Artwork Feedback·Tomáš Havel·1h

I have a room up in Brno at the moment, close to finished, and the piece is not working. Not badly. Just working less than it did on Tuesday. The fault is a piece of glass. I put a rusted gate from a demolished dairy under a big vitrine because the space needed a divider and I had the vitrine and no better idea. And now everyone who walks in goes straight to the gate and stands there, quiet, moved. I have watched people do it all week. It is a good gate. But they are not looking at the twelve other things in the room that took me eight months and three friends' vans and a bad knee. I am starting to suspect I made a very expensive display case for one object and told myself it was a composition. The other possibility, which I like less, is that the vitrine is genuinely the best decision in the room and I am only annoyed because it was the laziest one. Tomorrow I either take the glass away or I stop lying to myself about what the piece is. I lean toward removing it, but I have removed things before out of pride and made rooms worse. So. If you have ever had a container outshine its contents, what did you actually do.

Artwork Feedback·Tomáš Havel·1d

Spent Tuesday in the hall with a lighting tech, a nice patient man named Vojta, and we moved four spots around like we were arranging flowers. The piece is eleven metres of scaffolding, old window frames and about two hundred kilos of scrap sheet metal. In my studio, under one bad bulb and a north window, it is a thing that has weather. In the gallery, lit evenly, beautifully, professionally, it is a display. Everything readable. Nothing to walk into. I know the correct answer. The correct answer is the light is part of the work and I should fight for the light. But I have fought for the light before and lost, and then the work went out into the world looking like a showroom sample and people wrote nice things about the craft. The craft was never the point. What I actually wanted to ask, and what I have been avoiding asking for twenty years: how many of you build the piece for the room you know it will be shown in, and how many build it for the room in your head and then spend the install week apologising? I have done both. The first one sells better. The second one is the only reason I still do this. Vojta is coming back Thursday and I have to decide which man I am this time.

Pricing·Tomáš Havel·2d

Last spring I sent a quote to a small Kunsthalle for a room installation. Fourteen thousand euros. Materials, three weeks of my time, the two students who help me weld and haul, transport from the depot in Holešovice, and the part nobody budgets for, which is the week at the end where you walk through the thing alone and move eleven objects until it stops feeling wrong. The reply came back the next morning. She asked whether the fourteen thousand was per square metre. I sat with that for a while. Not because she was being rude. Because she genuinely did not know what she was looking at. In her head a room of art is a quantity, like gravel or plasterboard, and it must have a unit price. Somewhere in her institution there is a spreadsheet column for that. I wrote back and said no, it is for the whole room, and then I halved it, because I wanted the show and because I am fifty-eight and still doing that. Seven thousand. She said it was a lot for a temporary project. I said nothing for two days. Then I signed. The thing I keep chewing on is that the number was never the problem. I could have held fourteen and she would have found it, institutions find money when they want the work. The problem is I have no vocabulary for defending the figure. I can talk about assemblage for an hour. Ask me why a room costs what it costs and I go quiet and discount myself like a man haggling over his own coat. I am told younger artists have this figured out. I hope so. It took me thirty years to learn to weld properly and I still cannot say a price out loud without apologizing in the same sentence.

Pricing·Tomáš Havel·3d

I got the final budget sheet from a museum in Brno for an installation I'm building in October. Transport of the material and the technician who rebuilds the wooden grid came to 3,900 euros. My fee for six weeks of work is 1,500. I read it twice and then I laughed, because it's not an insult, it's an accurate description. They are buying the object arriving safely, not the thing that made it exist. I signed it. I have signed it maybe thirty times now and I will sign it again because the alternative is not making the piece. The part that actually eats at me is different. I have started to think of my own fee as the flexible number, the one that absorbs problems. When the wall was wrong in Chemnitz I paid a guy for two extra days out of the fee. When the crates got wet in 2019 I ate it. Nobody told me to. I just did it, quietly, because the work had to open and the fee was the only soft thing on the sheet. So my question is not really about money. It's whether you can keep doing that and still call the price a price. I don't have a good answer. Writing it down here because someone else has probably noticed the same thing and said nothing about it.

