A Modest Manifesto

What to make of Miroslav Tichy?

Born in Czechoslovakia in the 1920s, Tichy had the bad luck to be attending art school just as the Communists took over and threw out the life models. They were replaced with overalls-clad workers brandishing hammers and marching into the heroic Soviet future.

Tichy, whose taste ran more toward Matisse than Socialist Realism, dropped out. But dropping out wasn’t an option in post-war Czechoslovakia, and Tichy landed in jail and in psychiatric wards as a subversive. To be honest, though, he might have suffered the same fate anywhere he lived for Tichy is that rarest of birds: a true eccentric.

Released and back home in Kyjov, he took up photography and became a fixture there – the town crazy who wandered the streets wearing a much-mended overcoat and wielding a series of homemade cameras. Looking at the man and his cardboard-and-duct-tape contraptions, his fellow citizens couldn’t believe that the cameras were functional and thus revealed themselves openly for Tichy’s lens. Madness was the perfect disguise.

At the rate of 100 frames a day, Tichy recorded the quotidian life of Kyjov – all those inconse-quential moments that, unremarked and unremembered, make up the stuff of life. A sampling of his output is on display at the International Center of Photography and, from the evidence of the photographs, Tichy spent most of his days ogling women. Women passing by on the street, flashing legs and ass and ankles, gossiping with one another, sunning at the swimming pool, necking with their boyfriends – all photographed surreptitiously by the town crackpot working with DIY cardboard cameras made with cardboard, duct tape, beer bottlecaps, Plexiglas, and whatever else came to hand.

In keeping with the cameras – a representative sample of which are displayed in two vitrines – the prints are also a mess: tattered, creased, and stained, they look like Ansel Adams’s worst nightmare. Each and every photograph is blurred – technically a consequence of his imperfect lenses (polished with toothpaste and ash). You suspect, though, that he wouldn’t have bothered to focus if he’d been carrying a Leica.

Still, they're clearly cherished objects: Tichy has mounted many of his prints in carefully hand-drawn paper frames and, for a handful, has even drawn directly on the photographic surface, tracing a graceful arc along the female figure.

The overall effect is just a little bit creepy – a dirty old man wandering the streets, stalking young women, capturing their image, and then retreating into his hovel to make bad prints for which he then lovingly drew his charming paper frames.

Just as you’re about to conclude that this guy is essentially a Czech Henry Darger, you watch the video about Tichy and the people who found and championed him. Called “Tarzan Revisited,” it makes the case that Tichy was far more knowing, far more sophisticated in his aesthetic choices than you might want to think.

The evidence isn’t cut-and dried. A classic hoarder, Tichy seems never to have thrown anything away – the old paintings are there, encrusted in dust that can’t be washed away, the prints have been squirreled away in cubbyholes and strewn on the floor, dirty plates and glasses litter the kitchen. In one sequence, he merrily explains that he’s had to construct a cage to protect his food from the mice. The rats are another matter.

But Tichy is, after all, a product of the Academy of the Fine Arts, a one-time aspirant to a fine arts career – and a crafty old fox. As he observes, “Photography is something concrete, a perception, what you see with your eyes. And it happens so fast that you may not see anything at all! To photograph is to paint with light! The flaws are part of it. That's what makes the poetry.

“And for that you need a bad camera,” he adds wryly, “If you want to be famous, you have to be worse at something than everyone else in the world!”

One of his art world champions, Harald Szeemann, shuffles through a pile of prints and aptly compares them to Gerhard Richter. I thought, too, of the Starn Twins, who burst on the scene back in the 1980s by thumbing their collective nose at the photo establishment – printing on RC paper, tearing and scratching their prints, Scotch-taping them together, breaking every rule in the Photo I rule book.

In an art world dominated by $12 million dollar sharks, Tichy’s casual indifference to the world’s blandishments is more than a little refreshing. Like some thoroughly secular St. Jerome – an anchorite with a sybaritic imagination – maybe the dirty old man living in his cave has something to teach us. That is to say, what may be most compelling about Tichy is the life itself. The wreckage notwithstanding, you wouldn’t be wrong to wonder whether he may just be the last sane man left standing.

I don’t mean to romanticize the squalor or, in fact, the choices Tichy has made. I’m an accommodator, someone who’s tried to walk a careful line between the world’s demands and my own desires. That is to say, I have serious issues with the notion of going it entirely alone. Tichy's feral existence transpires largely outside the human concourse. He's turned his back on the rest of us and, although I do admire something about him -- his persistence, his dedication to his own vision -- I'm troubled by the singularity of his life, by his isolation and loneliness.

The Tarzan movie I’d like to see is the one where the wild man chooses civilization over the jungle, where he sees the modest nobility behind all the unheroic compromises we make for one another.