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There was a story doing the rounds in Budapest near the end of the 1960s concerning the National Museum in Prague.

"As a result of" the shameful military invasion which suppressed the 1968 Prague Spring, bullet holes "appeared" on the Museum walls near Wenceslas Square. One night a pair of diligent hands painted the building's bullet wounds white and wrote above them: "El Grechko fresco". The Commander-in-Chief of the Warsaw Pact united forces was, at that time, a certain Marshall Grechko.

The story has the elements of classic Czech humour in the Soldier Svejk tradition, but the real message runs much deeper.

Buildings as monuments

Let us first take a look at the building. Central European museum architecture in the late Nineteenth Century produced some curious edifices. Due to the intense search for national identity and the resulting incorporation of various differing objectives, museums built at that time were intended as representations of the Nation and its History "almost monuments" rather than functional exhibition buildings. Even without its glass-cased exhibits, the urban location and uniform style of the National Museum in Prague express national identity and pride. This, then, was the building wounded by Marshall Grechko's bullets. The artist who highlighted the building's scars in white reinforced this symbol of national identity and wounded pride, and filled it with new, compelling, and far-reaching content.

Bricolage as an artistic gesture

The artistic gesture "as well as the applied technique" has outgrown itself. It has shown that bricolage and DIY can be brought to perfection; that homemade tools and methods (such as graffiti) can be used to promote messages about human rights and freedom.

This "technique" has a long history of its own. Already in use in the Soviet Empire, it flourished in the socialist bloc countries created after World War II. It is enough to recall the creaking Methuselahs on wheels kept on the roads for decades, or those strange pub decorations of welded reinforced iron, or the numerous homemade flower-stands. Later, amateur pop and rock bands appeared with makeshift amplifiers and crude shortwave transistor radios, able to pick up Radio Free Europe.

This resourcefulness was present not only in day-to-day practicalities, but also in culture and the arts. I cannot know what kind of paint or paintbrush the Museum graffiti artist used, but my guess is that, having dreamed up the idea, she did not rush to the first paint shop around the corner to buy paint and a brush. Most likely, she was more circumspect. Or, let us imagine there was a shortage of white paint. No doubt our artist would simply have grabbed dried-up leftovers from her shelf and thinned them out with industrial alcohol or varnish-remover stolen from the local factory. Then she probably grabbed an old, frayed clothes brush, threw the lot into a sports bag, pulled on a pair of blue tracksuit pants and "pioneerka" trainers, and left home to bring her message, her work of art, to life.

Many in post-communist East European societies today will identify this story with a sort of proletarian pseudo-romanticism: a puny attempt at the expression of freedom reflecting, rather than transcending, the power it aims to challenge.

I myself prefer to identify bricolage with inventiveness, seeking out the gaps in the defences of dictatorships and economic monopolies alike. To my mind, today's home assembly of computers is rooted in the same impulse as the movement, decades ago, to create a parallel counterculture, independent of the "central command", for the expression of free thought. The young hackers who attack the new media - the computer systems of today - at its root are reminiscent of the samizdat editors, toiling in secret over the wax-cloth on their kitchen tables.

Samizdat viewed through bricolage

Is it possible to exhibit the homemade products of free thought in a building-monument? The question remains even if we recognise that the ideas spread in samizdat publications are not dissimilar to those expressed by the entire structure of the National Museum. The casing of the content, in the case of the building and of the samizdat publications is, however, essentially contradictory. Nothing can be done but to keep this contradiction. The glass cases should have stands of higgledy-piggledy welded iron, their shape indeterminate, random, and the whole thing placed amid prefab walls independent of the building's own, just as children's rooms are separated from the main room in rented apartments by ad hoc wardrobes. The lighting should reflect the strict logic of improvisation. And not even the smallest detail of this installation should suggest nostalgia.

The fact that the glass cases, trapped behind reinforced iron bars and floating on beams of light, are reminiscent of a samizdat archipelago is due only to our history.

Translation by Csilla Dér and Stephen Humphreys