Who is Jiří David? Is he the guy who blew up a photograph of a dead Marilyn Monroe, then slapped it on a gallery wall above a row of urinals programmed to play “Happy Birthday, Mr. President”? Was it he who made a map of the world out of raw meat, then lit it with a slide of hippies at Woodstock? Is he the one responsible for last year’s neon blue crown of thorns atop the Rudolfinum, and that big red heart currently blinking day and night on Castle Hill?

Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Problem is, we still don’t have an answer to the first question. How does one begin to evaluate an artist who, in the course of his lengthy career, has exhaustively explored every artistic medium via several hundred original works of art?

We’ll start at the beginning. As a child in a small Northern Bohemian village, young Jirka initially wanted to be a game warden. Things changed when he began reading intensively. “I was mostly interested in the biographies of famous painters,” says David, singling out Gaugin, van Gogh, Cezanne and Modigliani. “I lived their lives with them, Ipainted their paintings with them and there everything started. Quite romantic, no?”

After a childhood spent “outside in nature, running through the woods,” the David family moved to industrial Ostrava. It was a radical turn in the young artist’s development, perhaps best evoked in his starkly emotional Window. It’s an oil painting of an abstract figure trapped in a dark room with a tiny square window in the corner; the figure holds his hand up to the light, as though waving goodbye. Finished in 1971 when David was only 15, Window prefigured the Czech Grotesque explosion that wouldn’t happen for another decade.

David completed his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and went on to become a member of the Tvrdohlaví (Stubborn) group. This was the 1980s, when all the important young Czech artists belonged to a movement with some manifesto behind it. Not until the 1990s did David begin receiving international attention, mainly for three politically-charged cycles of photographs. “No Com-pas-sion” manipulated portraits of famous political figures – including Václav Havel, George Bush, and Yassar Arafat – to show tears in his subjects’ eyes; 1998’s “My Hostages” portray his subjects tied up in silly costumes.

For David’s most famous cycle, “Hidden Image,” the artist spent several years making portraits of well-known figures like Martin Kippen-berger, Jacques Derrida, Jeff Koons and Dennis Hopper. Using a method developed in the early 20th century, David made duplicates of the portraits, then cut them in half down the center to form two new photographs by sticking both left sides together and both right sides together. The goal was to find out what these people would look like if their faces were symmetrical, which ultimately re-vea-led a spooky, unseen side to his subjects’ personalities.

Over the years, David has autho-red a number of texts even more baffling than his artwork.

“The problem with my internal ambivalence,” he says, “is that I subconsciously keep it growing.”

These writings don’t attempt to explain individual works of art, as David isn’t a conceptual artist. In fact, he has spent his entire career attempting to deinvent the very concept of art, to shatter the spectator’s preconceived notions of what art is supposed to be. A typical Jiří David text reads like a philosophical manifesto fueled by adolescent rage instead of a central, unambiguous argument: “What can be meaningful today is equal to the assertion that we must learn how to make bread out of hunger and a drink out of thirst.”

David’s statements are unique because they not only elucidate his own peculiar vision, but also manage to capture the essence of whatever is happening in the art world at the moment. In 1993, he compared contemporary art to sexual intercourse during menstruation, while a later essay, “Reality as Fragmentary Objectivity,” illustrated the growing distance between theory and practice in the (young) Czech art scene.

Which brings us to the present. No longer a young artist, David continues to draw criticism from his contemporaries based mainly on what he perceives as his refusal to compromise vision and integrity. He was recently dismissed from Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts, where he’d headed the school’s renowned Studio of Visual Communication since 1995, inspiring a passionate discourse between students and faculty.

His detractors’ statements haven’t affected him yet. The heart on the castle has inevitably become the talk of the town; whether you love it or hate it, you can’t help but notice it. It has been interpreted variously as a statement about the NATO summit, an emblem commemorating the anniversary of the Velvet Revolution and as a symbol of adoration for Václav Havel, who uses the heart shape in his signature.

In characteristic fashion, David has denied all of these interpretations. Since he views art as a symbolic language, it makes sense that he merely sees his current piece as an extension and amplification of last year’s “Glow” atop the Rudolfinum. David plans to conclude this cycle with a third, unannounced neon installation somewhere in Prague next fall.

Despite the anger that’s easy to pick out in much of his work, David doesn’t reject anything. Everything surrounding him somehow gets subsumed into art. By refusing to focus on any one particular medium, restless ambition ultimately leads the artist to a total distortion of reality – his, and by association, ours. This is, after all, hypothetical. Perhaps Jiří David doesn’t even know who Jiří David is. Maybe not knowing is the fun part.

Jiří David on his recent dismissal from Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts:

“The situation that led to my expulsion is typical of the current trends at AVU. Over the last three years, things have changed a lot there and the conservative parts of the school have prevailed. The professors now try to “hold their position however possible” in the same way that our Communistic professors used to. Nothing has changed in this respect. I see now that it’s not only AVU that’s like this. The professors only have students to preserve their social status. They’re afraid of change, tired, they don’t bring anything new. Their fear of competition resembles the devil’s fear of a cross. And anyone who criticizes them directly, they get rid of, oftentimes using less than virtuous manners. Unfortunately (fortunately), I was the only one who said these things to their faces.
“Besides this facet, our study became very famous and much desired among students from other studios. For some professors, namely for Milan Kní?ák,* this was unbearable because he was losing the certainty of his pedagogical leadership, governance and influence. Very few people took his side, and he suffered because of it. Therefore, he insulted our studio and humiliated my students whenever it was possible. We have written proof of all this. Afterwards came our personal conflict, then a lot of ‘behind the scenes’ action he orchestrated, manipulated auditions (which I successfully passed anyway), and that was roughly it.”

* Editor’s Note: Kní?ák, an artist once associated with the Fluxus movement, is currently the director of the National Gallery. He sparked a scandal by utilizing state funds to purchase his own artwork for the gallery’s permanent collection, and has angered many with his inflammatory and racist comments.

Markéta Hofmeisterová and Dean Ivandič contributed to this article