Research Publications

The publication attempts to establish a "pragmatic" approach to visual art and image-making. The latter are not presented here primarily as the aesthetic object they appear to be at the level of personal understanding, but are explored with much evidence as a significant and unremarkable social process, necessary for inventing and testing new pictorial signs needed to cope with new social contexts.

The concept of the image, art, its theory and history, including its pedagogy, thus established, here presents the field as a coherent system with a certain functionality and direction, often in contrast to the view that nothing of the sort can be sought in art, since what is most valuable about it is its lack of focus and its freedom, the pursuit of its independent existence and the maximization of its aesthetic effect, which in the Kantian tradition preclude any further purpose. In this context, however, it is no longer enough to learn only the use (critique) of these visual signs as such, but to understand the whole process by which signs are created and socialized.

During this examination, some contexts gradually emerge, linked to the rehabilitation of the notion of structure in Jan Mukařovský's conception - the structural idea of the development of art and its functional, pragmatic integration into the active functioning of society; the idea of the image, of representation as a gradually evolving structure of visual signs (which also means, of course, an increasing number of their mutual relations!), functionally directed through individually conditioned unique perception and cognition towards social cooperation and coordination.

Jaroslav Vančát

Publisher: Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art

ISBN: 978-80-261-1121-4

Year of publication: 2023

The problem of a non-linear, empty or absent narrative has been present in art for a long time, but today, in the context of a time-consuming crisis, the disintegration of certain certainties (progress, liberal democratic globalization, relative peace, etc.), it is gaining new relevance and intensity. This publication presents four original contributions on how to not only think about the absent narrative, but how to understand it as a creative strategy and response to the complexity of the contemporary world. Felice Moramarco deals with the crisis of modern subjectivity. That is, the disintegrating ideas about man or humanity as a fundamentally rational and his-torically progressive or universal actor. Precisely this disintegration is the main historical-philosophical motif of non-linear or absent narrative. Milan Mazúr and Viktor Takáč then show their work with these disintegrating stories. In Milan’s contribution, we can observe a number of motives, plots or moments, among which the experience of migrants has the main place, the surrounding story and subjectivity is always in a certain (absent) in-between space. Viktor’s entry into the book represents a set of images from the game environment, which again, both generally as a medium or in the author’s specific design, is a collage of many seemingly unrelated objects, media, elements or views. The book is clased by Václav Janoščík’s text game reproducing human history as an interactive philosophical game of dynamics and concepts.

Václav Janoščík, Milan Mazúr, Viktor Takáč, Felice Moramarco

Publisher: ArtMap

ISBN: 978-80-908560-3-5 

Year of publication: 2024

The extensive Czech-English graphic publication maps the semester-long project Second Service or What Remains Under the Shell of Nostalgia?, which in 2023 connected the studios of Graphic Design and Digital Media and Ceramic Design at the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art, ZČU in Pilsen.

The starting point of the semester project was the decor of quarter-litre porcelain mugs from the 1960s to the 1980s. The task of the graphic designers, under the guidance of associate professor Ditta Jiřičková, was to reinterpret the aesthetics of normalization and find a new perspective on the range of original motifs. The book presents the final designs including research, concepts and sketches. In the chapter Selecting the Dubí Porcelain Factory, there are six decors that were put on sale by Český porcelán, a.s. in early December 2023. The public could also actively participate in the selection of the realised motifs through voting at the Prague International Design Festival Designblok.

The final part of the book is devoted to the Ceramic Design Studio, where students under the guidance of Associate Professor Gabriel Vach designed the form of the relief decoration of the mug and its handle so that the design they created would meet the requirements of mass production. The first prototypes were created in the conditions of the school, the second phase took place in cooperation with Český porcelán, a.s. directly in the porcelain factory. The book concludes with an afterword by the historian and design critic Kryštof Hejný on the "archaeology" of the mug.

Ditta Jiřičková, Tereza Kovářová, Gabriel Vach, Markéta Kalivodová

ISBN: 978-80-261-1239-6

Editor: Zlata Gersdorfová

Introduction: Ditta Jiřičková, Václav Hájek, Gabriel Vach

Afterword: Kryštof Hejný

Year of publication: 2024

Published by: University of West Bohemia in Pilsen

Bedřich Kocman's monograph looks back on twenty years of creative work and twenty academic years of his teaching career at the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art. The publication consists of a selection of photographs documenting not only the creation itself, but also the process of its creation and the events associated with its presentation. It includes authentic texts reflecting the key exhibitions, which are a testimony of honest craftsmanship, searching and finding in the field of two techniques that are Bedřich Kocman's own - lithography and serigraphy. It also includes an insight into his teaching career in the Graphic Art Studio. 

Bedřich Kocman, Mikoláš Axmann, Jindřich Lukavský, James R. Nelson, Li Portenlänger, Andrea Sloupová

ISBN: 9788026110347

Published by the Faculty of Design and Art of Ladislav Sutnar University of West Bohemia in Pilsen

Year of publication: 2021