Aura Satz, She Recalibrates (Pauline Oliveros), 2018
This short essay was published in the publication accompanying Aura Satz’s recent exhibition in the Fridman Gallery in NYC (November 2018). The images are taken from the Gallery’s site.
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She Recalibrates, Aura Satz’s new series of drawings are portraits fashioned from details. Most derive from publicity for electronic music presenting a composer at work in a studio surrounded by banks of dials, switches, tape reels and faders. Satz’s gallery of immortelles features Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, Laurie Spiegel, Pauline Oliveros, Éliane Radigue, Maryanne Amacher, Suzanne Ciani, Wendy Carlos, Beatriz Ferreyra, Else Marie Pade, Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux and Tara Rodger. Some were ‘pioneers’ of electronic music from its early days in the 1950s and 1960s, and others are still active today. All are women.
Satz’s portraits include many women who enjoyed little public acclaim, even within the rather recondite field of electronic music. Only occasionally did they occupy centre stage (Wendy Carlos attracting the brightest lights). Their recordings were only rarely issued at the time of their creation. A 1970 ‘Electronic Panorama’ of new music from around the world was issued on the Philips Label: not one woman featured among the 26 contributors to the four LP box set. And yet, as Christoph Cox notes, women ‘have been much more than a token presence within the experimental tradition and have produced work as significant as that of their male counterparts.’[1] In a one sense, Satz’s She Recalibrates forms part of a larger recuperation of these women and their work in recent years. But this drawing cycle asks more of its viewers than simply to pay homage.
Satz’s drawings are presented behind magnifying lenticular sheets and in precise circular frames. The optical effect of the grooves on the transparent disks is an invitation to the viewer to move to the find the point at which the image resolves (not unlike the pleasure of turning a CD in the hand to see diffractive patterns on its surface). In effect, the viewer has to tune in to the visual signal of Satz’s circular dials. The drawings record a repertoire of gestures involved in the work of the composer in the studio: the turn of a dial to change the frequency of a pulse; the careful splicing and editing of magnetic tape to combine sound clips; or the depression of keys on a keyboard to effect tempered pitches. Working the instruments of the studio, the hands also signal close listening. Hands and ears sculpt disembodied sounds – either generated entirely electronically or abstracted from concrete sources – to form acousmatic compositions. Working as a producer and composer of soundtracks for Danish Radio from the mid 1950s, Else Marie Pade returned to the studio ‘after hours’ to work on her own compositions. They include early experiments like ‘Seven Circles’ (1959) in which a serial pattern of notes is shifted, accelerated and layered over seven cycles according to a careful set of calculations. Its score is an exercise in geometry and tabulation. Pade relished the ‘microscopical precision’ afforded by the studio’s instruments: ‘The possibility to achieve the exact pitches you want to manipulate, so that they match fully with your own perception of pitch. The sounds that I’m looking for can have an airy character, but still be very concrete.’[2] Others stressed the improvisation which was required in the early years of electronic music. Éliane Radigue worked as a voluntary assistant for Pierre Henry in Paris at the end of 1960s. In return, Henry gave her two first generation tape recorders which, though limited, were ‘tough enough to support feedback experiments’. Radigue set up a small home studio, working intensively with tape techniques of speed manipulation, overlaying and feedback. ’Sometimes,’ she recalls, ‘it was enough to touch one of the recording or playback potentiometers to develop a sound. In this way, I discovered the pleasure of a work made with the tip of the fingers.’[3]
By centring in on the hands, She Recalibrates allows for a kind of pulling back too. Where else have we seen these hands? Where are these gestures also made? The image of the hand operating the console was one of the key signifiers of the information revolution of the second half of the twentieth century. It was the harbinger of both dreamworld and catastrophe: push button technologies promised ‘miracle kitchens’ and, at the same time, Cold War command and control centres threatened planetary annihilation. In the ‘third industrial revolution’, the dial inferred new relationships between people and machines based on automation and cybernetic regulation. The role of the human in future manufacturing, agricultural and transport systems was to become that of an overseer in a clean, frictionless world. This promise was also underscored by existential anxiety: the image of the fallible human being replaced by new forms of automata was the subject of doomy prophecies in the 1950s and 1960s. In his essay ‘Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation’, Norbert Wiener, for instance, reflected on the threat to humanity posed by cybernetic machines: ‘It is quite in the cards that learning machines will be used to program the pushing of the button in a new pushbutton war’.[4] In this scenario, a thinking machine commands the console; in other words, it commands itself.
