Susannah Dickey recently travelled to Prague with the support of the Ireland Chair of Poetry Travel Award 2024. The award enabled her to explore the work of visual artist David Černý.
Her Travel Report, shared below, illustrates the unique opportunity this bursary provides for creative development and exploration.
David Černý’s Really Big Horse, Susannah Dickey
On one of our first evenings in Prague, we go to a cocktail bar called The Alchemist. It’s highly rated on Google, and we are met at the door by a waiter in a well-fitting waistcoat. He leads us to a room just off the main bar area, where there are runic symbols printed on the walls and a mannequin in the corner in a black cloak and a plague mask. Neither of us is feeling too swish, so we order beers, and the waiter looks a little put out as he takes away the faux-leather bound cocktail menus, where each cocktail is accompanied on the opposite verso by a confusing aphorism about witchcraft or starlight. At the table next to us, a group of what I think are colleagues grows incrementally larger – they are speaking in English to one another, but with different accents, and the vibes are just a little bit stilted. The waiter comes to take their orders, and one woman requests a margarita. There is a pause, and then the waiter says, “One moment, please.” He leaves the room, and the group exchanges bemused looks. After a somewhat protracted pause, he returns.
“I’m sorry, but our bartender this evening is new and very inexperienced, she doesn’t know how to make that.”
The looks of bemusement intensify. At our table, we are not even attempting to conceal our eavesdropping. The woman who requested the drink looks thoughtful for a moment.
“Okay, what about a mojito?”
The waiter frowns. His shoulders are making a break for it down his torso.
“One moment please.”
He goes, but returns quickly.
“No, I’m sorry, she can’t make that either.”
The group of colleagues is laughing now. The men at the table order beers, and one suggests jokingly to the waiter that he can get up the instructions for making a margarita on his phone if that would help. The waiter does not laugh, and the woman orders a glass of white wine. I’m half expecting the bartender to not know how to prepare one.
An hour or so passes, during which the colleagues discuss the runic symbols on the wall and certain specificities of their day. The beers and wine go quickly, and soon a new waiter, a woman, in the same waistcoat as her colleague, comes to offer them more drinks. One of the men asks if an old fashioned is possible, by any chance. The waiter says she will check. She returns quickly, apologetic, and I become newly intrigued at this mysterious bartender who took a job at a cocktail bar despite not knowing how to make any cocktails, and who is seemingly completely resistant to learning how to do so. The man orders another beer. The man next to him says, “Can she make a martini? A martini’s not too hard, is it?” This time the waiter does not even perform the routine of going to check.
“Please, no. Don’t ask for that, please. She can’t. Please.”
*
‘Saint Wenceslas’ by David Černý lives in Prague’s Lucerna Passage. The arcade is a vestige of another time – it has stained glass windows, fuddy and dowdy independent clothes shops, a place selling miscellaneous porcelain figures, and an arthouse cinema. The cinema has a café attached, and its aesthetics fall squarely between art deco and soviet. I order a bottle of something called ‘Almdudler’, which I discover after Googling is ‘Austria’s most popular herbal lemonade since 1957’. I suspect I’m maybe the only person to have ever ordered it in the café, because the waiter doesn’t know what it is, and when the bottle arrives it feels a little dusty. The Almdudler tastes very herbal, and I’m not sure, at first, that I like it, that I wouldn’t be better off just ordering a beer. Instead, I end up drinking four bottles of Almdudler, understanding better with every mouthful why it is Austria’s most popular herbal lemonade since 1957. The café sits on a mezzanine, with windows that look out onto the main vestibule, where ‘Saint Wenceslas’ is suspended from the ceiling, held equidistant between the tiled floor and the stained-glass cupola, which has pale blue and lemon panes.
The statue, for starters, is massive. I’d looked at pictures before I arrived, but nothing prepared me for just how massive it is. Even in the photos I took myself, it’s hard to get a sense of the scale. The statue depicts King Wenceslas riding a horse. Or no, not riding – the statue depicts King Wenceslas on a horse, but not riding it. Rather, he sits astride the horse’s belly. The horse is upside down, and very very dead. You can tell it’s dead because its tongue is hanging out, and, to give a sense of the sheer size of the thing, its protruding tongue, which is both the smallest bit of it, and the bit that hangs closest to the earth, is about the size of a woman’s size 7 loafer, which is what I happened to be wearing on my feet when I went to see it. The horse’s legs are perfectly straight, arranged like a synchronized diver’s legs. The weirdest thing about the horse, which takes a moment to realise, is how off its proportions are. It’s nowhere near long enough from head to rear to justify its insane girth – this is a chunky, chunky horse, short and squat like a colossal roll-on deodorant. Maybe it was the combination of being slightly hungover (the day prior was St. Patrick’s Day, and we took full advantage of the slightly confusing Czech-Celtic festivities), plus the two litres of Almdudler, but I had what I can only describe as a transcendental experience, staring at this enormous, uncanny, callipygian horse, head thrust to an extreme angle on its stout neck, allowing it to stare sightlessly at the floor.