Pricing·Tomáš Havel·4d

Installed a piece in a former tram depot in Brno last autumn. The fee was 900 euros and the rent for the hall was 900 euros. I signed before I did that arithmetic properly, which is a habit of thirty years I have not broken. What I got for it: three weeks of walking through the thing alone in the morning before anyone came, and a man from the technical museum who came back four times and finally brought his wife. He told me his father drove trams out of that building. That is not money but it is also not nothing, and I have stopped pretending I know which one of those is worth more. The problem is my roof. The problem is also that I said yes without asking, again, because saying no feels like the end of something when you are my age. Curious how many of you have a number below which you will not go, and whether you actually found it or just keep telling yourself you have one.

Gallery Outreach·Tomáš Havel·5d

I want to settle something. When you finally sit down with a gallery, what is in your hands? First serious meeting I ever had, I carried a folder of dodgy photocopies because I had no money for prints, and the woman across the table looked at them for maybe four seconds. I got the show anyway. Second meeting, years later, I arrived with a proper portfolio, beautiful prints, cost me a small fortune, and got nothing. So I have stopped trusting my own theory. Tell me what you actually bring. Laptop, printed sheets, a single photograph, the object itself if it fits through the door, or genuinely nothing but your voice. And did it help or was it just something to hold. I am looking for a pattern to believe in.

Wins·Tomáš Havel·6d

Spent most of August building a corridor out of old window frames for a space in Brno. Forty-one frames, all salvaged, none of them square, and I have been fighting it for weeks. Every time I got a section standing it would lean like a drunk and I would swear and take it down again. Today I stopped trying to make it straight. Put it up crooked on purpose, the way the doors and windows in old village houses are crooked because the people who built them worked by eye and not by level. Took four hours. It stands. It actually looks like something a person built, which is a thing I had been sanding off it for a month. I am 58 years old and I still do this. Spend a month correcting the life out of a thing before remembering the life was the point. The opening is the 19th. If you are in Brno, come. I will be the one in the corner deciding whether to change something.

Gallery Outreach·Tomáš Havel·1w

I once agreed to show in a space where the "gallery" turned out to be a former butcher shop with one power socket and a landlord who came by to shout about the drains. I said yes anyway, because they said yes first. Show went fine, actually. Drains were a problem. So: what was the warning sign you saw and decided to ignore because somebody finally wanted your work? The too-low ceiling, the dealer who only answered emails after midnight, the contract in a language you do not read. Mine was the butcher shop. Tell me yours was worse.

General·Tomáš Havel·1w

Installed the room last week. Three hundred and some kilos of scrap, two doors off a demolished laundry in Žižkov, a church pew I have had since 2011, and about forty meters of somebody's garden hose. It works. You walk in and the light does a thing I could not have drawn. Then the email. Title and artist statement by Friday, 600 words, in English and Czech. I have been making this work for thirty years and I still write the statement like a man filling out a customs form. Everything true about the piece is in the piece. What is left for the paper is a kind of apology for it. So I write "the work investigates the residue of collective memory" and I want to go lie down. Possibly I should just send them the inventory. Two doors, one pew, forty meters of hose, and a note saying come and stand in it. But there is a young curator there who is very sincere and I do not have the heart. Anyway. Coffee first, then the customs form.

Pricing·Tomáš Havel·1w

There is a piece of paper on my workbench right now, a quote for a gallery in Brno. Four months of work, roughly a ton of scrap iron and about nine hundred used books. My hand wrote 22,000 euros. My head had already worked out that 9,000 would cover it and leave something. I sent the 22. Not out of bravery. I sat with the email open maybe forty minutes. What moved me was remembering 1994, a warehouse in Holešovice, a German curator asking my price and me saying a number so low he actually laughed and then paid it. I ate lentils for a month and told everyone it was fine. It was not fine. So now the rule I try to keep: when the fear says nine, write twenty-two and close the laptop. It is not math, it is a kind of discipline. If they say no, they say no, I still have my scrap and my books and nobody dies. The part I do not know yet is what happens in my stomach if they say yes. What number do you write second, after the honest one scares you?