The potencies of utopia and disaster were also invoked in discussions of new electronic music. In 1970, French writer and composer Maurice Fleuret, described the turn of the dial in euphoric – even cosmic – terms in publicity for the ‘Electronic Panorama’ box set:
Time and space shrink. Tokyo can hear what is happening at any instant in Paris. Turn a knob and you can be at the ends of the earth, or even on the moon. … The walls dissolve, the ceiling vanishes, and we are released on the flying carpet of the sound-dream; all kinds of geographic, historical, and acoustic perspectives are open to us. Fiction outstrips reality at the gallop. The eye listens, the ear sees: a new sense is given us.[5]
Electronic music would not only expand human capacities, it was, it seems, even capable of recalibrating the senses.
Writing two years later, British composer Daphne Oram was more circumspect, warning of a ‘world where freehand, empirical, human control is withdrawn and everyone (and everything) is submitted to total permutated “logical” control by computers. It appears an arid, cold, inhuman world to me and not what I would choose; but others may prefer it and certainly in the 1950s it looked as if the world was heading in that direction.’[6] She welcomed the spread of aleatoric techniques in the composition of music in the years since, whether the ‘spin of the coin’ or ‘the random number table housed in the computer’. Such techniques would ‘keep much of the responsibility out of the freehand human control but escape the regimentation of total serialisation’. They would ensure ‘a feeling of individuality which is not arrogant, not conceited, but is based on inner conviction and faith, based on what lies beyond.’[7]
Oram, like other composers and musicians portrayed by Satz, pulled away from the carefully controlled world of precise instruments towards New Age thinking – to what lies beyond. Else Marie Pade imagined ‘that the stars and the moon and the sky uttered sounds and those turned into electronic music’.[8] American musician and composer Pauline Oliveros, celebrated for her ‘sonic meditations’ (group listening exercises) and ‘telepathic improvisation’ techniques, began her work in electronic music. Her sense of the beyond began there. Experimenting with signal generators working beyond the range of human hearing to create electronic music from ghostly combination tones in the mid 1960s, Oliveros was accused of ‘black art’: the director of the studio where she was working unplugged her amplifiers.[9] Perhaps the director found something unnerving in the composition. Certainly, Oliveros’ recordings from the mid 1960s – often created live in the studio – have qualities which challenge description. Music critic Frances Morgan writes: ‘Sometimes when I listen to Oliveros’s early electronic works, I think about how I can only explain certain audio phenomena or functions on a synthesizer by gesture – by demonstrating on a machine or, in the absence of something with dials and knobs, by waving my hands around, drawing shapes in the air.’[10]
For many of these composers, electronic music seems to have been less a way of producing calculated sonic effects than a kind of unstable threshold between worlds. Oliveros, Radigue or Oram at the console call to mind German sociologist Georg Simmel’s brilliant essay ‘The Handle’ (‘Der Henkel’, 1911).[11] Reflecting on those things like vessels which invite holding, he came to the conclusion that for all their purposefulness, these ‘interfaces’ act as a kind of portal between worlds of utility and fantasy, and between ordinary material and ineffable immateriality. Simmel was drawn to organic forms, imagining the ceramic stem of a handle as a kind of extrusion of nature and of the body. Potentiometers and mixers – clad in plastic and accompanied by gauges and numeric scales – don’t lend themselves to this order of naturalism. Nevertheless, for Oram at least, they opened up a kind of posthuman imaginary: ‘We might now perhaps wonder further – wonder whether the human body is one vast “tuned circuit” embodying within it all these millions of smaller tuned circuits. (Maybe the spinal column is the coiled wire; maybe the brain … (the frontal lobes?) … and the solar plexus (with the sexual organs?), are the plates of the capacitor?)’.[12] Rather than being simply instruments managing electric and sonic flows, perhaps the studio dials and switches – which have drawn Satz’s attention – might be understood as valves for the body too. Composer Annea Lockwood said something similar when she wrote these words to Oliveros: ‘Seems possible to me that however intensively we compose with them and process them, sounds process us much more deeply. And so far I know so little of the changes which go on when sound goes through me.’[13] These composers embraced the kind of disordering – of music, of themselves, of spaces, and of the social world – which these electronic thresholds invited. These effects were not merely accidental or impetuous. After all, she recalibrates.
