The Most Beautiful Age II

In just under two weeks, 57 graduates will take their final exams, leave school, and become artists. As students discuss their future, their sense of unease and uncertainty increases.

Scene 1 

Architecture Building

The Professor of New Media is sitting in his office at a Cubist table designed by Josef Gočár and is getting ready for an academic committee meeting. He is still writing his presentation. He reads out loud:
The graduating students from New Media 1 successfully complete their studies at AVU with projects that explore serious social issues while also making highly innovate use of form, thus contributing to expanding the field of visual culture.*

Scene 2 

Academic Committee

Main Building, Room 6. A small lecture hall, auditorium seating, lights dimmed. Rays of sharp southern sunlight shine through the wooden blinds, but you cannot see outside. The air is stuffy. The faces are lost in the shadows.

Professor of Painting:
We are absolutely absorbed by painting. We don’t even notice that a car is honking its horn across the street, or that the person at the neighbouring easel is rustling with their brush. What if we run out of paint tomorrow? What if the canvas isn’t properly stretched? What if our teachers die? Absolutely nothing troubles us. We live in the here and now.

Professor of Intermedia speaks from a table at the front. Everybody turns to look at him:
We will leave the setting of the studio. Our studio will explore the semantics of laziness as a social need and institutional hurdle, and will fulfil the concept of post-studio artistic practice.

After a moment, the Professor of Painting speaks from the second row:
We don’t know what will be tomorrow, we don’t know what will be the day after tomorrow, we don’t know what will be the day after the day after tomorrow, we don’t know what will be the day after the day after the day after tomorrow…

Professor of Architecture shakes his head in disagreement and cries out:
But we know, we will be rich and happy! (Nobody laughs…)

Professor of Sculpture adds nervously from the top row:
I don’t know… perhaps we should instead focus on the here and now.

Scene 3 

Klub AVU

The green wall tiles still remember the days when most of school’s professors were students. Loud music is playing. The students are seated around tables or are waiting in an endless line for food. Dogs keep an eye out for food tossed aside by children. The future is being discussed here as well.

The graduating students are leaning against the bar. They are illuminated from below by a display case in which herbs are being grown for the kitchen. The line moves slowly, so the students have plenty of time for discussion…

Painter I:
Questions like this make me a little nervous. I get the impression that they’re not asking what they appear to be asking.

Sculptor responds:
I’ll be glad if I manage to continue to be active as an artist.

Painter II joins in:
Evidently, something is ending and something new is beginning. I’m trying to think positively and am ready to go after what I want regardless of whether or not the road will be thorny.

Painter III is sceptical:
It’s hard to write about the future, my vision of it changes every second.

Her scepticism is shared by Painter IV:
Hard to say what will be going on in five years, when I don’t know what’s happening tomorrow.

The kitchen staff finally bring the bulgur with chicken and three Hokkaido soups, which the students take over to the largest table by the window. They sit down and continue.

Painter V:
According to one statistical study from 2015, the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague is a leader in terms of the numbers of its graduates without employment, achieving a figure of 37.5 percent.

Restorer I:
Life is not just work, however.

Restorer II:
I’m looking forward to the world outside of AVU. The world is different over there. Poorer in many respects, but calmer and more cordial.

Intermedia Artist I adds:
I will now think about whether it is meaningful to continue with art and will begin to contemplate leaving the art world.

Drawer responds:
Art? Well, I’ll be making it, but I’m not going to be so bold as to try to guess if it’s going to be of interest to anyone other than my friends…

The discussion jumps over to the area underneath the projector, where the people on the worn and slightly dirty sofas are somewhat livelier.

Somebody from the first table asks:
Filip, where will you be in 5 years?

New Media Artist I:
Five years from now I see myself in my own hot tub with my friends, who work for me. (Embraces the friends seated next to him). And you, Ondřej?

Intermedia Artist II:
At AVU!

Upon hearing the name of his alma mater, Painter VI awakens, holds up his pint glass, and shouts:
Set for life!

Painter VII timidly and in Slovak:
I’ll be a galactic overlord subconsciously controlling everything and everyone with my mind…

Scene 4 

The long, high-ceilinged corridors of the Academy, reminiscent of the main nave of a Gothic cathedral, are filled with various works of art and random junk. Cast-aside wooden frames are leaning against plaster casts of Roman statues. Bags of plaster are piled on the ground. Everywhere, people are cleaning, and so more and more items block the view of the beautiful and well-executed bodies of Roman warriors. In two weeks, you will be able to walk straight down the corridor without getting dirty. At the end of the corridor in Room 6, the academic committee is still under way.

Room 6 

The teachers are speaking in hushed tones amongst themselves. The room is filled with a buzzing. Small groups of 2-3 heads continue to debate. The buzzing is interrupted by the Professor of Restoration, who stands up. The buzzing continues, so you can only hear him the last part of his speech. The heads in the lower rows turn.

Professor of Restoration:
I hope that, as in the past, the Studio of Restoration of Painted Artworks will continue to fulfill these requirements, and that teaching will meet the highest demands for the care of cultural heritage.

Professor of Printmaking in the left corner (where he always sits), counters:
Yes, but it is only by coincidence that the studio produces “contemporary art.” After all, “the contemporary” originates from five years in the past.

Professor of New Media enters the discussion:
We are seated with a group of students in a circle around a fire in the school’s garden, telling stories. In the background, several dolphins jump in a swimming pool. We take turns telling stories with the dolphins, joking together.

