The Hungarian Avant-Garde and Socialism: The Art of the Second Public Sphere 1350211583, 9781350211582

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The Hungarian Avant-Garde and Socialism

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The Hungarian Avant-Garde and Socialism The Art of the Second Public Sphere Katalin Cseh-Varga

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Katalin Cseh-Varga, 2023 Katalin Cseh-Varga has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. x–xii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Tjaša Krivec Cover Image: The K358/72. exhibition. Persons visible on the photograph: András Orvos and György Szemadám (at the center), Árpád Fenyvesi Tótand Ottó Mezei (on the right), György Galántai (on the gallery), 1972. Photo by László Haris. Courtesy of László Haris All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. ­A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-1158-2 ePDF: 978-1-3502-1159-9 eBook: 978-1-3502-1160-5 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.­

­To my parents, Katalin and László

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­Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Public Spheres and Spatiality 2 The Happening and the Consolidation of the Art of the Second Public Sphere 3 Places of Resonance: Artist Studios 4 Official Venues, Semi-Official Art: Party-Run Locations 5 Turning Private into Public: Apartment Culture 6 Avant-Garde above the Ground 7 Conclusion Bibliography Index

viii x 1 25 49 71 101 143 179 215 221 242

I­ llustrations 2.1 Gábor Altorjay and Tamás Szentjóby, The Lunch (In Memoriam Batu 53 Khan), 1966. Courtesy of the artists 3.1 György Jovánovics, the opening of the exhibition in Adolf Fényes Hall, Budapest, 1970. Courtesy of the artist 75 3.2 György Jovánovics, The First Camera Obscura, 1970. Courtesy of the artist 77 3.3 György Jovánovics, Fillér Street studio space, Budapest. Courtesy of the artist 79 3.4 György Jovánovics and Liza Wiathruck in the Fillér Street studio space, 1976. Courtesy of the artist 80 3.5 György Galántai, Sign Action in the Chapel, Balatonboglár, 15 August 1972. Photograph by György Galántai. Courtesy of the Artpool Art Research Center – Museum of Fine Arts 86 3.6 Dóra Maurer, Space Confusion (Once we went), (photo-actions), Balatonboglár, 1972, participants: Miklós Erdély, Tibor Gáyor, György Jovánovics, Dóra Maurer and Tamás Szentjóby. Photograph by Dóra Maurer. Courtesy of the Artpool Art Research Center – Museum of Fine Arts 90 3.7 Dóra Maurer, Space Confusion (Once we went), (photo-actions), Balatonboglár, 1972, participants: Miklós Erdély, Tibor Gáyor, György Jovánovics, Dóra Maurer and Tamás Szentjóby. Photograph by Dóra Maurer. Courtesy of the Artpool Art Research Center – Museum of Fine Arts 91 3.8 Péter Türk, Question Mark Experiments, Balatonboglár, 15 August 1972. Photograph by György Galántai. Courtesy of the Artpool Art Research Center – Museum of Fine Arts 93 4.1 Page 33 of the catalogue Iparterv 68–80, Iparterv, Budapest, 1980 112 4.2 László Végh, intervention at György Jovánovics’s Lying Figure, IPARTERV II., 1969 114 4.3 Tamás Szentjóby, Distance. Action with Tape-Recorder (Do You See 115 What I See? – evening), Budapest, 1968. Courtesy of the artist

