Self-publishing as a Surrealist Strategy: The Samizdat Catalogues of the Surrealist Group in Czechoslovakia

During the period of so-called normalization in the former Czechoslovakia, the restrictive cultural policy ousted numerous oppositional artists, theoreticians, and writers from the public cultural sphere through bans on exhibitions and publications. As a consequence, the affected individuals developed their own means of enabling creative, scientific, and literary work beyond censorship. A key medium for the realization of officially banned texts, studies, and projects was illegal and clandestine self-publishing, also called “samizdat”.

This article discusses the phenomenon of samizdat using the example of the self-produced collections of the Surrealistická skupina v Československu. In the 1980s, the community created two (fictitious) exhibition catalogues, Sféra snu (1983) and Proměny humoru (1984), which presented the individual and collective surrealist activities with images, quotations, and written descriptions. However, the editions were not only a media of documentation to reconstruct surrealist practice. They were at the same time a creative way to exhibit their content in its own specific artistic forms and theories of art. In this paper, I explore the unacknowledged dual-function of the ‘70s and ‘80s Czech surrealist samizdat as both an archival technique and a work of art. I investigate the function of these volumes for group artistic praxis and how it reflects creative production under the social conditions of the time.