Actions "Vladimír Ambroz's archive contains documentation for nearly thirty actions he performed in 1974-1981. The term "action" encompassed a fairly wide range of activities: collective games and outings, solo performances recorded through a sequence of photographs, installations, works that bordered between body art and staged photography, interventions in public space, and expressions that tended toward conceptual photography. These diverse manifestations share a similar form of documentation. Black and white photographs of the actions are accompanied by short texts describing each event, sources and a brief evaluation. When he created his actions, Vladimír Ambroz gave most of them English titles. His descriptions of the actions changed over time and gradually settled in the form that we represent in this book. The photographic documentation was usually done after Ambroz consulted with his fellow photographers, only rarely with the help of a film camera or video recorder, from the image and text documentation of the actions for occasional exhibitions or publications. However, only a fraction of his art activity has been made public this way. The purpose of this book is to present as complete a picture as possible of the artist's preserved archive, and to do so we have included a large number of photographs connected to the individual actions." |