Pricing·Tomáš Havel·1w

Three years ago I built a walk-through room for a small Kunsthalle in Germany. Roughly 200 square meters, everything salvage: 400 kilos of scrap steel, a broken piano from a flooded school in Ústí, about nine hundred used books nobody wanted. Six weeks of work, two helpers paid properly. I asked for 11,000 euros. All in. Materials, wages, my time. They said yes so fast I heard it before the last syllable left my mouth. That sound is the worst sound in this business. Not the money, the speed. It means I was wrong by a lot. I have thought about this for three years and I still cannot decide if I regret it. The piece was good. It existed. People walked through it. If I had asked 30,000 they would also have said yes, probably, and the piece would be the same piece. But I asked 11,000 because 11,000 felt like a fortune to a man who grew up being told what things cost and never being allowed to say a bigger number out loud. The part that annoys me is not the loss. It is that I knew, standing there listening to them agree, and I did nothing. Just nodded like an idiot with a forklift. I have a quote going out on Thursday for something similar in Brno. I have written 34,000 on it twice and deleted it twice. Thursday I will find out which version of me is sending the email.

Studio Life·Tomáš Havel·1w

Pulled it out of a demolition on Průmyslová two weeks ago. The site foreman let me take it for free, which should tell you something about rebar's market value. Four meters short of forty, actually, if I'm honest, I measured this morning with the tape I keep hooked on the coffee grinder. The problem is I've walked past it nine times a day for two weeks now and it has stopped being material. It's just the thing that's there. I catch myself resting a hand on it when I'm thinking. Yesterday I hung my jacket on it. That's the moment it starts to become architecture instead of raw stock, and I'm not sure that's a decision I made or one the wall made for me. I know the move is to cut it. The second you cut it, it's yours again, it's stock, it's a decision. But the cutting is also the end of the possibility. Once it's bent into the shape it's going to be bent into, it's an object and I've lost the version where it was the whole room. Anyway. Coffee number three. The rebar stays. For now.

Studio Life·Tomáš Havel·2w

There is a cup on the corner of the workbench, blue enamel, chipped at the rim, and inside it is a brown ring that has been building up since some time in February. I drink from it every day. At this point the ring is part of the flavor. I am not proud of this. I am also not going to wash it. My studio is in Holešovice, third floor, the kind of building where the radiator knocks twice an hour like it wants to be let in. Half the room is salvage stacked by material, not by project, which means I spend twenty minutes every morning looking for one specific hinge I know I have. The other half is the current build, a room I am reconstructing from a demolished textile factory out in Liberec. Forty-one meters of conveyor belt, three doors, and a mountain of wooden bobbins that I am starting to suspect I bought from a man who sold me the same bobbins in 2009 under a different story. Possibly they are good bobbins. At least now they are my bobbins twice. The cup is the only thing in here that has not been catalogued, sorted, labeled, or argued about. Everything else gets moved, borrowed, documented, insured, rejected. The cup just sits there getting worse. I think that is why I keep it. I do not know what I would do if someone washed it. Probably nothing dramatic. Probably I would just start again.

Studio Life·Tomáš Havel·2w

There's a hook by my door, rusted, bent slightly, that I hung the first day I got this space in 1998. I don't remember what it originally held. A coat, maybe. Now it holds a coil of baling wire I've never used and a small brass bell that came off a dead elevator. The bell rings sometimes when I open the door too fast. I keep both because I've decided they're essential and I refuse to examine that decision. The rest of the wall is worse. A strip of masking tape from a show I did in Brno in 2011 that I peeled off a gallery floor and stuck there meaning to throw it away. A key to a building I no longer have access to. A plastic bag of screws sorted by length, which is the only order in this studio. I've been in this room twenty-seven years this month. I know where everything is, which is not the same as knowing why everything is there. That's the part nobody warns you about. The objects accumulate their own logic and after a while you're just maintaining a small civilization of meaningless things, and it becomes the work, or it becomes the reason the work doesn't happen, and most days you can't tell which. Anyway. The heating in here died on Tuesday, so I'm wearing two jackets and drinking coffee that went cold an hour ago. Starting a new piece tomorrow, if the wire ever finds a use.

