Róbert Cyprich, “Ex alio loco,” translated from Slovak by John Minahane, originally a samizdat text under the same title (1983), published posthumously in Radislav Matuštík, Terén: Alternatívne akčné zoskupenie 1982–1987 (Bratislava: SCCA, 2000), 136–150 (excerpt)

Robert Cyprich was a musician, poet, Conceptual and Fluxus artist, and art theorist. Until the mid-1980s he continued his actions and performances, focused mainly on political division and reconciliation, and on the commercialization of avant-garde art. He translated and disseminated samizdat literature that was forbidden in socialist Czechoslovakia, and frequently he came into conflict with the authorities. Culminating in Abstract Expressionism and Action painting, the modernist tendencies in visual art had their climax in Pop art and New Realism. Abstract Expressionism, which laid emphasis on the direct expression of the artist’s unique personality, prepared a situation where the artist’s personality became art. The art of “appropriation” is a kind of outline re-creation of the world, using artistic thought. The creative acts of McCarthy and Schneemann, and likewise the works of Štembera, Bartoš, Mlcoch, and Kovanda, were often developed on the basis of dream material indicating how the mechanisms of the unconsciousness were akin to shamanistic magic.