‘You keep belittling us and we are sick of it!’: Four lessons learned from feminist interventions in Czech art schools

ABSTRACT

Joining the many past and present students who are sick of the belittling in Czech art schools such as the feminist collective Čtvrtá vlna, the article identifies four areas that are key to the upholding of heteropatriarchy in Czech tertiary education. Presented in a form of ‘lessons learned’, the aim of the respective analyses is to help make successful the contestations of androcentrism and sexism in Czech art schools and art world more broadly. Deploying autoethnography, the analyses draw from a self-reflexive account of the author’s experience of studying art and art education on the university level in the Czech Republic. Drawing from this self-reflexive narrative and feminist scholarship on art education and postsocialism, the article examines the paradoxical and intricate ways through which heteropatriarchy operates in Czech tertiary art education, with particular focus on how heteropatriarchy entangles with other regimes of colonial (post)modernity, namely Eurocentrism, capitalism and its correlate, the overcome state-socialism.

Acknowledgements

I want to thank the editor of Gender and Education Helen Rowlands and the anonymous reviewers for their support and valuable comments. My thanks also go to Puleng Segalo for inviting me to UNISA's Women Researchers Writing Retreat, where I begun to work on this project, and to colleagues at Faculty of Fine Arts at Brno University of Technology, where I completed the manuscript during my Visiting Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. I am also grateful to Elspeth Mitchell, Liz Stainforth, Hana Janečková and Martina Smutná for the many insightful conversations about feminist struggles, art and art schools.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Fourth Wave’s video ‘Sexism in Czech Art Schools’ (2016) that includes English subtitles is accessible via YouTube channel of Krytyka Polityczna: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTxYRSdU8vA&ab_channel=KrytykaPolityczna

2 As follows from this work, what makes art schools specific site for feminist interventions is the ways in which the tension – between the transformative potential embodied in art and art education on the one hand, and the traditions, practices, conventions, and evaluations that define these institutions on the other – plays out in relation to heteropatriarchy. Put differently, the paradoxical and intricate ways in which heteropatriarchy operates in art schools renders its manifestations extremely pronounced but difficult to clearly point out, and thus contest. However, because of the transformative potential embedded in the critical and creative aspects of the artistic and educational practice, art schools represent a particularly advantageous site for the transformative work necessary for the building of a different world beyond the premises of heteropatriarchy and colonial (post)modernity more broadly.

3 Following Madina Tlostanova, Suruchi Thapar-Björkert and Redi Koobak (2019), I use the terms ‘postsocialism’ and ‘postsocialist’ to refer to the post-Soviet and Central and Eastern European countries that were in the former Soviet sphere of influence. Similarly to the above authors, while I am aware of the significant differences between those countries, I use the term in order to acknowledge ‘the shared legacy of the Soviet presence across the region’ (2019, 82).

4 The brackets that accompany the way I render ‘colonial (post)modernity’ signal that this afterlife of colonial modernity – a system that benefits those who have been associated with non-native, white, European, masculine, heterosexual, and cisgender subjects in the capitalist Global North and/or West at the expense of those who have not – is more of a continuation than a radical break from it.

5 'For further reflection and close examination of this project see two of my texts that were published in Czech (Vráblíková 2010, 2012).'

6 For reflections on the overall culture of patronising and belittling and the effects of the pedagogical model of the paternalist pyramidal structure of the ‘master and his disciples’ in Czech art schools see Forman (2016), Švehláková (2018), (Kolárčik n.d.).

7 These recent initiatives follow the tradition of feminist practice in art and art education developed by ‘Body Design Studio’ at FAVU that has been focusing on the issues of gender and embodiment since its foundation in 1999 by Jana Preková, and since 2012 by Lenka Klodová.

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Lenka Vráblíková

Lenka Vráblíková is a lecturer at the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, and in 2016 co-founded Nätverket Feministiska Läsningar/Feminist Readings Network. Her work lies at the intersection of visual culture studies with transnational feminisms, critical university studies, feminist deconstruction and political ecology.