Lubo Kristek’s ‘Promenade with a Neurotic Fox’

In 1975, after winter, Kristek found a fox skeleton still bearing the remnants of skin in the woods. It reminded him of his recent experience, when he found a pigeon fatally injured in a car crash on the bridge over the Lech. He wasn’t able to help the pigeon, nor to kill it, so he asked people on the bridge. Everybody looked away.

Kristek decided to return to the place of the event and scrutinize the taboo of death. To do so, he took the fox on a leash for a walk on the famous Landsberg colonnade.

The artist found strolling in the colonnade rather mundane; simillarly as in the Luhačovice spa, where he, as a child, used to go with his grandmother to heal his asthma.
He always wanted to bring new impulses to stereotypical surroundings to create situations with unpredicted outcome. One could say performativity was always part of his life.

Kristek’s team hid and documented reactions of people with a secret camera.

The artist named the performance piece Promenade with a Neurotic Fox based on a jazz composition by Karel Velebný he had once heard at a concert at the Viola Theatre in Prague.

All the passers-by became part of Kristek’s ‘promenade’.

Adults looked away, looked furtively or in astonishment.
They rarely stopped.

Kristek noticed an interesting cross reaction. Whereas adults showed their interest in the fox, children were mostly interested in the artist.

The connection of the genius loci (the frequencies of the place), the found object (the fox), and a live event brought about unexpected and inspirational encounters ...

... both with passers-by and animals.

Animals were quite interested in the fox ...

... and wanted to take a close look at it.

Some people, on the contrary, gave Kristek with the fox a wide berth. They rather withdrew to ‘safe ground’ – to the narrow grassy path just on the edge of the Landsberg Weir.

Kristek kept the shoes he wore during the performance piece Promenade with a Neurotic Fox for a long time.

In 2018, the artist transformed one of the shoes to a nest and made it part of his assemblage Evolution Seismic Altar with a Liquid Sacramental Bread Forever Locked in Time.
Lubo Kristek is interested in the soul of objects. For his works, he looks for objects with personal history. He deems the frequency of their previous states to be a part of the new artwork. The components do not conform slavishly to the whole but they live their own life.