The work of Petr Skala (*1947, Písek) developed for a long period of time along several disunited parallel paths due to the political and social situation in the second half of the 20th century.
On the one hand, for pragmatic reasons, Skala engaged in official commissions for state institutions and businesses (Short Film, Czechoslovak Radio) and on the other, he continuously created original art films the presentation of which was, in principle, limited only to a private circle of viewers.
Today he is known primarily for his pioneering work in the field of video art, which follows up on his early experiments from the late 1960s and the first half of the 1970s. At that time as a student and fresh graduate of the Film and TV School at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU) he was interested in the development of principles which corresponded in many ways to the contemporary abstract trends in visual art. His original creative processes applied to the then typical 16mm film (e.g. scratching, engraving, painting and application of chemical agents) were in fact close not only to foreign hand-made film but also to gestic painting and the material-orientated Art Informel.
This approach was already apparent in his early films Hieroglyphics and Structure (both from 1969), which were based on work with brown and black ink. As in these examples, in his following works as well, the compositional schemes were arranged according to pre-existing scores, forming the basis of the rhythm of the resulting image. Similarly, in those days he attached great importance to colour which contributed to evoking even more complex visual perceptions. The basic scale of form ranging from simple lines to abstract, amorphous looking compositions gradually transformed against this background into a structurally multi-layered form which, at its peak, give rise to dramatic but not directly critical works influenced by the gloomy atmosphere of the so-called normalization period (Isolation, 1977; Disturbed Peace, 1978).
In the early 1980s Skala turned to figural motifs (mainly the silhouette of a pregnant woman) which gradually began to prevail over completely abstract artworks. Simultaneously his work began to show distinctive metaphoric and poetic features, which became the supporting foundation for his metaphysical and cosmological visions. In those days Skala also focused for the first time on the implementation of the soundtrack and the combination of manual processes with the technological possibilities of video, which, quite naturally shifted his work to the innovative field of video art. [1].
Despite the new processes the main line of Skala´s work continued to evolve in an organic manner and the artist derived his further development above all from his previous film attempts, while concentrating on the very specific character of the new media only later. This was also emphasized by his use of the found-footage method, based on repeated embedding - and thus recontextualization - of fragments of his previously used material (Only Death…, 1988, The Earth is Crying, 1993).
In the context of early video art, the crucial moment for Skala was his encounter with filmmaker and artist Radek Pilař, with whom he co-founded in 1988 the Video Department registered by the Union of Czechoslovak Visual Artists. His activities within the framework of this officially acknowledged platform enabled Skala to present his work to the public and it also provided him with at least a partial professional background, thanks to which his work could gradually be acknowledged abroad (e.g. In 1993 he was awarded the Deutscher Videokunstpreis in Karlsruhe). In the 1990s, Petr Skala took a significant part in the production of many documentary films for Czech Television and finally also began teaching at the Film and TV School at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU) where he also worked as the head of the Alternative Work Studio (2002-2005).
Lujza Kotočová
[1] For more information see: Bohdana Kerbachová, Petr Skala – utajený experimentátor (with DVD), Praha: Národní filmový archiv 2005; Bohdana Kerbachová, První schůzky naplňovalo snění. Rozhovor s Petrem Skalou, Iluminace 2006, roč. XVIII, č. 2, p. 189–198.
