Milan Knížák (born 1940 in Plzeň, Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, today Czech Republic) 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,
Otomo Yoshihide—there was Milan Knížák. In 1964, Knížák, 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 LP's, which would ultimately result in 1979's
Broken Music, his major musical work.
Leading figure of contemporary art in Eastern countries before the fall of USSR, Milan Knížák directed the National Gallery in Prague and teaches since 1990 at the Academy of Fine Arts, Prague.
