I Am Not a Castle

October 9, 2025

Today I joined a walking tour of the city hosted by the group Sensitively on Brutalism whose mission — as far as I can gather — is about the role of public art in socialist times and its increasing irrelevance to the community. Amidst al the grey and black dress of the architects, I bumped into a fellow professor on this walk, Liz from the UK, whose speciality is this exact topic. They said that the former Czechoslovakia had a preponderance of public art because upwards of %5 of any construction budget for civic buildings had to be dedicated to public art. And, I must say, it’s true, as far as my untrained eye can tell. I seem to be constantly bumping into some of the most strange oddities: giant slabs of concrete styled into odd-shaped blocks teetering on top of each other; bronze statues in the late socialist realist way, where bodies were exaggerated and gestures amplified to signal some kind of ideological glory. Then there were the hallucinatory years of the 60s and 70s, where the artworks seemed to have been sprinkled with a little bit of disregard for engineering nuance. Which is fantastic, these giant ensembles teetering on the edge of collapse. It seems that about half of the public art works have been destroyed, while the remaining 70 or so are in somewhat decay, or dislodged to some weird off-site , or are actually preserved with care.

So that got me thinking about the castle, which I have written about before, and its seeming grasp on the entire town. Not just because it hovers like Air Force One above the clouds, but because all investment into Trenčín’s image economy has been plowed into this pile. I feel like I am always nagging the poor castle, but what I loved about tonight’s walk and Sensitively on Brutalism in particular is the care and attention and obvious love they have for such spaces and artworks, artistic infrastructure that could easily be labelled as anti-monuments.

As I was walking, I decided to photograph the castle from wherever I was, in a sort of Garry Winogrand kind of way: flagrantly off the cuff, a disregard for any overt acts of composition, impulsive (Winogrand-ing?). I wanted to view the castle as something other than a dominant visual symbol, recasting it instead as one of the socialist-era monuments I saw tonight that were lost to time and attention, a status symbol of the has-been. Tonight, the castle was just as not-important as a grain silo or an old textile factory collapsing into ruin and unconsciousness, barely visible and on the fringes of our minds.

So a kind of inversion of Robert Smithson, who walked amidst the dilapidated and rusted out industrial catastrophe that was his hometown of Passaic, New Jersey photographing the moment where construction and ruin collide. Smithson made “monuments” out of ordinary objects: sewer pipes and busted concrete abutments, an inversion of typical tourism into something atypical; his monuments were unconcerned with official commemoration (1). I took photos of the castle and tried to make it as just another piece of the landscape, fitting comfortably with pipelines, drains, machinery.

No castle, but it’s my newsletter.

I took a few pictures on my way. Sometimes I forget the freeing capacity of photography when you just take pictures for fun — not for any infernal ‘project’ or ‘personal work’ — just like Winogrand said: to see what something looks like photographed . With each successive click I sensed that my camera and I were starting to become a small and playful counterweight to the heavy machine of history sitting on my head. The castle has been here for, I don’t know, centuries. But every photograph was just a fraction of a second, exposed and then not, displaced by the next click and the next and the next in contrast to that stone pile whose permanence is forever. We talk a lot about photography as a sort of fixing act (well in the darkroom you literally fix the image!), and yet today I sensed my photographs as nothing more than that moment of its creation, and that was just fine. We all don’t need to be Andreas Gursky or Jeff Wall.

Anyway, I as I was photographing our tour was stopping at various sites in the city. And then we’d move on, making our way from corner to alleyway to lakeside to concrete island. The tour, I realized, wasn’t really about preservation in the classical sense, but reanimation. By that I mean attention as a form of animation, which could either be the clicks of my camera (and others’) or just pointing and talking, all of which are momentary, ephemeral, and reanimating: anti-monumental, gestures.

The castle, and my photographs, and their tour, was a kind of carving, except we avoided stone and instead carved attention into the city, creating a temporary, spoken monument. Here, again, Smithson: he called this “non-site thinking.” He saw that as transposing the field to the gallery. I see it as as the act itself, of photographing, of walking, talking, where the gestures themselves transform decay into narration and ruin into story. Becoming ‘not-castle’ is a an excellent way to produce living monuments: and this is what I took away from the Sensitively on Brutalism gang, that all we have to do is just notice what’s already there.

(1) This is my THIRD Smithson reference; after cabbies, he makes the most appearances.