[1] Christoph Cox, ‘A La Recherche d’une Musique Feminine’ in Her Noise, ed. Anne Hilde Neset and Lina Dzuverovic-Russell (London: Forma, 2005), pp. 7–13.
[2] Pade interviewed in the Ja Ja Ja (4 November 2014) https://jajajamusic.com/magma/else-marie-pade – accessed August 2018.
[3] Radigue interviewed in ‘A Portrait of Éliane Radigue’ (2009) issued on DVD by Institut für Medienarchäologie, Hainburg, Austria.
[4] Norbert Wiener, ‘Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation’ in Science, vol. 131, no. 3410 (6 May 1960), p. 1356.
[5] Maurice Fleuret’s sleeve notes fort he ‘Electronic Panorama’ 4 LP box set, issued by Philips, 1970.
[6] Daphne Oram, An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electricity (London: Gaillard, 1970) p. 58.
[7] Ibid
[8] Sleeve notes on ‘Else Marie Pade. Electronic Works 1958-1995’, CD, Important Records, 2014.
[9] Pauline Oliveros, ‘Some Sound Observations’ in Software for People. Collected Writings 1963-1980 (Baltimore MD: Smith Publications, 1979) pp. 26-7.
[10] Frances Morgan, ‘Diffuse, open and non-judgmental: Frances Morgan on Pauline Oliveros’s early electronic music’ in The Wire (December 2016) – https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/Pauline-Oliveros-Frances-Morgan accessed September 2018.
[11] Georg Simmel, ‘The Handle’ (1910) in The Hudson Review Vol. 11, No. 3 (Autumn 1958), pp. 371-385.
[12] Oram, An Individual Note of Music, p. 121.
[13] Annea Lockwood letter to Pauline Oliveros (9 May 1970) in Martha Mockus, Sounding Out: Pauline Oliveros and Lesbian Musicality (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 57.
In ‘Live! From the Ground’, a 1988 performance in Chisinau in Moldova, he crawled prostrate along the city’s main street. Addressing the cracked tarmac, he called out ‘Ground to centre! Come in! Come in! I can’t hear you’ like some kind of desperate army telegraph operator. Dan Perjovschi saw this action as a metaphor for life in the communist and post-communist years when Romanian society moved at a crawl ‘unable to tear ourselves off the ground’.
At Tate Liverpool in 2008-9 this pattern was reversed: Dan Perjovschi’s blackboard drawings were slowly overwritten over the course of two months by chalk cartoons and graffiti by the city’s school children. A frenzy of buzzing lines and words slowly swallowed his work. At the end, the only way to leave a mark on this billowing surface of chalk dust was to draw with a wet fingertip.
What is the relation of Dan Perjovschi’s graphic marginalia to the institutions on which they are quite literally inscribed? In many of his cartoons and slogans, he reflects on the condition of the museum and gallery in the twentieth-first century, deprecating the commercialism and sponsorship of culture. Like many Eastern European intellectuals, Dan Perjovschi possesses a sharp sense of freedom and so ‘free’ – whether attached to humans or things – is a word which invariably raises suspicion.
One conclusion to be drawn from the comparison is that he is a brilliant visual and textual editor. In English, his word plays are often as sharp as any newspaper headline and his drawings deliver their message in a few telegraphic lines. These are skills honed over many years. When he joined the team of 22, the first independent weekly in Romania after the 1989 Revolution, he was involved in all aspects of the press from layout to proofreading. Established by a group of dissidents and intellectuals called the Group of Social Dialogue, 22 continues to defend freedom of speech and democratic rights in Romania. Loyal to the cause, Dan Perjovschi, wherever he is in the world, still sends cartoons to the weekly today.
