Zorka Ságlová
Zorka Ságlová belonged to that group of Czech artists who probed the potentiality of actions in public space during the 1960s and ’70s. She was active within the penumbra of the rock band The Plastic People of the Universe, and her husband Jan Ságl (a trained photographer) documented not only the band’s activities but also his wife’s performative landscape interventions that she began undertaking in 1969. Ságlová, who had originally studied textile design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, worked during the 1960s to create abstract paintings and minimalist objects. And when she was forbidden to present her artworks in public after the Prague Spring movement had been crushed, she moved into the open air to carry out
interventions in the form of land art projects accompanied by a close circle of friends. In the spring of 1969, Ságlová staged her first action, “Throwing Balls into Bořín Pond in Průhonice.” In this action, the participants tossed 37 blue, green, and orange-colored balls onto the pond’s surface, which gave rise to various compositions depending on the movement of the wind and the water in and around the pond. The participants were mostly members of The Plastic People of the Universe as well as The Primitive Group. Ságlová combined a sculptural approach with active participation on the part of the attendant crowd, creating a happening-like situation in the countryside that could not have been realized in a gallery environment in Prague. For that year’s second action, however, Ságlová brought hay from the countryside back to the gallery for her installation “Hay-Straw” within the group exhibition “Somewhere Something,” which was held at the Václav Špála Gallery in Prague and also featured works by Běla Kolářová and Jiří Kolář. Another art-historically important action was “Laying Diapers near Sudoměř” from 1970. According to a historical legend, Hussite women spread cloths on a meadow near Sudoměř where a battle was to be fought in order to entangle the legs of their enemies’ horses so as to make the riders fall off and fall prey to the Hussites. Ságlová, together with her friends, therefore spread 700 white diapers over the reported site of the historical battlefield. In doing so, she took up a female perspective on historical events and stood in opposition to her male actionist counterparts in Prague, doing so in a very subtle manner. Her actions, however, only continued until 1972. During the 1970s and ’80s, she worked in seclusion due to the “normalization” policies in effect, which prevented her from being publicly visible. And from the 1990s onwards, she returned to painting and to more abstract forms of expression. W.S.
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