Male Professor of Sculpture laughs:
I see a sculptural Baikonur! A launchpad from which to set out on the journey to one’s planets, shining for the greatest possible number of like-minded people! (The teachers briefly look at one another, unsure whether this was supposed to be a response to the previous speaker.)

Professors of Intermedia, looking at one another, add:
We do not take ourselves completely seriously.

Scene 5 

Architecture Building

The Professor of New Media is still in his office. He has finished another sentence, and again reads the entire text out loud:
The graduating students from New Media 1 successfully complete their studies at AVU with projects that explore serious social issues while also making highly innovate use of form, thus contributing to expanding the field of visual culture. The Studio of New Media 1 becomes a key place for the articulation of these issues.

Scene 6 

A group of students is seated in the courtyard. The sun is shining pleasantly, and it is relatively warm out. The students are dressed in loud colours, quite extravagantly. They are seated underneath a balcony where some sculptors are depositing plaster studies of female nudes. Most of them are opulent women of an advanced age. Quite a lot have been made over the years, a kind of little Terracotta Army.

Sculptor I:
I’d like to live with my friends and make art together.

Sculptor II:
In a position where I’m content and not shy?

Painter:
Five years from now I hope – probably like all of us – to be able to continue to devote myself fully to my work.

Sculptor III:
I hope that my work will be meaningful.

Architect timidly:
I would like to keep fulfilling myself intellectually on several different levels.

Restorer lying on his side on the grass adds tersely:
Quite frankly, I look forward to anything, anywhere.

Scene 7 

Main Building, Room 6 

In the meantime, the discussion inside the building has moved on to the students – what kind of students they are and what kind they should remain…

Professor of Restoration:
Despite the significant changes in the school’s spaces and facilities, and in the face of new trends and technologies, I am more than glad to see a clear enthusiasm for learning among our current students, including all the qualities that have remained unchanged over the years despite the unstoppable development of civilization.

Professor of Sculpture sees the studio in biological terms:
Sculpture Studio 2 is a kind of living organism, joined every year by two or three new students whose future development, both personal and in terms of talent, cannot be entirely predicted in advance.

Speaking calmly, the Professor of Printmaking offers a relatively exact vision:

They should have faith that authentic expression goes hand in hand with knowledge acquired through personal experience and is not necessarily related to topicality or attractiveness.

Scene 8 

The Professor of New Media reads out loud by an open window. He can be heard out on the street:
The Studio of New Media 1 becomes a key place for the articulation of these issues, and has found a path to their resolution, which it presents to the general public.

Scene 9 

Main Building, Room 6 

The discussion at the academic committee is beginning to feel somewhat abstract and so the younger teachers, but also the more experienced ones, enter the debate with more radical visions.

The New Professors of Painting try to move the discussion forward:
To summarize what was said above: we believe than in five years all our graduates and current students will be an integral part of the world of art. Anyone who claims otherwise is lying and shouldn’t be believed.

Male Professor of Drawing describes his experience and refuses to prepare anything:
After years of experience teaching at AVU, I have learned that planning and coming up with my own visions of the studio – a creative environment where change is a natural, everyday thing – is naive and a waste of time.

Professor of Intermedia cites a student of hers:
In five years, the studio will have: 5 first-years, 3 second-years, 8 thirdyears, 6 fourth-years, 1 fifth-year, and 12 sixth-year students.

Scene 10

The Professor of New Media enters Room 6 and presents his vision for 2024:
The graduating students from New Media 1 successfully complete their studies at AVU with projects that explore serious social issues while also making highly innovate use of form, thus contributing to expanding the field of visual culture. Art has changed the world. For the better.

Scene 11

Modern Gallery

A large studio scattered with easels, papers, archival cabinets. To pass through, you have to walk down narrow aisles between all the items. Even the stairs to the balcony are strewn with stuff. The building was originally a gallery, and it is filled with a beautiful, diffuse light. On the balcony are black-and-white landscapes and large portraits –like something from a different era.

Seated upstairs by his graduation work is a student. He looks at his phone and sees a text message from a fellow student. She is asking where he sees himself in five years. He answers:
:)

Every graduating student and the leaders of each of AVU’s 18 studios have been asked to imagine the future in five years. These fictional scenes, made using their real words, show some of the different ways that fine art, architecture and restoration can understand their relationship to the future. None of them is wrong, and outside of fiction, this isn’t the kind of argument you can win. Art is made in the here and now. It needs absorption, blocking out not just the noise in the street but the demands and responsibilities the world places upon us, whether that be paying our rent or pleasing our professors. This is what the academy, especially the art academy, can do best, screening out the world so that these moments of absorption can happen a little more easily, allowing the interplays of circumstance that mean contemporary art can happen.

To ask this year’s graduating students to think about their own future might seem cruel. Their focus has rightly been on completing the six years of study that have brought them to their final exhibition. What happens next is for most uncertain, if not terrifying.

It is a difficult time to be optimistic, not just for graduating students. Economic and political trends across Europe don’t look so hospitable to emerging artists right now. Economic stability, of even financial independence, are increasingly out of reach. The time left to act on climate change is short. But fatalism is worse than denial, and if optimism is to be found anywhere then where else than in the work of this year’s graduates, in the labour, care and passion that is apparent in the fine art, architectural and restoration work they are presenting.

The work in this exhibition is just a taste of what these graduates have the ability to envision and make real. The futures they imagine for themselves now might not be the ones that happen, but the future will happen anyway, and their time at AVU has given them skills and disciplines that can shape that future. For this reason, we hope this exhibition makes clear that the most beautiful age, for them and for all of us, may still lie ahead.

Tomáš Džadoň, John Hill, professors and graduates