An ambiguous gesture, the tattoo implied both choice (this I chose to do) and compulsion (‘my’ national identity is marked on me). In 2003 he had this tattoo removed in three public sessions at ‘In the Gorges of the Balkans’ exhibition in Kassel, Germany, a gesture which marked a break with the nation. Kristine Stiles, in her landmark study of Dan Perjovschi and Lia Perjovschi’s art, identifies this action with a renewal of their vows of dissent. Thereafter, they became increasingly critical of the activities of the political and cultural elites in Romania.
While Maurer has been resolutely independent in her career as an artist, she has often worked closely with others, most regularly her husband, Tibor Gáyor, a Hungarian who escaped the country after the political repression that followed the Uprising. The couple met in Vienna in 1967 when Maurer was in the city on a Rockefeller Scholarship. Their marriage brought dual nationality, which meant that she could travel between Austria and Hungary with relative ease, becoming a key means of contact between unofficial artists in Hungary and their international counterparts. Maurer has also enjoyed productive exchanges with figures active in other areas of the arts. She has curated many exhibitions and edited anthologies including a ‘Hungarian’ issue of Schmuck magazine (in collaboration with Beke), which was published in Britain in 1972. With Miklós Erdély and György Galántai, Maurer developed a series of experimental workshops at the Ganz-MÁVAG Cultural Centre in the mid 1970s that were later known as ‘Kreativitási gyakorlatok’ (Creativity Exercises). Rejecting conventional art training and encouraging collective activities, participants were given playful group exercises, sometimes using video cameras – a rare resource in Hungary at the time.
This idea of presenting the viewer with irreconcilable perceptual effects perhaps reached its apogee in Kalah, a 1980 experimental film made in creative partnership with Zoltán Jeney, one of the founders, tens years earlier, of Budapest’s celebrated Új Zenei Stúdió (New Music Studio). The structure of both sound and images in Kalah was provided by the traditional Arabic game of the same name that is played with 72 stones. Maurer prepared coloured panels – which corresponded to the volume and pitch of notes on a chromatic scale – which she shot on film in the Pannonia Film Studio in Budapest over three days. She then spent a further three weeks carefully editing the film and Jeney’s music, itself ‘composed’ from existing recordings on magnetic tape. The same aleatory system, derived from the way numbered stones are used in the source game, governed both sound and image. The result is unsettling as the viewer struggles – and fails – to make sense of the rapid combinations of sounds and notes. Kalah captures Maurer’s preoccupation with the effects of the shift – the marginal movement or dislocation of a filmic image – on cognition. Kalah was not made simply to be seen but to be experienced: Maurer and Jeney imagined viewers lying under a curved projection screen.
In 2015 works from 
In the 1960s and 1970s the citizens of the people’s republics might have been unable to consume many branded consumer good, or everyday luxuries like cars, washing machines and fashionable clothes but they were aware of the aesthetic codes which accompanied modern consumerism. ‘Socialist consumerism’ across the Bloc and Yugoslavia was a phenomenon found largely, if not entirely, in the realm of images rather than things (or, in Marxist terms, as exchange values rather than as use values). Post-stalinist states, for instance, created agencies and professional guides for the production of ‘socialist advertising’ which would manage popular expectations or, in Haug’s terms, desires. The first International Conference of Advertising Workers (Mezinárodní konference reklamních pracovníků), held in the International Hotel in Prague in December 1957, laid down three cornerstones of socialist advertising:
this was created by the title’s own designers but adapted from French sources. Eastern European states also provided shop windows for Western consumer goods in the form of so called ‘hard-currency shops’ like the Tuzex chain in Czechoslovakia and Pewex in Poland. Western consumer goods were put on sale for Western currency in an effort to extract Western currency from its possessors, whether citizens or foreigners. These shops were often criticized for their obvious ideological contradictions: With writer in Nove Slovo announced ‘Tuzex fosters petit-bourgeois fetishism and worship of goods of Western provenance’ whilst another in Tribuna asked ‘Is not Tuzex a way to confuse people, to convince them that “West is Best”?’