­Illustration

4.4 Tamás Szentjóby, Reading. Action-Reading (Do You See What I See? – evening), Budapest, 1968. Courtesy of the artist 4.5 Tibor Hajas, Vigil, Bercsényi Collegium, Budapest, 18 May 1980. Photograph courtesy of the Estate of Tibor Hajas 4.6 The White Room at the exhibition Hungary can be yours! International Hungary, Young Artists’ Club, Budapest, 1984, curator: György Galántai. Photograph by György Galántai. Courtesy of the Artpool Art Research Center – Museum of Fine Arts 4.7 INCONNU Group, Où est l’inconnu?, collage, 1984 (work in the collection of Artpool Art Research Center, contribution to the exhibition Hungary can be yours!, 1984). Courtesy of the artists 5.1 László Végh’s and Géza Büky’s improvisation night at Pál Petrigalla’s salon, 1964 5.2 Apartment theatre in Dohány Street, Preparation for Being Together for a Time Unspecified, Budapest, 1972. Photograph by Gábor Dobos. Courtesy of the photographer 5.3 Apartment theatre in Dohány Street, King Kong in Dohány Street, Péter Halász (man lying on the floor) and Péter Breznyik (dressed as woman), Budapest, 1973. Photograph by Gábor Dobos. Courtesy of the photographer 5.4 Apartment theatre in Dohány Street, King Kong in Dohány Street, István Bálint (in the door left) and Péter Breznyik (dressed as a woman on the right, at the top of the staircase), Budapest, 1973. Photograph by Péter Donáth. Courtesy of the photographer 6.1 Gábor Bachman and László Rajk, Catafalque at the Heroes’ Square, Budapest, 1956 memorial, 1989. Painted photograph by László Rajk, 1989. Courtesy of the artists 6.2 ‘Work-Act’ Pub, Szigetszentmiklós, 1986. It was designed by Gábor Bachman architect-designer. This pub was destroyed in 1988. Photograph by Zoltán Bakos 6.3 Róza El-Hassan, Boulevard Stroboscope, Polyphony project, Soros Center for Contemporary Arts Budapest, 1993. Courtesy of the artist 6.4 Gyula Várnai, Agitator, Polyphony project, Soros Center for Contemporary Arts Budapest, 1993. Courtesy of the artist 6.5 Image of the exhibition space Somewhere in Europe – Gaudiopolis, 2017. © Dániel Végel and the OFF-Biennale Budapest Archive

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A ­ cknowledgements This book is based on a dissertation that I began in 2012 at the University of Vienna, and completed in 2016 at the Graduate School of East and Southeast European Studies of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. The Graduate School provided me with generous financial and infrastructural support which enabled me to conduct my research to a high standard. Caroline Fricke and Martin Schulze Wessel were both incredibly supportive and always accessible. I am also grateful for the calm backing of my supervisor, Christopher B. Balme, who was always there for me and never said ‘no’ – our conversations in a collegial and pleasant atmosphere are among my most treasured memories of my time in Munich. At the University of Vienna, and at the very beginning of my doctoral studies, my mentor was Klemens Gruber. He was the main reason I turned to academia roughly twelve years ago. Klemens, with his provocative and targeted questions, taught me not to take the easy path. My real introduction into the Hungarian art scenes of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s happened when I first entered the Artpool Art Research Center in summer 2012. As well as the interviews and conversations I had with a number of important figures of neo- and post-avant-garde art circles, such as Gábor Altorjay, Gábor Bachman, László Beke, János Gát, György Jovánovics, Tamás Szentjóby, János Vető, Klara Palotai and Marianne Kollár Bongolan, all of which were invaluable to the book, I owe Júlia Klaniczay and György Galántai the most – because it was through them that I gained insights into the historic connections and attitudes that taught me to combine archival precision with creative open-mindedness. Júlia and György remain my first points of contact when I am approaching new research subjects related to the culture of Kádárian Hungary. From the Artpool team, Dóra Halasi was also exceptionally helpful in the early phase of my research and beyond. Through Artpool, I also directly and indirectly met a number of outstanding Hungarian scholars with similar research interests. Exchanges with Kristóf Nagy, Edit Sasvári, Emese Kürti, Dávid Fehér, Dániel Véri, Mónika Zombori, Lóránt Bódi and Annamária Szőke were eye-opening in many respects. First of all, they highlighted the challenge inherent in the art historiography of the Kádárian era, which is that it needs to take into account both local and global