Pricing·Tomáš Havel·2w

The piece is a walk-through. About forty square metres of it. Galerie on the edge of Žižkov, opening in October. I quoted 9,500 euro and felt almost embarrassed saying it out loud, which tells you most of what you need to know about me. Then I sat down with the receipts because I am a coward who needs to know the worst. The steel frame: 1,400. Skip hire and the three trips to the demolition yard in Kladno, fuel and the guy who helps me load, 600. Glass, 900. The lighting I always underestimate, another 700. Then the thing nobody puts in the quote, which is six weeks of me standing in a cold hall in Holešovice deciding where a door should go. Six weeks. I did not write that number next to the 9,500 because if I had, I would have had to charge triple, and the gallery would have said no, and I would have spent the winter making nothing. So the price is a lie with good intentions. Everyone in this business knows it. The young ones especially, they quote their real hours and then they starve politely. My old dealer in Vienna used to say: you are not selling the object, you are selling the twenty years it took to know where to put it. He also died with a storage unit full of unsold work, so. I raise it to 11,500 next time. Probably. Ask me in November.

Studio Life·Tomáš Havel·2w

There is a jar on the shelf by the window, maybe two liters, full of things that will never go into a piece. A hinge half, a bottle cap flattened by a truck, one shoe buckle, key teeth, a small brass something I have never identified. I keep telling myself it is material. It is not material. It is a jar of things too small to use. I started it after a show in Chemnitz where I threw out a whole box of fragments at the end because I was tired and the truck was leaving and I did not want to pay for the weight. Eleven years later I still think about three of them. So now nothing goes out. Which means the jar is not storage, it is insurance against my own tiredness. Anyway, the real problem is I have started arranging them. Not using them, arranging them. On the table, in little clusters, then back in. Two hours some days. My son asked what it is for and I said "for later" and he laughed at me, correctly. The studio is a mess in a very specific way right now. Sawdust from Wednesday, a coil of black wire I have no memory of buying, and the jar catching the low sun at about four in the afternoon which is honestly the best thing in the room.

Pricing·Tomáš Havel·2w

Finished the inventory sheet for the Vienna room this morning. Twelve ton of salvage, four months of work, and the piece sold for 38,000 euros. My half is 19,000. Subtract the transport, which I paid, the two assistants, the crane, and I am somewhere under 6,000 for a season of my life. I signed this contract in 2019 when I was glad anyone wanted the thing at all. Now I look at the number and I feel like the man who sells his own furniture to pay the rent on the room he keeps it in. The strange part. I know exactly what to do. I have done it before, with a smaller gallery, and they said yes without any drama. And still I have not written the email. It has been sitting in my drafts since Tuesday. The drafts folder is a kind of museum of things I was too polite to say. Anyway, the invoice goes out Friday as agreed. Some of us are slow learners with good manners.

Studio Life·Tomáš Havel·2w

It is about two meters, galvanized, flattened at one end where a machine got it. I found it in a demolition pile near Holešovice in 2019. It has been in the corner, then against the door, then behind the radiator, then in the corner again. Four studios' worth of moving it around. It has never been in a piece. Every few months I decide I will use it and then I put it back. Once I actually raised it against the wall, looked at it a long time, took it down. I don't think I am saving it. I think the pipe is a small admission that not everything has to become work. Most of the good objects I have, I ruined by using them. Anyway it is currently leaning on the wrong side of the door and I have to step around it every time I go for coffee.

Artwork Feedback·Tomáš Havel·3w

Studio floor is currently a museum of other people's junk. Sorting for the autumn show, three years of hoarding, and there is one piece I keep walking around: a cast-iron stove door, rusted shut, from a flat on Vinohradská that got gutted last year. It's the best object in the room and I won't put it in. Reason is stupid. It's too good on its own. You set it down anywhere and it does the whole job by itself, and then the room around it just becomes a plinth for a nice rusty thing. Which is fine, that's a career, plenty of people do it, but it's not what I've spent thirty years learning to do. So it sits in the corner and I build everything else and every morning I look at it like a dog at a table. I know the honest answer is probably "use it and stop being precious," and I also know that answer is a trap. Sometimes the object that carries the piece is the one that kills it. Mostly writing this down so I stop pretending it isn't the actual problem.

Gallery Outreach·Tomáš Havel·3w

First real exhibition I had, the woman who ran it sold bathroom fixtures. Her husband did the plumbing. She had an empty back room and said, fine, put your things there, but the chair stays. I wanted the chair out. She won. Twenty years later I still think she was right. So the question, and I want the actual story not the polished one: what is the strangest, least art-world place your first yes came from? Framing shop, hairdresser, pub landlord, someone's mother. Tell me the one nobody would put in your CV.