This is explored in ‘Personal Search’ (1972), a Polish movie directed by Witold Leszczyński i Andrzej Kostenko telling the story of the arrival of a group of travellers – a mother and son accompanied by a cousin bearing a strong resemblance to Brigitte Bardot – at a customs office on a border post between Poland and, strangely, Switzerland.
A similar claim could be made for Věra Chytilová’s ‘Daisies’ (1967). In this extraordinary movie made in Czechoslovakia, two young women, sharing the same name and seemingly the same persona, embark on a spree of gluttony in Prague, funded by the gullible old men who expect (but never receive) sexual favours in return. In fact, the two women only seem interested in food, though not necessarily in eating. Although the film does not have a clear narrative structure, it reaches a crescendo in an excessive and spectacular destruction of a banquet. [film shots] The two woman dance on a table laid with luxurious food and alcohol, destroying everything under their stiletto heels. In between these bouts of excess, the young women sunbathe on the banks of the Vltava and play bored games in the bedroom. Like ‘Personal Search’, some of Chytilová’s techniques seem to be directly drawn from Godard: sound and images are often discontinuous; still images are cut into the action, sometimes appearing so briefly that they barely register; and scenes are are shot with coloured filters. Chytilová’s embrace of collage is important too. The eschewal of narrative was also a rejection of the tendentiousness which Soviet culture after Stalin seemed to treat as the sine qua non of progress. The idea that all actions should point to a radiant future made narrative clarity a requirement of all Soviet films at least until the 1970s. Of course Czech new wave cinema had already shaken off its Soviet shackles in the 1960s. But her use of collage also eschews the Bildungsroman narrative structures of films made by contemporaries like Jiři Menzel (‘Closely Watched Trains’, 1965 for instance). The idea that an individual should confront the absurdity of the world or shape his or her own fate – motivating ideas after Stalinism – shaped many of the most celebrated the New Wave movies and documentaries made in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s.
In 1986 Tamás Király arranged for his latest collection to be photographed on the steps of the Műcsarnok, the kunsthalle in Hősök Tere in central Budapest. A group of adults and children – barefooted, with stiff sculptural caps and belted robes – occupy the steps. The men are peacocks in bright silks; the woman, in black. The appearance of this extended family is so conspicuously alien, so strange, it is as if they belong to some kind of cult or perhaps have arrived in Budapest from another world.
Király and his young friends also organized informal ‘fashion promenades’ through the capital in 1981 in which they brought a kind of sartorial élan to colourless streets. Unannounced and exuberant, these walks were an example of what writer Dick Hebdige once called ‘hiding in the light’ – the blinding quality of subcultural style to be both arresting and incomprehensible, at least to those lacking the cipher to crack its codes.
Over the course of the 1980s, Király’s designs began to take on more recognizable forms. Wearing his highly structured, monochrome dresses, models were given geometric silhouettes. One visitor to Budapest, a reporter from Stern magazine who went to Hungary in 1990, noted a strong resemblance to the puppet-humans of Oskar Schlemmer’s ‘Triadische Ballett’ (Triadic Ballet, 1922).
