Multimedia artist working in fine art (actions, paintings, sculptures), music, literature, architecture, fashion and furniture design. Member of the international art group Fluxus. Featured in major galleries around the world as well as archives, catalogues, encyclopedias and dictionaries. His Broken Music was included among the 1000 most important compositions of the 20th century. One of the 500 artists in the 20th Century Art Book (Phaidon Press, London and New York). A dictionary of designers published by Ambiente lists him as "a central figure in modern Czech design." Curatorial work, theoretical essays, exhibition architecture. Extensive teaching, lecturing and publishing activities. Collector and expert on the history of puppet theater (puppets, set design) and author of the only encyclopedia of Czech and Slovak puppet theater designers. Under the communist regime he was arrested, searched and detained by the police approximately 300 times, spending several months in custody in total. He was convicted of failing to prevent a friend from deserting and of harming Czechoslovakia's interests abroad, and in 1968 he was arrested in Vienna for attacking two policemen. From 1966 onwards he was listed as an enemy of the state. His final prohibited exhibition was to have been held in November 1989. Milan Knízák has had more than 120 solo exhibitions and hundreds of group exhibitions throughout almost the entire world. He has published approximately 80 books and catalogs and released many music recordings, as well as creating a number of design projects.
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SR 526CD
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"My piano compositions are a mixture of musical reminiscences and a confession of my love for disharmonic chords on the one hand, and lascivious melodies on the other. As in the case of almost all my pieces, I wrote them 'dry', at a desk, without using any musical instruments. I only worked with memory and a little bit of imagination. The compositions often come across as randomly taken out of a pot, which contains a blend of fragments of works of a variety of periods, styles and creators." --Milan Knízák, Mongrelised Piano
Another State of Stagnation contains six unreleased piano pieces by Milan Knízák, written between 1991 and 2021. Played by Czech piano virtuoso Miroslav Beinhauer in August 2020 and recorded in August 2021 at Czech Radio Ostrava under the Petr Bakla's recording direction. The author of the title and cover is Milan Knízák. Produced by re-set production. In the second movement, at least two references to Czech "tramping" (hiking, country) music can be read or heard: Ceka huãí and Táboráku, plápolej. They are among the numerous references to other pieces, while they can concurrently be something else -- for instance, a Beethoven minuet. Beinhauer pointed out: "Milan KníÏák's piano works abound in these 'quotations', some of which are just very similar to well-known melodies, while others are true quotations... I do not even recognize some of them at first listen, but that is not actually the point. If someone does identify these quoted fragments when listening, they can feel good about themselves or can even remember the whole piece better, but I myself do not deem it essential in the case of Milan's compositions. Alternation of styles is more important."
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SR 518CD
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Milan Knízak canonical text Aktual University, dating from 1967, contains ten short lectures outlining the university's character -- On Conflict, On Dreams, On Revolutions, On Love, On Belief, On Art, etc. These lectures were to serve as inspirational schemes for lectures, seminars and discussions held at an ideal university. In the first piece, Aktual University, Milan Knízak reads his own text, with Opening Performance Orchestra providing the musical accompaniment. It was performed live in October 2019 at the Movement-Sound-Space festival in Opava, where this recording was made. The second track, titled "Broken Suite", is a studio remix, in which Opening Performance Orchestra used fragments and quotations from Milan Knizák's compositions, conceived over the past fifty years, applying the "broken" method. The majority of them are made public for the very first time in the newly created "Broken Suite". The booklet features English translations of ten Aktual University lectures, as well as Milan Knizak's contemporary initiation text. Includes 12-page booklet.
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SR 479LP
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Violin was Milan Knízák's first instrument. He has composed hundreds of works of this ilk. The first one "DHK", was written 45 years ago. Next to his destroyed works, Milan took notations of different composers, cut them and put them together (with his own score) into a collage, expressing his feelings and his apprehension of music. Recorded from February-July 2018 and performed by fama Q: David Danel, Roman Hranicka - violin; Ondrej Martinovsky - viola; Balázs Adorján - violoncello. fama Q is a string quartet founded in 2005 in Prague. Its members, also orchestral musicians with the Prague Philharmonia, were always devoted to chamber and string quartet music.
"I am aware that the majority of my compositions are technically challenging, since I employ uncommon intervals, so as to make the musicians think in a different, novel way and to produce different colors in the 'classical' passages too. If the instruments were arrayed 'beneath one another', simple melodies may come across as boring. In the case of interval skips, whereby I count with a certain fuzziness, even falseness of tones, music is far more colorful. I don't care who would perform my pieces, as long as they are solid musicians. I think I have written them in such a manner that they should not forfeit energy even when someone is not familiar with the modern playing principles, only their effect would somewhat shift. And I really don't mind any shift. One of my friends said that this music of mine is not similar to anything. I would like to add that it is similar to everything. Perhaps both are true." --Milan Knízák, April 2018.
Prof. Milan Knízák, Dr.A. is a multimedia artist working in fine art (actions, paintings, sculptures), music, literature, architecture, fashion, and furniture design. Member of the international art group Fluxus. Featured in major galleries around the world as well as archives, catalogs, encyclopedias and dictionaries. His Broken Music (SR 400LP, 2015) was included among the 1000 most important compositions of the 20th century. A dictionary of designers published by Ambiente lists him as "a central figure in modern Czech design". Milan Knízák has had more than 120 solo exhibitions and hundreds of group exhibitions throughout almost the entire world. He has published approximately 80 books and catalogs and released many music recordings, as well as creating a number of design projects.
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SR 400LP
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2019 repress. Milan Knízák's 1979 masterpiece reissued on vinyl for the first time; presented in a gatefold with the original design. Milan Knízák (born April 19, 1940) is a Czech performance artist, sculptor, musician, installation artist, dissident, graphic artist, art theorist, and pedagogue of art. Before everyone else -- Christian Marclay, Philip Jeck, eRikm, Martin Tétreault, Yoshihide Otomo -- there was Milan Knízák. In 1964, Knízák, a member of Fluxus from behind the Iron Curtain, sat down on a sidewalk near the Charles Bridge in Prague, laid down a paper carpet right into the street, and starts tearing pages out of books and burning them. Around the same time, he began to create music from defective, worn, damaged, or broken LPs. These Broken Music compositions, his classic collages of noises created during performances and happenings, are widely regarded as important sound art documents. Knízák recalls, "In 1963-64 I used to play records both too slowly and too fast and thus changed the quality of the music, thereby creating new compositions. In 1965 I started to destroy records: scratch them, punch holes in them, break them. By playing them over and over again (which destroyed the needle and often the record player too) an entirely new music was created -- unexpected, nerve-racking, aggressive and even humorous. Compositions lasting one second or almost infinitely long (as when the needle got stuck in a deep groove and played the same phrase over and over). I developed this system further. I began sticking tape on top of records, painting over them, burning them, cutting them up and gluing different parts of records back together, etc. to achieve the widest possible variety of sounds."
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