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specificities in order to nuance the state versus opposition distinction. I truly appreciate all their assistance and inspiration. Through my involvement in international projects, I also had the luck to meet and to work together with recognized experts in the field, such as Klara Kemp-Welch, Andrea Bátorová, Amy Bryzgel, Daniel Grúň, Beáta Hock, Pavlína Morganová, Cristian Nae and Angelika Richter. From their thinking, I gained knowledge from which the present book greatly benefited. Among the international colleagues I met through our shared interests, or indeed by sheer coincidence, were Adam Czirak and Victoria Harms, who both carefully read the first version of my dissertation and provided me with thoughtful comments. Adam and Tori, I am grateful to have you as my friends and peers. Similarly important were the insights and thorough critiques of the four anonymous peer reviewers, who considerably contributed to the improvement of the manuscript. I would also like to express my gratitude to the research staff of the institutions I visited between 2012 and 2016: Special Collections at the University of California Davis, the Hoover Archive at Stanford University, the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archive in Budapest, Fales Library & Special Collections at New York University, and The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center. My wonderful editors – first Lisa Goodrum at I.B. Tauris, followed by Margaret Michniewicz at Bloomsbury – were enthusiastic about the project from the very beginning, and encouraged me throughout the writing process. The book was finished under the supervision of April Peake, who kept supporting me in the final run, although it took me, as a native Hungarian speaker, quite some time to turn my German-language dissertation into an English monograph. The organizational and stylistic notes suggested by Colin Cumming, Matthew Wyman-McCarthy and Gretchen Bakke helped me to plot this navigation between languages and to think of it not as a burden, but as an opportunity. Over the course of the years, ever since the idea of the book was first accepted for publication in early 2017, emotional support has been immensely important. First and foremost I received this from my parents, who in my early twenties accepted my decision to go into academia, whose personal (hi)story motivated me in selecting the dissertation’s topic, and who in times of crisis were always right with me. But this book could not have been written without my beloved partner Péter standing by me. We became parents shortly after I signed the book contract; turning my thesis into a book thus overlapped with my balancing between at least two roles at all times. Besides Péter, Olivér has been the best thing that has happened to me so far. I am thankful to have you both in my life.

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­Acknowledgement

Despite the intellectual and emotional ups and downs over the past few years, writing this book has been a rewarding and enriching process. Those people in my life who have been part of this (still ongoing) learning curve but who are not named in these acknowledgements should still be aware of their importance. The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain permission for the use of copyright material. However, if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased, if notified of any omissions, to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity. The third party copyrighted material displayed in the pages of this book are done so on the basis of ‘fair use for the purposes of teaching, criticism, scholarship or research’ only in accordance with international copyright laws, and is not intended to infringe upon the ownership rights of the original owners.

Introduction

In the countries of the Eastern bloc during the communist era, no public discourse outside that dictated by governments (themselves overseen by the Soviet Union) appeared to exist. Official media echoed mantras of socialist brother- and sisterhood, and promoted the values and ideology of a worker’s culture. Urban spaces proclaimed the dominance of socialist ideas and were home to parades praising the goals and achievements of communism. Architecture was bland and promoted order usually equipped with a façade showing heroic images of a rising proletariat. The main source of news for people was state-run media that echoed well-known phrases of propaganda. Those who expressed political opposition of any kind were jailed, exiled or otherwise silenced. This image of communist society in Eastern Europe is misleading. Though many people outwardly conformed to the state’s rules and agenda, gestures of criticism – some overt, some more subtle – appeared on each cultural, economic and political level. In his 1975 book Worker in a Worker’s State,1 the author, journalist and politician Miklós Haraszti describes the acts of sabotage against the communist regime in Hungary as fusi/fusizás, noting that they had grown out of workers’ acts of illegal production at their workplaces. In fusi, the individual executed actions independently and freely in the workplace, thereby subverting the socialist ideal of fixed and prescribed labour.2 Fusi was an example of how a critical attitude was performed within the communist system yet simultaneously challenged that system. A similar spirit of independence emerged in the Hungarian art scene – which was controlled by the state and meant to serve communist agendas – in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, as artists like workers sought out opportunities to act independently and freely. Neoavant-gardists were aware of their limitations, yet nonetheless (and perhaps therefore) looked for ways to expand state-imposed barriers to their creativity. This book is about the possibilities and limitations of Hungarian socialism read through the art of the 1960s through the 1980s. This art tested the

