Ludvík Hlaváček

* 1940

  • “I myself was fired in seventy-seven and then had to go around for two or three months to boiler rooms looking for work. Everywhere rejected me saying I was a signatory of the Charter and that they couldn’t hire me. Ultimately, I got hold of a job only thanks to the fact that at the place in Radlice they took me in fast and didn’t even stop to ask for my personal file. They stamped my ID and wrote directly on it that I was a stable boiler stoker. Two days after I started they fired me because they’d found out that I was a dissident. But I already had the papers certifying that I was a stoker. So, then, next week I went to the railways and they said to me there: ‘You’re a stoker. We need someone just like you in Prague central.’ I started working there in some incredibly rank boiler room where someone immediately came up to me and introduced himself as Docent Šindelář. A few days later, the foreman found me and told me that, apparently, I wasn’t allowed to be in Prague central anymore and that I had to be somewhere in the outskirts.”

  • “One day the school headmaster, Jiří Musil at the time, called me to his office. Sitting there were four American girls asking me if I didn’t want to found and run the Soros Center for Contemporary Art. I told them that, first of all, I didn’t even know what that was. They explained it a little bit until I told them I was interested and by all means yes. The next day we were assigned a big space to work in. I brought the Englishwoman Pavla Niklová with me and we started the center. We had to wait a half year to get any money because American bureaucracy is maybe even worse than ours. At the end of the year everything got going. We got computers and files with instructions on what to do. They included detailed descriptions on how to announce a grant, but also how to inform applicants that they got one or not.”

  • “Charlotta and I went to the [Church of] Saint Voršila on Národní Street. We got permission to go in through some institute of the academy. We said that we were there to ring the bell and two workers in white coats joined us. We climbed up to the attic above the vault where I fastened the cord to the bell and at the right time we started to ring it. Suddenly, shots were fired and someone started yelling from below. A moment later, Russian soldiers were climbing up the ladders after us, shooting their guns into the air. The four of us climbed down to the rear part of the vault and tried to hide ourselves. Of course, the sniffed us out immediately and shoved us down all the way to the refuge island by the trams, where the interrogation began. The guys in the white coats said that they were only taking care of the structure itself, that it was their job. One way or another, Charlotta managed to convince them that she was there with them, and then all of the suddenly I was all alone. Luckily, two cops in blue uniforms happened to pass by who said they would deal with me. The Russians handed me over to them and they took me around the corner and let me go.”

  • “I had studied art history since 1965, but I didn’t know anything about philosophy. In the mid-1960s, I met the professor himself through Honza Patočka [Junior], and my first wife and I started visiting him. He always treated us to punch that he liked to prepare. It was a crucial moment for me. The moment I started to come into contact with phenomenology and had only just started to scratch its surface, I said: Boy, you’ve just wasted another five years of university studies. From how I saw it, it was a total revolution in what thinking and art was supposed to be. Again, I was back at the beginning. Later on, it was a bit different and ten years later I ended up going to, just for pleasure, some lectures by Professor Pešina, his beautiful diapositives, and then I realized that everything was far more complicated. But, Patočka’s lectures were fantastic irrespective of the fact if they took place at the university or in apartments. Still today I compare it to being part of a great biography. At the end, one had to stand up, legs quivering, and go back to the real world. It was in those moments that I realized that thinking had to be something more than remembering the dates and names of works of art.”

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Praha, 19.06.2020

    (audio)
    délka: 01:30:34
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
  • 2

    Praha, 21.07.2020

    (audio)
    délka: 01:44:37
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
  • 3

    Praha, 02.09.2020

    (audio)
    délka: 01:40:26
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
  • 4

    Praha, 15.10.2020

    (audio)
    délka: 01:32:51
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

We were living in one big swindle

Period portrait of Ludvík Hlaváček, 1990s
Period portrait of Ludvík Hlaváček, 1990s
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

Ludvík Hlaváček was born on 2 March 1940 in Prague. Following the completion of his secondary education focused on electronics and his compulsory military service, he started to study Art History and Aesthetics at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University at the beginning of the 1960s. He graduated in 1966 and meanwhile was attending lectures on phenomenology led by Professor Jan Patočka. He worked in the National Memorial Institute until the second half of the 1970s, and later went on to work at the Institute for the Theory and History of Art. In 1977, he added his signature to the Proclamation of the Charter 77, which, half a year later, led him to being stripped of his post. Not even a trial in which he was briefly represented by the lawyer Dagmar Burešová was of any help, and Ludvík was forced to take on work as a stoker at cargo train depot. Meanwhile, his interest in phenomenology waned as he was becoming more present in the contemporary art scene as well as postmodern philosophy. In 1984, he was employed as a furniture bailee in the warehouse of the Museum of Decorative Arts, and, along with fellow art theorists, he started to produce the samizdat publication Někde něco (Somewhere something). Following the Velvet Revolution, he had a brief stint as the editor-in-chief of Výtvarné umění (Fine Art) magazine. In 1992, he was entrusted with the founding and running of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art. Today (2020) he is the general director of the Foundation for Contemporary Art, which stemmed from the Soros Center for Contemporary Art, in addition to his work as a teacher at the UJEP College of Art and Design in Ústí nad Labem.