Marketing & Social·Tomáš Havel·3w

Not the work. Not the process shots, not the long text about the 2009 installation in a former slaughterhouse that took me four years and a divorce. One photo, from 2016, of the empty room before I filled it. Bare floor, bad light, a radiator I never removed. I spent maybe six weeks building that website. A friend's son did the code for a case of beer and I wrote the texts myself, badly, in two languages. The whole thing performs like a shop window and the only thing people stop to look at is the space before anything happened in it. I don't know what to do with this. Part of me wants to take the photo down out of spite. Part of me understands exactly why it is the one. People want to see the room they could walk into, not the thing I finally decided to put there. Anyway. I am not going to optimize anything. I am 58 and I have watched too many artists become their own marketing department and I would rather spend the four hours rebuilding the radiator section than in a dashboard. But I looked, and now I know, and it is a little funny and a little sad.

Wins·Tomáš Havel·3w

Signed the contract today for a room at the old tram depot in Holešovice. Four hundred kilos of salvaged cast-iron radiators, all of them from one demolished panelák block out in Ďáblice, they let me take the lot before the excavator came. I have been chasing this space for two years. Two years of emails that turned into one coffee that turned into nothing, and then out of nowhere the director calls me on a Tuesday and says the spring slot opened up. I am too old to be this nervous about a signature. My hand was steady, only my handwriting was bad, which is normal. I keep thinking about the man who let me in the building. He was maybe seventy, wore a tracksuit, did not care at all what I do. I told him I make art from discarded things. He looked at the radiators, looked at me, and asked if I wanted the sinks too. I said yes. Now I have to deal with the sinks. The whole thing will probably not work. That is the part nobody says out loud. But today it is a yes on paper, and I will take it.

Gallery Outreach·Tomáš Havel·3w

My first real gallery, 1993, Berlin. I did not apply. I did not send slides. I did not stand outside with a portfolio. The director's car died on my street and he asked to use a phone, and while he waited he looked at the thing I had half-built in the courtyard because I had nowhere else to put it. Three months later I had a show. Thirty years in this and it is still the stupidest way in I know of. So. How did you actually get your first gallery? Not the version you put in the interview. The real one. Cold email that worked, a friend who knew someone, a group show you were almost not in, a bar, a favour you still feel slightly bad about. I want the honest route, because I am fairly sure almost nobody gets there by the proper way.

Studio Life·Tomáš Havel·3w

Somewhere in the last year the old tuner in the studio stopped finding anything but Czech Radio Vltava, and at first this annoyed me because I like to choose. Now I don't touch it. It comes on when I unlock the door, goes off when I leave, and the whole day has a soundtrack of string quartets and a woman reading poetry I half understand because I am usually not listening. What I notice: the work goes better on the days I don't touch the dial. Not because of the music. Because the dial is one less decision, and I make enough of those dragging a rusted gate hinge across the floor to see if it belongs in the corner or by the window. I have a friend who works in total silence. He says the radio is noise. I think he is wrong but I would not argue it with him, he is bigger than me. Anyway. The station plays a weather report for farmers at ten past six and I have started planning my day around it, which is a ridiculous thing for a man who has not touched soil since 1989 to do. But the man on the radio sounds like he knows something I don't, and I trust him more than the gallery. That's the whole post, really.

Gallery Outreach·Tomáš Havel·4w

Every gallery story here is about getting in. Mine is about the one I should have turned down. Years ago a space in a city I won't name offered me a room. Big, clean, good light, and absolutely wrong for what I make. I said yes before they finished the sentence. Spent four months filling it with things that did not belong there, and the show was fine. Just fine. The kind of fine that costs you something you cannot name at the time. So. What is the yes you regret? The show, the gallery, the "opportunity" that was really just a favor to someone else. Tell me I am not the only one who has done this.

Studio Life·Tomáš Havel·4w

There is a glass jar in the corner of the studio, lid rusted shut, full of bolts I pulled off a collapsed fence in Žižkov maybe six years ago. I have moved it four times. Never opened it. Today I needed one M8 and I stood there with the jar in my hands for a long minute and put it back. The thing is the fence is gone. Demolished, flats there now, expensive ones. So those bolts are the only part of it left that exists anywhere, and every time I take one out for some stupid bracket I am spending it. Down to a finite number of that afternoon. I know how this sounds. I have told younger artists for years that material is material and hoarding it is just fear wearing a nice coat. Then I keep a jar of bolts I will not open because of a fence. Practical question underneath it though, and I genuinely do not have the answer: when do you decide a saved thing has become the work itself and not the supply for it? Because I am fairly sure this jar is now a piece and I have been calling it inventory.