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boundaries of party tolerance and took advantage of favourable circumstances or loopholes in cultural politics to unfold its experimental potential. The book looks at artists from diverse backgrounds: artists who found their separate peace with the regime and artists who remained on the periphery of society. It looks at different types of artistic expression that challenged the apparatus of cultural politics, including visual art, event-based, intermedia and conceptual art. It looks at art produced and displayed in both public and private while at the same time it deconstructs the binary of public and private in a socialist system. And, through all these case studies, the book shows how vibrant dissent was within the artistic community in Hungary during late communism.

Galántai’s chapel and acts of subversion One example of the sort of social sabotage explored in this book, playful but also ferocious, was carried out by the artist György Galántai. Galántai arrived in Balatonboglár, an unremarkable small town near Lake Balaton south-west of Budapest in 1966. A graphic designer and painter, Galántai made an unusual and ambitious proposal to the city council: he wanted to turn sleepy Balatonboglár into a flourishing cultural destination. The first step, he suggested, was to allow him to rent – and convert into a gallery space – the town’s hilltop chapel. At first, local reactions to Galántai’s fifteen-year lease with the Catholic Church were positive. Local newspapers even welcomed the initiative, largely because Galántai promised to devote himself to the chapel’s renovation. After this was completed, the interior space was quickly made suitable for exhibitions. By the summer of 1970, Galántai’s chapel was home to both abstract and nonfigurative art shows, displaying in particular works by artists who were part of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde, a movement of vital experimental art with a critical attitude towards Modernism and sociopolitical agendas.3 Galántai’s role as an organizer of neo-avant-garde art made him popular in art circles, especially in Budapest. But he was decidedly less popular among those who expected art to advance socialist ideology and objectives. The general expectation for art to engage in politics and social matters, to praise the working class and peasantry in order to evoke social change, was the legacy of the hardline communist ideology of the Stalinist era. Images of proletarian masses and the new socialist man4 were by the second half of the 1960s mostly signifiers of a fading dictatorial tradition. Aesthetic Modernism gained more and more significance (even) in state-funded art. The 1965 ideological statement

Introduction

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of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (Magyar Szocialista Munkáspárt) encouraged aesthetic modernization by supporting non-linear and non-epical art, as long as it did not overtly challenge socialist ideology.5 For a short period, a more expansive understanding of what constituted (socialist) art coexisted with more traditional ideas. Following the breakdown of the Prague Spring in 1968,6 however, reactionary tendencies against artistic experimentation became more powerful. In this context of tightening restrictions, Galántai’s chapel gallery offered an aesthetic counter-discourse to officially accepted art directives. This counterdiscourse was a rebellion of form and content, and the provocative works Galántai displayed and events he organized revealed that he was not willing to blindly accept the artistic rules of any regime. After the first shows on abstract art, photographic works, calligraphy and kinetic sculptures, as well as lectures, readings, and musical and folk poetry events between June and September 1970, the official press and organs of the Workers’ Party started attacking the obvious unorthodoxy of the chapel project.7 In the spring of 1971, a year after it opened, Galántai’s chapel studio was ordered to temporarily suspend all activities until the artist provided an approval of operation. Not even the distribution of advertising material was allowed. By ignoring the law for a little while Galántai turned his irritation into action-oriented creativity: he grabbed a bucket of paint and climbed up to the bell tower of the chapel to paint a giant trail marker there. The area around Lake Balaton was filled with these sorts of ‘tourist markers’ directing meandering visitors through a system of well organized pathways. Usually a simple symbol on a white background (like a yellow diamond or a green circle), Galántai chose a white square with a red stripe, and painted the symbol on such a scale that it was visible from several kilometres away. His aim was to make sure that random passers-by, artists and even party officials who were travelling on the road near the chapel could not possibly miss it. Galántai then reproduced this sign throughout the area. From the hilltop where the chapel was located, he moved into the woods and marked a variety of paths with the same red and white trail marker. When he finished, the routes leading from the town to the ‘studio’ were flanked with recognizable tourist signs – leading visitors to the place, he suggested, they might most want to go. Galántai’s signs were clever in that they were identical to those surrounding other trails meant for hikers exploring the natural beauty of the Balaton area.8 Being a dedicated organizer of studio events, Galántai came up with another idea of how to advertise his chapel project without overtly breaking the official

