But in this case, the whole story is a bit more connected. According to Jirous's article published in Výtvarná práce magazine, Zorka's husband Jan Ságl learned about Gustav Oberman during the preparations for the event of burning fires in the snow on the plain near Bransoudov. Zorka was inspired by a reference from the 13th century, when Pope Honorius III. allegedly labeled this place as place of pagan mysteries. Having heard a story about the local shoemaker Gustav Oberman, who at the beginning of the occupation "walked through the meadows and for his own pleasure spat fireballs (…) until the gendarmes beat him", then Zorka organically incorporated it into the event. The title, the legend and the dedication to Gustav Oberman are based on the creation process, giving the event a "romantic touch", as Jirous writes. During a blizzard in March 1970, Zorka, her friends and family – helpers and participants of the event – filled nineteen plastic bags (today's ecologically oriented art raises eyebrows) with jute, poured gasoline, placed them in the shape of a large circle on the snow plain... and set them on fire. Jan Ságl photographed the event, and as part of the Hay, Straw, Watercress exhibition in 2015, after several retrospectives dedicated to Zorka Ságlová (in Roudnice nad Labem, in the gallery in Louny and other places), the event returned to Vysočina through a newly prepared digital print, exhibiting in as part of the exhibition at OGV. In the literature, documentation of events from the late 1960s is usually listed under the authorship of Zorka Ságlová as the author of the event and Jan Ságl as the author of the photograph. This is a debate that was not very well conducted at the time of the creation of not only this, but also a number of other works of action art: photography was perceived as a documentation tool, and sometimes even its authorship was not much addressed. But in 2013, a catalog was published for the international land art exhibition Ends of the Earth: Land art to 1974, in which Tom Holert draws attention to the controversial aspect of photographic documentation, which results in the division into the "main work" (the action itself, land art) and "accompanying images", as Lenka Dolanová points out in the catalog of the mentioned exhibition Hay, straw, watercress, and the authorship of the images began to be taken into account as documentation of the event.
Zorka Ságlová (1942–2003) is a Czech action artist, textile artist, painter, graphic artist.
After the exhibition Somewhere Something, where her event Hay-straw drew negative attention to the political regime, the artist faced a ban on exhibiting and reduced her activities in the field of action art, devoted herself more to textiles and returned to exhibiting only after 1989.
Jan Ságl (born 1942) is a Czech photographer, he worked for the magazine Výtvarná práce, thanks to which he captured a number of artistic personalities of his time, and thanks to contacts with Václav Boštík, he formulates his photographic starting points in relation to the landscape. Since the end of the 1960s, he has been collaborating with The Plastic People of the Universe and The Primitives Group, documenting events in nature organized by his wife Zorka Ságlová, in which the landscape often plays a defining role. He has published several photography books and has collaborated with a number of foreign prestigious magazines since 1984. In 1989, he captured the Velvet Revolution and founded the Prague House of Photography together with other photographers. To this day, he is known to the public mainly as a photographer of events connected with the Plastic People circuit and other groups.
Lucie Nováčková