Planning Warhol in Prague: Part II

Kafka and The “Refounding” of the Asylum Culture House
About two weeks after opening day Rik and I arrived at Asylum to discover, along with Jason, an enterprising, energetic Australian and one of Asylum’s two founders, that the entrance locks had been changed. It’s probably not too difficult to imagine the consternation we all felt.

Who was it? The police? The neighbors? It turned out to be the theatre school, DAMU, that held the lease on the space with the assistance of the police, but we only found that out much later. At the time we had no clue. No one was there to meet us or confront us. No one was there to tell us to go away. There was no sign of a hostile presence. The locks looked just like the ones that had been there the night before. Nothing at all particularly looked much different. But put your key in the lock and try to twist it. You couldn’t. Give it a little yank; maybe it needs a little grease? Still nothing. And then a little twist of the eyebrow and you understood. It wasn’t a sudden light bulb kind of understanding. Nor was it a languid Homeresque rosy pink fingers of dawn kind of understanding. No, it was definitely a twisted brow kind, the kind of understanding that has to knot its way around the bridge of your nose and over your eyebrow into consciousness. Quite simply and quite inexplicably the locks that had been in place the night before were no longer the locks that were in place today.

To put it succinctly, we were freaked out as hell.

Look at an old 19th Century Italian landscape painting and you might think “Wow! What unique vision those Italians had! Look at the gem-like fragile clarity of the leaves and their sparkling translucence. Look at those elongated spidery trunks! ” Then you go to Italy and look at the actual landscapes and the actual trees and you realize those painters were simply painting what they saw. That’s what it looks like.

To read Kafka is a similar experience. “The Castle” and “The Trial” are not the twisted mad ravings of a genius, but simply faithful recordings of the daily Czech experience with authority... Read More >>