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injunction against him. The same week that he painted his ‘trail markers’, visitors to the chapel were given paint and paper templates designed by Galántai. Their task was to paint the following inscription on their shirts: ‘Kápolna Tárlat / Balatonboglár / Painting Show’. Each participant used his or her own shirt – the one they had worn to the studio – as a ‘canvas’. Thus, the chapel came to be filled with half-naked men and women sitting on chairs or on the ground, their shirts laid out on the floor, as they painted letter-by-letter through the words. After the participants were finished, their shirts dried and they put them back on. With this action, Galántai gave a do-it-yourself souvenir to his visitors that also served as an advertisement for his gallery.9 These actions, local as they were, had a surprising reach, in part because Galántai’s visitors were seen wearing their souvenir shirts throughout Hungary. An art historian acquaintance of Galántai, Gábor Pap, notes that he saw a girl at the Hungarian Museum of Fine Arts (Magyar Szépművészeti Múzeum) in Budapest wearing a chapel studio shirt. Pap noted shortly thereafter that he was surprised by how popular Balatonboglár had become.10 In effect, Galántai had succeeded through his art and publicity strategies in his stated goal of turning the town into a tourist destination. Hungarian tourists travelling by car to Balaton began to stop in Balatonboglár and visit the gallery. With time, these tourists reinvented Galántai’s concept and produced posters instead of shirts. A group of them glued this ‘advertisement-art’ onto the window of their car with a Swedish licence plate: during their travels, the slogan from Balatonboglár accompanied them through the whole country. Galántai later heard that people assumed he had promoted the chapel studio not just in Hungary but also abroad.11 This popularity was the result not only of his creativity but also of the enthusiastic ways in which his cause of challenging authorities by refusing to stop all activities was taken up by Hungarians who visited or heard about the chapel. The case of the chapel studio’s promotion reveals two things: there were indeed regulations in socialist Hungary that kept the system of bureaucratic and ideological centralization alive, but control was never complete. Acts of sabotage and disobedience, no matter how unspectacular, created an impression of artistic resistance, of not being willing to accept the socialist regime completely. As with Galántai’s earlier exhibits, local authorities were far less enthusiastic about the chapel studio shirts than were visitors to the studio, especially those who created their own souvenir. Over time, visitors and fellow artists got inspired by the project and adapted the production style at the chapel to their own environment.12 Collective creation, inventiveness in situations of constraint, and the integration of artistry into one’s everyday life were a few practices of