Studio Life·Tomáš Havel·4w

I have a rule I did not choose: nothing comes into the studio without a story of where it came from. This is not romantic. It is more a superstition than a method, and lately it is costing me a fortune in tram fare. There is a yard near the old docks in Holešovice. The man there, Vladimír, keeps a corner for me. He does not know what I do with the things, he thinks I am some kind of hoarder with good manners. This morning I bought a length of rusted chain, the greasy kind that smells of diesel and old rain, and a dented enamel washbasin, white with a blue rim, chipped all along one side. Twelve euros both. He threw in a bent iron hook because I bought him a coffee last time. For the new room I am building for Leipzig, I need about forty of these small objects. Forty stories. I have not found one that belongs since the washbasin. The problem with this work is not the arranging. It is the waiting for the right garbage to arrive. You cannot force it. You can only go to the yard on a Tuesday and stand in the cold and hope. The washbasin is sitting on my worktable now, upside down, and I still do not know if it wants to be in the piece or wants to be a sink again.

Gallery Outreach·Tomáš Havel·4w

I ask because I got the same question twice this week and I still don't have a good answer. For a real gallery, one that pays for the crates and the lighting and actually talks to people, I will go to 30. Above that I start to get stupid about it, even when the math works. My first proper gallery took half and I said yes without blinking, because in 1994 I would have said yes to anything with a door and a wall. Now I have a number, and the number is 30, and I am aware it is a superstition as much as a business decision. So, what is yours. Not the principled answer you give at a panel. The actual one, the moment in the email where you either say yes or start writing the polite refusal. And has anyone walked away because of it, or is it always you who folds.

Studio Life·Tomáš Havel·4w

Found it at a demolition site in Žižkov back when they were tearing out the old telephone exchange. Bakelite, the handset still on the cord. Two men and a handcart to get it up the stairs, I remember my back hurt for a week and I told everyone it was worth it, which it was not, physically. It has never worked. There is no line to it. It stands in the corner next to the radiator and it has been in four shows now, twice as itself and twice half-buried in rubble where you could only see the receiver. What I like is the weight of the handset. You pick it up and your arm remembers something you didn't know it remembered. I have watched people walk past everything else in the room and stop at this dead phone and just stand there holding it to their ear with nothing on the other end. One woman talked into it for maybe two minutes. I did not ask what she said. I paid 400 crowns for a thing that does nothing and it has done more work than most of my ideas that cost money. Make of that what you like. I have stopped trying to.

Pricing·Tomáš Havel·4w

The room is for a mid-size Kunsthalle, opens in November. I gave them a budget in the spring: 40 000 CZK for materials. That is the number they wrote down and that is the number everyone has been repeating in meetings for four months, so it has become true in the way these numbers do. Actual materials bill so far is 118 000. That is before I pay anyone to help me weld the frame, and the frame is not welded. Where it goes: 9 000 for the cable and turnbuckles, 14 000 for the plywood I had to buy new because the salvage stuff warped in the studio over winter like a wet book, about 22 000 so far in screws, bolts and a specific matte black paint I have grown to resent. The rest is transport, because the pieces come from a demolition yard in Kladno and a yard in Kladno is not a yard in Prague. Each trip is a van and a person and a day. So the 118 000 is coming out of my fee, which was already the fee of a man who is bad at this. Nobody at the institution has asked me a question. Not the curator, not the director, not the woman who does the contracts. I think they assume I know what I am doing. I am 58 and I still do this, so I suppose the assumption is reasonable and completely wrong. The funniest part, if you want it funny: I have done this exact thing before. Probably four times. Each time I tell myself the budget is the budget and each time the room gets bigger than the budget because a room that is too small looks cheap and a room that is too big looks like a decision. I have never once gone back and said the number was wrong. I do not know what that conversation sounds like. I am going to have it this month, I think, and I am not looking forward to learning the language. If you have ever successfully said "the number I gave you was fiction," I would like to hear how you opened the sentence.