristic capabilities, he had no ambition to attain the status of an academically established art historian. He had always found the present and the future more appealing than the past. Valoch was strongly drawn to people who stood on the margins at that time or even far off from an academic focus on art, which he wrote about and collected. He has avoided self-historicization, doing so only when prompted to by editors who, in the 1990s, began charting the history of “prohibited” art—which, in this case, is also the history of that generation of Eastern European conceptualists who, during the 1960s and 1970s, used English as both an instrument of international communication and a status symbol within their own communities. J.P.
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