When I started using the phrase artistic research, quite naively and in my own way, I took it more as a description of a method of creation. It was only later that this overused phrase appeared, which in today's terms is intended to be a scientific discipline. It turned out that the development was actually going in two directions. The direction that is close to my heart is creation with the support of external sources, which is a bit of a contrast to the "modernist" idea that an artist keeps his head open, doesn't really know anything, is tabula rasa, and then inspiration comes in the form of a muse who kisses him on the forehead. The idea that an artist has to consciously keep himself in a state of ignorance in order to be a tool for divine inspiration is very remote and ridiculous to me. I understood the principle of artistic research to mean that it is finally a chance to emancipate art and to show that it is an adequate language of knowledge, that it can be put on a par with the language of philosophy or the language of the humanities. Into this then came the second notion of artistic research in conjunction with doctorates. That is the "overused" phrase that we artists take unnecessarily personally, because it doesn't really concern art. It's not so much about the creative process, it's basically about money. It's about the inclusion of the arts in the system, in the Frascati Manual, in the TACR, and in other systems. When the Vienna Declaration was released, there was an immediate opposition to it, opposing the attempt to standardize and judge the arts according to the same criteria as all other disciplines since the Bologna Process. It's similar to the way we used to oppose the Register of Artistic Performance (hereinafter RUV) in the beginning. Now that the system has turned out to bring in money, everyone has somehow got used to it. But in the beginning, it was absolutely heartbreaking for everyone to have to fit their art into boxes and measure it against others. I'm glad that my colleague Lenka Veselá, who enjoys using the system of the scientific world for artistic activities, took over part of the agenda related to the institutional concept of artistic research. I think that this process does not affect art as art, that it will at most affect art at schools. When one teaches, one is actually abusing one's art. Where else would they give me money for an exhibition than at a college from RUV? I, on the other hand, have to be willing to give something back to the academy in terms of formalities. There are some interestingly idealistic moments in criticisms, for example of the Vienna Declaration. According to some, there was an expectation of artistic research to be the Trojan horse of European education. That it would be some kind of instrument through which the whole of education could be seen as if from above. To see it and revise it. In fact, it was supposed to be a kind of metaphysics of university pedagogy.

My discovery of the medium of artistic research is also linked to my PhD. It's really a question of proportion. It's the PhD that makes you apply a certain approach to a large extent, but then there are processes where you do that too, but to a lesser extent, and you don't call it artistic research, but maybe inspiration or collecting material. For example, when I was writing my thesis on Božena Němcová, I had a particular text that I was drawing on. It was in 1997, when her correspondence started to be published, which is now slowly the main thing you read from Němcová. So even then my artistic work had some basis. 

What's also terribly pleasing about the emergence of artistic research is that artists take more care when working with sources as we are able to take anything and freely misinterpret it. To misinterpret different methodologies and pass it off as our own approach. So I think the shift towards artistic research might save a lot of projects from being too naive. 

I have that slightly exploratory attitude in me. I was a straight-A student at grammar school, and I love to study. At the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design (hereinafter UMPRUM), I found that insufficient a bit. If I hadn't given birth to two children while studying, if I had free time and hadn't been completely hyper busy, I would probably have complained. But the UMPRUM with its specific demands, plus two kids, it gave me quite a mix that kept me busy, so in the end I was satisfied that there wasn't actually that much load. It was only the PhD that was a more appropriate way of studying for me. I found it wonderful to study and encounter what I was interested in. Theoretical reading is actually meeting other people, encountering the fact that some of the germs of one's own ideas have already been picked up by someone else in history or someone else in another institution. But at the same time I'm terribly glad I have an art education, because I didn't get to theory until I was studying only what I wanted to study. I first found my field and my place in it through art. So I have this kind of precisely targeted knowledge and I didn't have to bother with any background. So that's where I thought it was wonderful. I don't really follow such a specific approach in my work as I did with my PhD, having a theme and starting by studying literature first, and then coming up with a work from that. 

I think it's more that the artistic research aspect applies in my work as a whole. Some themes, like nudity, I've been embracing with my work for a long time, like decades. I think that's more or less the case with all artists. When people say someone has a style or has found their own artistic language, that's basically it. That's also specifically focused systematic research that may or may not be verbalized. For example, from 1998 to 2002-2003, I had a lot of fun cutting out of the Leo magazine. That's kind of a typical example. As long as the ideas keep chaining, going one after the other, I just do it. I have a classic working method - lots of sketchbooks where I write down ideas. If there's a spare moment, I'll sit down and sort of stare at the wall and think and draw. I draw quite a lot. Then, when there's more time, when it looks like I might even be able to implement something, then I refine it and implement it. That's how I slowly get the theme rolling. For example, I had a period where I became fascinated with the juxtaposition of performance and striptease, and that was my main research motif at the time. Basically, all the performances are related to this motif. On top of that there are always activities depending on the place, depending on the occasion. Then the culminating research event in this area of performance for me was the activities with actual hired strippers.

