Milan Knížák

Milan Knížák is a Czech artist born in 1940 in Pilsen. A central figure in Czech Fluxus and the Aktual group he founded in Prague in the early 1960s, Knížák organised happenings, actions and street events that drew the hostile attention of the communist authorities — he was arrested and subjected to political persecution on multiple occasions throughout the decade.

From 1963 he began deliberately damaging vinyl records — burning them, painting them, cutting them, gluing fragments of different records together — and playing the results on conventional turntables.