Milan Knížák
1940–2026 · Czech performance artist and noise musician
Milan Knížák (Plzeň, 1940 – 2026) was a Czech performance artist, sculptor, noise musician, graphic artist, theorist and art teacher. He is a key figure of action art in Czechoslovakia and is associated with Fluxus, organising actions and concerts from the early 1960s onward.
At the start of that decade he staged happenings on the streets and courtyards of Prague with the group Actual Art, later known as AKTUAL, including Demonstration of One (1964). From 1965 he directed Fluxus East and organised Fluxus festivals across the Eastern Bloc, and in 1966 he gave the first Fluxus concert in Prague.
Under the communist regime he was watched by the police and arrested at an event with the band The Plastic People of the Universe. In 1979 he received a DAAD fellowship to West Berlin.
From 1990 he taught intermedia at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, and from 1999 to 2011 he directed the Czech National Gallery. His legacy lies mainly in teaching intermedia art and in spreading ephemeral and participatory practices in Central Europe.