I think that artistic research is always preceded by one question: Is it yours? In the sense of whether it's your authentic interest and it's in line with you. Nobody orders artistic research as a principle of creation from you. There always has to be that inner motivation. Then there are various external influences, who you communicate with, who you meet, who approaches you with an exhibition. Actually, even as studio heads at the FFA, we function mainly as independent artists. Academia doesn't really ask us to do anything. There is no external research plan. We actually have more of a task to be "ourselves", to find research topics from our own sources.

Already during my PhD studies, I discovered that I was quite good at writing projects. I was fascinated that I got a grant right at the beginning of my studies. It was like today's specific research. Ever since my PhD studies, I've enjoyed a certain thrilling contrast. I have my themes, from a pornographic magazine for women to women's issues and nudity, which are personal and sometimes slightly on the edge for various reasons. With them, I confront the structures that I lightly attack. Even my PhD studies were to some extent motivated by curiosity about what UMPRUM would say to my subject of pornography. It was similar with the Festival of Nude Forms and the request for support for such a festival from the Ministry of Culture. It's part of my overall concept. It's not just a joke or a provocation, I see it as a subtle latent political stance.

Absolutely. I have a simple foundation, which is fascination by the fact that certain things work. For example, I had no ambition to be a curator of an international festival, but I ended up becoming one after a while. When I'm in a good mood, I give it a try, and things usually work out. I mustn't speak too soon, or I don't want to brag about it, but it's a method that works for me. It happened with the festival, and I think the same thing happened with the studio [Body Design Studio]. When I started with it, it looked miserable from a certain point of view, and then it got better a lot. Lately, I've been having (probably also under the impact of Covid) archival tendencies. Thanks to a grant for digitization, I've put a lot of my stuff together - the festival website and the website of our Mothers and Fathers group. I'm starting to get a picture of how much has actually been done. Things then start to explain and support each other. But when you ask about the Naked Situations publication, I now think it's a bit of a dead end. I take it as too much self-explanatory.

Well, for example, I'm not sure about the text at all. It was one of the experiments and there are more text possibilities. This may not have been the ideal form. It's a thing that I see as standing alone. I don't have a lot of publications, which is actually why this publication exists. I have an old catalogue from 2005, published by Ivan Mečl, and I'm happy with that. I can't yet classify the Nude Situations publication exactly, but it has actually done a tremendous service in conjunction with the Festival of Nude Forms. I actually started the festival originally as an ancillary thing to the book. 

When you mentioned the specific research with the Faculty of Architecture, I took that as a bit of an obligation. There was a desire, motivated by the Art Research courses that we run with the Faculty of Social Studies, to do something more practical and more student-oriented. As an artist, I was only there as a contributor to one event. And the rest of it, Karolína [studio colleague Karolína Kohoutková] and I did as academics. That was where we also learned things that were a bit unnatural for us from an artistic perspective, but which were natural because of our affiliation to the academia, like writing a research journal, observing processes from a pedagogical perspective, and so on.

[a moment of hesitation] 

I think it's a really, really broad field. It has a lot of amazing resources that I don't use myself, but I'm sure someone else can. I don't use them more because of my own personal preferences. I'm not a totally collaborative person, I like to follow my own lines more.

Well, I think the advantage of artistic research, which is often mentioned by our students, is that it can often be a team activity, ideally an interdisciplinary one. It can also mean a certain relief from individual internal personal responsibility. I think in the research we did amongst students, someone responded that they saw it as a great opportunity to get out of the individualised art. As we speak, I feel like we're always mixing two things together. I don't quite know when you're asking about artistic research in the context of the school, the academic environment, and when you're asking about it in the context of individual creation or free creation.