*
You’d be forgiven for thinking that David Černý is the only Czech artist to ever exist, judging by how ubiquitous he is on Prague’s streets. The city is riddled with work by him, each one sitting somewhere on a scale of sublime to ridiculous. The ridiculousness of some of them is reducible to their utter on-the-noseness: babies with barcodes for faces; a big butterfly with a body made of an airplane fuselage. He can sometimes veer a bit 3D Banksy – ‘maybe our phones are the real jailors!!!!’ – so at moments it felt inexplicable that so much of the city has been given over to him. On another day we went to the Museum Kampa, to see a collection of work by Franz Kupka and Otto Gutfreund (a sculptor who enjoyed a brief but ‘miserable existence in Paris’ between 1919 and 1920, before returning home to drown in the Vltava), two other Czech artists who, in many ways, were doing much more complicated and interesting things than Černý. That said, I feel certain that ‘King Wenceslas’ is doing something incredibly interesting, or at least, something that feels, to me, incredibly interesting.
I’ve been trying for some time to write a collection of poetry that thinks about the chewy contradictions of trying to inhabit, and enjoy, romantic love, amidst mass ecological death. The languages of these two different concepts feel incompatible in so many ways, and so what better way than to try and explore that incompatibility than through language?
If love is dependent on the lexicon of exceptionalism – you are perfect for me, specifically, because of your utter uniqueness – then doesn’t it threaten what I believe to be the right approach to discussing climate change, which is via a language of non-exceptionalism? For so long the human species has used language to place itself at the top of a spurious hierarchy, whereby the earth is ours to pillage as we see fit, to plunder and alter and atrophy in the pursuit of modernity, comfort, production. The failures of this approach are self-evident, as growth economics lead to the tangential destruction of eco-systems, as we get closer and closer to the reality of displacement, innumerable climate refugees, mass human and non-human death. How can we permit the language of ‘you’re so special,’ when the future of the earth demands we stop thinking of ourselves as special, as above ecological cooperation? This is what I’ve been trying to figure out, and one thing I keep coming back to is how many unsettling manipulations of non-human life we have become completely inured to in our urban spaces, and how our disassociation from our own animal-ness means that we don’t bat an eye at how weird our exploitation of non-human life is.
All this is to say, when I first discovered David Černý’s chunky, expired horse, its belly distended and acting as a cushion for a seemingly entirely clueless King Wenceslas, I was like, “Oh damn.”
*
Prague is maybe the most beautiful city I have ever been to, and part of its charm is definitely in its contradictions, which I guess are those which come with any city with a thriving tourist industry, but that seem particularly pronounced in Prague, with its cobbled streets and beautiful architecture. One evening we sit on the terrace of a restaurant set into the hill of the Petřín Gardens. The menu is entirely traditional Czech fare, and I eat a kind of schnitzel thing, floating in a puddle of butternut squash soup-sauce, with potato dumplings. There are also some slices of lemon, floating in the soup-sauce. And some whipped cream. And some berries. It’s kind of a dessert schnitzel. The views over the city are otherworldly – the sky is the brightest blue imaginable and the palette of this side of river – gleaming white walls, orange terracotta roofs – is lit up in the evening sun. I love my dessert schnitzel, and I love Prague. Another evening, at the other end of the spectrum of wholesome experience, we go to a place called Dog Bar, which is like if an Escher painting was made real and put inside an episode of Skins. We sit on a fairly rickety piece of wooden scaffolding and smoke (yes, there is smoking inside at Dog Bar) and talk about Kuppka’s idea that it is ‘absurd and even immoral to endeavour to create art imitating nature’. I say that I think I agree, and then I say that it’s not such a leap to see how David Černý’s statue is in conversation with this idea. I’m three ‘green vodka’ cocktails deep at this point, so it’s safe to say that I’m really cooking on a cerebral, philosophical level. Just as I’m about to make my point though, a man wearing sunglasses and a fedora falls off the piece of wooden scaffolding next to ours. His friends peek over the precipice, concerned but not that concerned. After a moment, the man stands. He adjusts his sunglasses and his tank top, then takes a slightly squashed box of Camel Lights out of his pocket. He lights a cigarette just as Cascada’s ‘Everytime we touch’ starts playing.
*
I write a 20-page poem about the statue. I think it’s pretty good. It feels like the book is coming together, maybe. I’m wondering about sending it to David Černý. He’d probably hate it, but then, Kafka would probably hate David Černý’s statue of his head, which rotates in modular strips at different times during the day. We can’t all be winners.
*
On our final day in Prague, we rent a rowboat and take it on the Vltava. A pedalo of six men in their 30s sploshes past us. All six men are on their phones, presumably wiling away the hours before common decency permits them to commence the more typical stag do itinerary – pints, strip club, pints. Pints, hospital, strip club, pints, strip club, pints, pints, hospital. It’s possible this has been the greatest week of my life.
Biographical Note:
Susannah Dickey is a writer from Derry. She is the author of two novels, Tennis Lessons (2020) and Common Decency (2022), both published by Doubleday UK and Penguin Ireland. She was the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award in 2020, and her debut collection of poetry, ISDAL (Picador, 2023), was a Guardian and Irish Times book of the year and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the John Pollard Prize.