Street style was elevated to style culture a few years after punk, first in Britain and soon elsewhere. This was a kind of reimagining of the idea of the avant-garde for the consumer age: the style cognoscenti were a vanguard, testing new looks and, ultimately, shaping the tastes of others. And style magazines (or ‘style bibles’ as some commentators liked to call titles like The Face and i-D in the UK, Tempo in Germany) set themselves the task of recording the rapid turns of fashion, naming and charting embryonic trends before, its seems, they had even had a chance to become a fully-fledged look. Of course, there was a good deal of self-promotion in the valorization of style. This was hardly new either: the transmission of culture and commodities has long depended on taste-makers. What, perhaps, did mark out a difference was a ‘cool’ attitude which penetrated deeply into the the pages of the style press; into the new medium of the pop video; and in the theatrical catwalk shows of fashion designers like Jean Paul Gaultier and Vivienne Westwood and, of course, Király, even when their designs teetered on absurdity. Irony allowed hyperbole, theatricality, politics, and history to be embraced without commitment: to wonder how seriously these images were to be taken was, of course, to risk being uncool. When the sober-minded monthly Marxism Today published a commentary on British style magazines in 1987, its writer was both disturbed and fascinated by the ways in which politics and history were flattened on their pages. Serious matters and trivial subjects were treated with equivalence: ‘In the fashion photographs and general deployment of “looks”,’ he wrote, ‘history exists as one large set of slides to be wittily back-projected behind the models. History as hair conditioner – it makes everything more manageable and free of knots. Coalminers, the 40s, bikers, Red Indians, Palestinian solders, and lately even the 70s have been plundered in search of new “angles”, new “looks”. Inevitably then, everything becomes plaything, meaning does not seem that meaningful anymore – the history of Cuba is really the history of salsa.’
Later, in 1990 Király was one of the founders of the short-lived NA-NE gallery in Budapest (with seven other artists and designers including Bachman, Rajk and Soós). Meaning ‘Oh No, This Cannot Be’, the interiors and many of the exhibits of the gallery experimented with the forms and artistic languages of constructivism, albeit in a critical, deconstructive manner. One suspects that these late expressions of Hungarian enthusiasm for the Soviet imagery owed less to a sense of living in the Eastern Bloc, than in their affinities to the new wave culture which had its origins in London, New York and Berlin. The NA-NE artists and designers to have developed a kind of ironic taste for their own estrangement and alterity, perhaps not unlike the way that the punks had turned anomie into an aesthetic in the UK and elsewhere. Art historian Éva Forgács describes the NA-NE aesthetic as ‘an iconic collection of formal elements which may have had a function of an original Constructivist work, but now all they reference is the falling apart and the historic failure of the one-time beauty and one-time idealism of Constructivism.’
The hotel closed in 2011, its small and poorly serviced rooms unable to meet the demands of contemporary tourism and, apparently, riddled with toxic materials like asbestos. The Cracovia stands empty today, with no other function than to act as a framework for mammoth mesh advertising. It occupies what developers like to call a ‘prestigious site’ close to the city centre. This quarter has been protected from urban development, chiefly because it is the setting of national landmarks – not least the Błonia, a park where the Polish aristocracy once elected its kings, and kopiec Kościuszki (Kościuszko Mound), a monument erected to the Polish national hero in the late nineteenth century. The hotel faces the National Museum, a massive block which looks so uninviting that visitors often imagine that it was designed in the Stalin years, despite its pre-war origins.
The ‘Nowa Cracovia’ scheme went through the offices of various architects, until it ended up on the drawing boards of DDJM, a practice led by architect Marek Dunikowski , that specializes in efficient and well detailed, if fairly anonymous office design. To pay respect to the historical setting, Dunikowski proposed fronting the Nowa Cracovia with what he called a ‘Pergola’, a double-height arcade dedicated to the history of the site in the national memory. Part picture-frame, part platform, the ‘Pergola’ would orientate the visitor to history. In the patriotic climate of Poland today, this is a familiar gesture: so much that is new in architecture declares a connection to the Second Republic of the inter-war years, before the communist take over. Sometimes this means restoring ‘lost’ building lines (a claim made for the Metropolitan office in Warsaw (2003) designed by Norman Foster Associates); at others, architects claim inspiration in the order of classicising modernism which thrived in the country before 1939. In fact, Dunikowski’s ‘Pergola’ seems to refer to the designs of Adolf Szyszko-Bohusz, the city’s leading architect in the 1930s.