Now I tend to say that when I make up my own stuff, I don't do any artistic research. But it changes the moment someone asks me about my stuff. I don't really turn down interviews, even for popular magazines like Vlasta, Žena a život, etc. There, suddenly you have to classify your things somehow, you talk about them as knowledge and want to explain how they are new and how they take knowledge somewhere further. So, for example, one doesn't do artistic research in creation, but in reflection forced from the outside, that's where it happens. I can't say if this is purely an artistic research point of view, because in general the need for a text accompaniment has increased considerably since the 1990s. Also because of the way the art market and art institutions don't work properly in this country, one often exhibited basically alone, one was a curator to oneself, a gallerist to oneself, and this also led to the need to be able to write about oneself. I think every artist has their own central theme. You could say that he or she is a researcher and a scholar in their field, in their focus, and then the form their reflection takes depends on what their external environment wants them to do. If someone is embedded in an academic environment and his work is part of a project, then he reflects in that language, if he is asked, for example, by the Vlasta magazine, then again in another language. For me, my Porn Studies Course [a course that Lenka Klodová teaches at FFA BUT] is very useful. I actually do it for myself, because it's my background from which I comment on my own work, among other things. And fourteen lectures for students are a kind of "by-product". This actually gives me much more argumentative possibilities for my work. It also occurred to me that a lot of categories are disappearing so that new ones can be created. And the new category of artistic research may have eclipsed some previously popular categories. Which was, for example, art in public space. That term was common in the late 1990s. Ludvík Hlaváček had a big exhibition at the Prague Castle and art in public space was presented as a huge expansion of what art could be. There, for example, the Podebal group appeared, and also the politics of art in public space appeared. Indeed, even sculpture, which originally was the dominant form in relation to public space, could be considered entirely as artistic research. Once there is any sculptural competition for a specific site, still with a specific historical dedication, that's where it clearly leads you to transcend into other disciplines. Rather than thinking about how much research there is in any art form, the question is how to make room for the art researcher in non-art disciplines and institutions. For example, a position that will be in the Department of Inorganic Chemistry, but it will be a position for an artist. I think it's heading towards a positive moment.

Perhaps it will be a similar process as when it was discovered that ethics, for example, should be part of various disciplines. Or that every field of knowledge has a history. So it is possible that it will be found, or has been found, that every discipline needs its own aesthetics. Which may not be a visual aesthetic, but it may be a systemic aesthetic or some conceptual perspective. But this is really terribly difficult, and the criticism of the Vienna Declaration was also aimed at this. If the position of the art researcher is to be on a par with someone who does, for example, the ethics of the disciplines, then the question can arise whether the artists are really equipped to do that. There is a danger of falling back on the idea that artists are automatically somehow extra-endowed or 'kissed by the muse'.

There is an idea and then there is reality, and then there are different destinies. I have very rare moments that I would start doing something on my own, even if I didn't have to do it. In the sense that I wouldn't know where it would be exposed and where it would go. When I finished school in 1997 and Boženka [my daughter] was still a baby, I did something only at home for two or three years. I was just searching and discovering then. It wasn't until the end of the millennium that the first exhibition opportunities started to appear. That was actually the only period of two or three years when I went to the studio in the evenings, when the children were asleep. First you bite your nails in desperation, then you try something, then it's midnight and you have to go back home, but you keep going there. You get some fleeting opportunities to show something with your friends. But since the year 2000, everything has taken off. And then I basically had to preserve my mental time to think things through. I felt from the beginning that one had to have some discipline and to stick with it. It's kind of indescribable stuff. You can actually think of anything, but only some of it is "right". And then again, only an awfully small portion of it is such that you really want to do it. That thinking process sometimes takes quite a long time. In fact, it's only recently that I have been able to rely on myself to come up with something if I sit down and give myself, say, a day. It didn't work that way before at all. You'd get into all sorts of panics. Another tricky tendency is that the more you do, the more it pulls you back. You find yourself doing variations on yourself. So I actually create quite heavily, so that the thing then comes out as a light joke [broad smile]. The technological solution, or whether it's going to be a photo or a sculpture or an action, I don't really care at first, it doesn't matter. It's a bit like getting ideas. That's something I wanted to address with my students when I started teaching. I thought we'd share the secret of finding an idea. I think it's a little bit like looking for mushrooms. You have to know where they grow, roughly, in your head [laughs]. You know where they grow, and then you go there, for a long time. And then you find something, but you don't go straight to it yet, you don't go and pick it up, but you pretend you don't see it looking around. I am drawing there, and that gives me an awful lot of "by-ideas". And then you go and pick the main mushroom. And then it tells you what to do next. Then you're calm. The practical stuff starts, which is a joy. And that's the easy stuff. But the by-fungi, the by-products are the germs for next time. When things are at their worst, you can always dig out those old notebooks and flip through them and some of that produces a mycelium again. It's in that finding of the "mushroom", that's where the feelings, the theoretical knowledge, the assignment, come together, and that's the moment [smile].