Being and Pub: Phenomenology of pub meeting as performance

Abstract

Despite the politically oppressive period of Normalization that followed the Prague Spring in the late 1960s and 1970s in Czechoslovakia, performance artists had to find a way of creating despite the heavy policing of cultural spaces. Křižovnická škola čistého humoru bez vtipu (Crusaders School of Pure Humour with No Jokes) found their creative sanctuary by making works in the semi-public spaces of pubs. The group of artists, performers, poets, philosophers, and photographers conceptualised of their meetings in pubs as a form of artistic practice. Their core materials became meeting, community, alcohol, and the pub atmosphere which they utilized to create often impromptu and satirical performance works. Their works such as Fando, nezlob se (Don’t Be Angry, Fando, 1969), which was an alcoholic version of ludo that the group regularly played, or Křižovnický kalendář (Crusader Calendar, 1972), in which the group met on the last Friday of every month to meet and capture themselves on camera, used meeting in the pub and drinking as both the site and the material for their performances. The group conceived of their meetings in the pub through phenomenology - drinking together in a pub functioned as an experiential epistemology for the group. The-pub became a stand-in for Heideggerian Da-sein and being-in-the-world was replaced by being-in-the-pub. This formulation anticipates pub as a prerequisite and a method for exploration of meeting. Their pub meetings were for them a free arena of artistic expression that relied on communal artmaking. As opposed to “the meeting” that defined the official sphere, Crusaders’ pub “meetings” were of the people–chaotic, loud, disorderly, and fuelled by alcohol. Crusaders’ shared practice illustrates how meeting can be a potent political and artistic tool to create and exercise freedom under political oppression.