The fact that Supersam (designed by Jerzy Hryniewiecki, Maciej Krasiński and Ewa Krasińska with structural engineer 
A number of these kielichy (goblets) – as they are popularly known – survive today, reinforced and subsumed into the new shopping centre, a fashionable parametric structure designed by Sud Architects for the developer in 2010. Boutiques now occupy the spaces between the concrete kielichy, structural elements that the developer Neinver called on its website, ‘a distinctive motif in post-War Polish architecture ’. It is – a presumably unintended – irony that Brutalism, so often accused of being indifferent to context, has been adopted as the means for making familiar. Similarly, the Nove Praha, a modern multiplex in an aestern district of Warsaw, stands on the site of its forbear, Kino Praha designed by Jan Bogusławski in 1948. The ground floor windows of new structure display casts of the socialist realist scenes of labour which once decorated the curved sweep of the stone and glass facade of Bogusławski’s cinema. Announcing the power of the workers on eve of the formation of the People’s Republic, these signs now act as advertising for leisure.
Commissioned in 1971, and opened a decade later, this hotel was a powerful sign of the privilege that the communist elite reserved for itself. With bespoke interiors and fittings, some created by celebrated Czech decorative artists, like glass artist Stanislav Libensky, supporters of the hotel claimed that the artistic merit of this late communist Gesamtkunstwerk outbalanced its dubious past. The story of the hotel’s privatization in the 1990s is indicative of the operations of capital in the Czech Republic after communist rule. Becoming property of Prague City Council in 1992, the hotel’s swimming pool and grounds were welcome additions to the public spaces of the city. However, in 2002, the hotel was sold to Falcon Capital, an investment company established by Georgian and Armenian businessmen in 1996, with murky connections to Russia that have perplexed journalists and commentators.
And mirroring the use of social media by defenders of socmodernist architecture, a Facebook ‘community page’ was set up under the name ‘Zbourejte komunistický hotel Praha’ (Tear down the Communist Praha Hotel). It introduced itself with these words:
Around 300 people dressed in gold masks and clothes – some carrying banners or playing instruments, others transporting a golden calf in a shopping trolley – took part in a rally that the artists called ‘Chciwość Miasta’(Greedy City). Approaching protest in an emphatically ludic and spectacular manner, Malik and her friends were effective at attracting the media and of course public attention too. But this was more than a photo-op. Focusing interest on the Cracovia’s striking and high quality decorative scheme, including an exuberant 37m2 mosaic of global landmarks from the 1960s that had been plastered over at some time in the early 1990s, Malik and Okoński were engaged in a project of architectural re-enchantment.
Arch Vader’s animated messages owe more to the language of console games and super-hero movies than the architectural press. Commenting on the plans demolish and remake the modernist railway station in Havirov, a factory town near Cieszyn that is an example of what the Czechs call Brussels Style (after the Expo in 1958), Arch Vader accuses the local authorities and Czech Railways of leaving the building to decay in order to make the case for a new building, a cheap box under a tented roof. To be paid for with EU funds, this is an example of what Arch Vader calls the new ‘Brussels Style’ of the twenty-first century. Darkly sardonic and, for that reason, highly entertaining, these short films are reposted, acquiring large audiences as they travel through social media.
Small pavilions with ambitious and expressive structures, the stations were designed by Arseniusz Romanowicz and Piotr Szymaniak in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the very height of the post-war wave of modernism. With ‘op art’ decorative schemes and sculptural rooflines, they were signs of a new optimism not just for new architectural forms but even for the renewal of socialism. By the 1990s, they were in a sorry state, with the concrete suppurating and the bright glazing obscured by advertising and shabby kiosks. Dark and decaying, these stations were invariably described as rotting structures: some were even subject of gruesome urban myths. One was even believed to house an underground illegal meat processing plant, with the animal fat leaking into the city’s sewers. However, the pressing need to ensure functioning communications in the city during the Euro 2012 football championships, and the state of the global economic downturn meant that repair was the only option. Sometimes the architects charged with the task came to realize that what was required was not architectural additions but removal, at least of the elements which obscured the original design. Michał Błaszczyk of PPMB was responsible for restoring ‘Stadion’, a double-height rectilinear box clad in rough stonework and a bold spherical entrance. He recalls: ”My first idea was to generate a new quality. But when together with Krzysztof Charewicz from the Warsaw Municipal Monument Preservation Office we started delving into the station’s documentation, looking at archival photos, it turned out that in the past it had looked different. It was then that the idea emerged to restore it and unveil its original appeal.’