Statement of Cultural Professionals, Students, and the Public in Support of Maria Topolčanská as Rector of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague

We, the undersigned, would like through this petition to express our strong disagreement with the media and petition campaign currently being waged personally against Ing. arch. Maria Topolčanská, Ph.D., as the rector of the Academy of Fine Arts (AVU) in Prague.

We regard Dr. Topolčanská as an excellent scholar, an inspiring pedagogue, and primarily as an intellectual force who has managed to bring to the stagnant waters of the Czech cultural scene vitally necessary stimuli for it to face successfully the enormous challenges and threats of our uncertain future. We are glad that she had the opportunity to attempt the implementation urgently needed reforms in artistic schooling, specifically including the shift from a hierarchic, master-class basis towards one that not only better reflects contemporary society and the current world, but equally creates a far smaller chance for abuse and the creation of toxic interpersonal relationships.

It has been, for us, a pleasure to work with a personality striving to create a vision for Czech artistic activities into the future, in place of its petrification into self-captivation with past glories and repetition of lists of famous names. In a world of ecological collapse, unpredictable social shocks, military conflict, and other unceasing changes to realities both large-scale and everyday, artistic creation will be forced to find different, possibly even radically transformed methods for its expression and practice. And it is also appropriate to invoke the parallel with Czech cultural dissent in the years before 1989, which similarly had no desire to hide behind the veil of pure and undisturbed artistry, but looked toward an unmediated, often even brutally raw, transmission of the weight of the reality that surrounded it.

At the same time, we would like to express our disturbance at the method of conducting the media campaign, indeed perhaps persecution, directed personally against Ing. arch. Maria Topolčanská, Ph.D. Certain statements in the text of the current petition calling for her dismissal are, in our opinion, verging on the defamatory. Similarly, even seemingly factual formulations of her alleged transgressions are presented in a truly manipulative wording. In particular, the mention of an “increasingly open stance toward drugs” at the AVU (while remaining silent on the long-lasting toxic relation with alcohol in the Czech cultural sphere), and the highly distorted, literally tabloid-level retelling of the controversy regarding the 19th-century J. B. Myslbek sculpture of the Crucifixion inside the AVU building. While the authors of the first petition rail against ideologization of artistic training, they nonetheless attack from a position itself no less ideological – from the cult of the lone genius, of artificially maintained and potentially toxic hierarchic relationships, rejection of more egalitarian and just approaches under the cliché of “new short-lived ideological and activist tendencies limited to the current age”.

We cannot be indifferent to the further fate of art and artistic training in the Czech context: precisely for this reason, we do not wish that it be maintained as the intellectual world of the 20th century on life support. It is our conviction that Maria Topolčanská has worked forcefully and effectively to ensure that this would not be the case, and therefore deserves our full support in remaining in the position of rector of the AVU.

Martin Tharp, MA, PhD    Contact the author of the petition