20 Minutes

In the 1970s, Czech conceptual and performance artist Jan Ml?och, born in 1953, was a member of a group of body art artists in Prague—together with Petr Štembera, Karel Miler, and Ji?í Kovanda. In socialist Czechoslovakia the medium of performance was one of only few means of free artistic expression, especially after the military invasion of 1968 that replaced “socialism with a human face” with a hard totalitarian regime. During the 1970s, Ml?och carried out more than twenty actions that were documented in photos, and that often dealt with his own personal or with social problems. Frequently, there was also a clear political message. In these actions he often subjected his own body to extreme physical and psychological situations. Most of these actions were private in character and they were usually performed alone for the camera or for just a small audience. Sometimes the artist directly included his audience, as in “20 Minutes,” a work from 1975. Ml?och tied a large knife to the end of a long iron bar, sat on the floor and laid the knife on his stomach. Then he asked a member of the audience to sit on the iron bar, and to increase the pressure whenever the artist seemed to lose concentration. This action was intended to last twenty minutes, but because the stopwatch was broken it actually went on for forty-four minutes.