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... Read More >>

Comments

[BillyWarhol]

cool story*

i gotta finish reading it*

;))