Introduction

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dissent the chapel studio both represented and encouraged. Indeed, Galántai’s continued promotion of the studio’s activities outside of the chapel’s dedicated space was one factor, among many, that turned initial supporters of his work in government into active enemies. Immediately following Galántai’s marker piece and the ‘make-your-own T-shirts’ action, measures were taken by both the city council and the federal government to delegitimize Galántai’s studio and its activities. For example, a condemnatory article appeared in the Hungarian Newspaper (Magyar Hírlap), the daily newspaper of the Hungarian People’s Republic (Magyar Népköztársaság), which stated that the exhibitions organized at the Balatonboglár chapel were illegal and clearly against the law.13 This was followed almost immediately by a member of Somogy’s Council (Somogy Megyei Tanács), directly in charge of regulating cultural activities in the area, stealing Galántai’s rental agreement. (A theft the artist successfully countered, receiving his contract back after two days.14) The party-supported paper of Folk Newspaper of the State of Somogy (Somogy Megyei Néplap) repeated the accusations of the Hungarian Newspaper. His painter and graphic designer colleague András Orvos wrote a defence of the artist in Hungarian Newspaper and Galántai himself submitted a similar statement to Folk Newspaper of the State of Somogy. According to both these responses, the edict that an operation permit is needed before a gallery begins to perform its activity did only apply to corporations and not to work presentations.15 The distinction between gallery and studio was about splitting words, as Galántai knew well. The two newspapers refused to publish corrected information after having consulted with the Ministry of Culture (Művelődésügyi Minisztérium) and the Lectorate for Fine and Applied Arts (Képző- és Iparművészeti Lektorátus), the government body responsible for the coordination and financing of the production of public artworks.16 Galántai imagined the chapel to be a collective forum for those who wanted to live and experience the freedom of creation. The purpose of the studio was to eliminate distinctions between artistic media and to offer uncensored access to producing and exhibiting non-realist contemporary art. Balatonboglár was a site of encounter and exchange beyond state-art. On 23  July 1971, only a week after the ‘trail marker’ and shirt painting actions took place, the city council of Balatonboglár denied Galántai’s request to appeal the accusations that had been lodged against him that spring. The council’s opinion was that Galántai did produce material in order to promote the studio. Further, the events organized at the chapel exceeded the category of ‘work presentation’ that Galántai had initially been

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granted permission to stage. As a consequence of these multiple violations, all shows and public programmes at the chapel studio were forbidden.17 Each piece of the story about Galántai’s chapel – finding a venue removed from immediate political oversight, the organization of progressive art events, and even the creative response to official measures – exemplifies what was particular about nonconformist art-making within the boundaries of a controlled structure. While bureaucratic barriers set by local party organs determined people’s daily routines in Balatonboglár, Galántai engaged in art that defied the state. The artist invented a space that was open to aesthetic experiment located beyond party-run exhibition venues. Balatonboglár promoted the avant-garde view of art as life that did not fit the ideal of a proletarian state in which art served ideology and was an instrument of indoctrination, designed to create uniformity in peoples’ thoughts and actions.18 Galántai was not alone in confronting official doctrines through autonomous art-making. Numerous artists whose work is also discussed in this book, including György Jovánovics, László Rajk, Gábor Bachman, Gábor Altorjay and Tamás Szentjóby, faced similar constraints and responded with similar inventiveness. Many of these artists were traumatized by the lack of creative freedom afforded to them throughout the communist era, though the precise amount of autonomy they were allowed or could create for themselves varied over the decades. In general, though, communist authorities viewed as unacceptable the idea that art was an end in itself; this opinion was threatening because it was contrary to the social and political mission of art. Further, unlike in Western Europe, artists could not (openly) question the party, its policies, or its monopoly on state power.19 Those who did not want to devote themselves to the then-current socialist mission sought forums of freedom to make art that did not follow state protocol, and to discuss this kind of aesthetics with like-minded colleagues. Galántai’s chapel studio was one of these forums.

The formation and transformation of the second public sphere Throughout the period covered in this book, Hungarian politics was dominated by János Kádár, General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party from 1956 to 1988. The laws, policies and goals that defined the Kádárian era were laid down during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Kádár imagined socialism as a system where the state coordinated and subsidized social actors, and which led to high living standards among all segments of the population. In this period

