A Cart Full of Tones

In this happening, Kristek was brought to the Freistein ruin in Podhradí nad Dyjí in a cart by seven naked muses. The audience had to endure a challenging journey through the woods to attend the event. Lubo Kristek brought the visitors to the very boundary of the usual framework of everyday reality, and, together with them, he crossed this boundary. In the structure of his event, we can find the phases of a ritual, as described in the book by Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (1961).
During the first phase of separation, the viewers underwent an unusual and uncomfortable pilgrimage through the night forest in poor visibility. They were freed from their safe stereotypes. During the second, threshold phase, new possibilities of experiences were opened to them. The taboo of nakedness had fallen. In the scene of blood animating, the naked figures smeared themselves with paint, then they approached the viewers and made them participate in the event. People were smearing each other, some viewers spontaneously undressed. During the last phase of incorporation, the initiator of the happening spoke and symbolically highlighted the need to ‘pull that cart together’, and incorporated the viewers into his world of fantasy. The courtyard of the ruins became filled with both the viewers and actors who merged in one communicating living matter, perceiving Kristek’s one-night vernissage.
Kristek didn’t aim to change the social status of the happening visitors (as is the case for a ritual). By inducing the state of liminality, a threshold or limit experience, he opened the viewer’s space for different perceptions of reality and experiments.
The viewers experienced an intense feeling of communality. Kristek’s symbology enables both the actors and viewers to make use of various interpretation frames. The performer doesn’t try to castrate their fantasy, on the contrary, he aims to develop it. These principles also stem from a ritual as described by Victor Turner (1977). By disrupting old, non-functioning stereotypes, Kristek opens space for new behavioural patterns as well as for the renewal of the community.
Kristek’s happenings have evolved out of vernissages for one night. Artworks have formed their integral part until nowadays. Therefore, every happening is an exhibition at the same time, which you can see now, or never.