My personal „eternal“ vector

Lumír Hladík / Czechoslovakia / 1 min.

synopsis

"I decided to become the owner of the cosmic vector." Based on this decision, Lumír Hladík performed an action event in which he inserted a boundary stone and sign with infinity symbols into the earth of the surrounding landscape, which ended up staying intact and in the same spot for the next twenty-five years. At a time when Hladík had already been living in Canada, his friend Petr Soukup filmed that very spot after having filmed all of the artist's previous action events.

This particular action event took place in 1977. The film is from the second half of the 1980s.

biography

Since 1981, Lumír Hladík has lived in Canada where he creates works on the border between conceptual art, action art, drawing, and video. However, the beginnings of his work date back to the 1970s when action art was created on the margins of the Czech art scene. Lumír Hladík was an active member in the body art circle alongside Petr Štembera, Jan Mlčoch and Karel Miler, but he bonded more with his friend Jiří Kovanda through the civility of his own action art. Hladík was among the few who actually documented his action art through film, with many of the events taking form as temporary interventions within the landscape. These recordings, which were originally shot on 8 mm colour film, were recently digitised in the National Film Archive and accompanied with the artist’s own explanations.