Freedom Is Czech Artist’s Most Useful Tool

Czechoslovakian performance artist Tomas Ruller is scouring Los Angeles for tools--hammers, screwdrivers, sickles.

The tools will become part of his performances at the Otis/Parsons Art Gallery on Friday and the Angels Gate Gallery in San Pedro on Sunday, both at 7 p.m. Ruller isn’t one to plan ahead; he spontaneously reacts to his environment in creating each performance. He waited until arriving from Prague to even think about the pieces he’ll perform this weekend, and he’s still pondering them. But one thing is settled: For Los Angeles--it’s tools.

“I came to the space where I will perform, and I found an atmosphere,” he said. “I want to create a kind of dialogue here, so I’m using objects I find here.”

The 33-year-old Ruller is the only performance artist involved in the “Dialogue: Prague/L.A.” exchange.

So what will the tools have to say to his audience as Ruller integrates them into the usual elements of his performances--big installations and improvisational techniques? He doesn’t like to talk about symbols, but he admitted, “The message of my piece will be the question of being in the here and now. It has to do with a human’s attention to the present.”

Ruller relishes the here and now because for him, the past was very different. As a performance artist in Prague under the Communist regime, he was not free to show his pieces. Insteads, he performed in underground theaters, and his work was seen by only a small group of intellectuals and artists.

“I had trouble with the police, and I was on trial twice,” Ruller said. The government, he added, called his work “not art, but political provocation.” Both cases were dismissed in mid-trial because the government did not have enough evidence, according to Ruller, and he was spared the fate of a political prisoner.

After the changes in his country, Ruller’s art was little altered by the new-found freedom. “My art didn’t change because I never paid attention to the rules anyway. But one thing that changed is the sense of possibilities. I can do more now somehow.”