Introduction

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of the Kádár era the autonomy and the individual initiative of social actors grew slowly, always under the observation of the party. Initially this control took on the form of significant retaliation against supporters of a democratized socialism from below. Retaliation served the purpose of stabilizing power after a nationwide reform attempt in 1956.20 The Kádárian regime began in violence. In October and November 1956, many Hungarians called for the overthrow of the Stalinist order led by Mátyás Rákosi. The protests began with a peaceful demonstration by Budapest-based university students and grew quickly into an armed uprising, the aim of which was to democratize communist rule, which had begun in 1949. As an act of solidarity with socialist Poland, which was threatened by Soviet military intervention, a protest was organized for 23  October. Protesters gathered under the banner of opposing Soviet interference, but they used the event to push for wider reforms to Hungary’s governing structure. This protest was the first major event designed to create a public discourse after the Soviet occupation of Hungary in 1945 and the constitutional establishment of socialism in 1949. In response to the anti-Soviet demonstration, Party Secretary Ernő Gerő called for military troops to stop the protest, and dismissed the march as chauvinist, nationalist and anti-Semitic. Gerő did not want to give in to the protesters’ reform demands and the protest radicalized. Protesters demolished a giant statue of Stalin in György Dózsa Street (Dózsa György út) in Budapest and read aloud demands for, amongst others, ending Hungary’s Soviet existing military occupation and to hold secret, multiparty elections in front of Kossuth Radio, eventually besieging the building. This, among similar events,21 was the flint to an armed resistance against the authoritarian regime on a national scale. In response, the Soviet Union’s leadership decided to put an end to resistance in Hungary with military force. They saw protesters’ demand to adapt communism to national conditions (as protesters in other states of the socialist alliance were advocating) as the first step in eliminating Moscow’s influence in them. Further, Soviet leadership felt threatened by the new Hungarian reform-government’s effort to leave the collective defence treaty of the Warsaw Pact. This in turn would have caused the collapse of the Soviet Union’s military and ideological buffer zone between Western Europe and the Eastern bloc.22 In November 1956 the Soviets sent troops to Hungary to occupy the country and to strike down reforms. The armed struggle for freedom was crushed by the coordinated attack of Soviet military forces. Dialogue between workers’ councils and the Communist Party leadership23 could have been the cornerstone of Hungarian self-government, but that vanished with the appearance of Soviet tanks.

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In 1956, Kádár, who coordinated the revolution’s suppression, was selected directly by the executive committee of the Soviet Communist Party as leader of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party. One of his first acts as the party’s general secretary was to order the execution of hundreds of the revolution’s participants and the imprisonment of tens of thousands of others. Many of those who were involved in the 1956 freedom fight were deported to compulsory labour camps. By early 1957 Kádár eliminated the workers’ councils too. He also aimed for deStalinization, but from above, following a clear structure centrally supervised by the party.24 Although the 1956 revolution was violently repressed, there was a lesson that the party leadership learned from the events: hardline politics alone were not an effective way to govern and control a society with evolving needs and aspirations. Therefore, alongside using punishment as a means of social control and suppressing dissent, Kádár introduced his living-standard politics, meaning a modest income and a stable, comfortable living environment secured by the government, in combination with a simulated public sphere. This ‘pseudo’ public sphere appeared accessible to selected members of the Hungarian society, but was thoroughly controlled and did not accept initiatives from below. Through economic reforms in the early 1960s, Kádárian socialism promoted personal consumption. Compared to the Soviet Union, Kádár was also more open to ‘Western’ influences and ways of doing things, viewing Hungary as a country that could combine the best of the ‘East’ and the ‘West’.25 As a consequence of these ideas and reforms, individual citizens enjoyed greater autonomy than they did during the Rákosi regime. The Kádárian integration into the socialist system’s operation first addressed intellectuals, as the freshly established regime was in need of specialist knowledge, but its long-term goal was to allow for an inclusion of other social groups as well as to broaden support and acceptance of the Kádár system.26 Those who sensed this attitude took advantage of it by introducing alternative public spheres. The Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party under Kádár liked to regard Hungary as a relatively open socialist country. This self-image was mostly based on the special local form of socialist consumerism it promoted, on its relatively ‘liberal’ travel policy,27 and on the ‘little freedoms’ it offered its citizens in exchange for their quietly accepting socialist rule and non-political behaviour.28 Because the Soviet Union had control over Hungary and determined the direction of the country’s policies, part of the Kádár regime’s openness was determined by a key outside factor: that Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Union following Stalin’s death in 1953 until 1964, was primarily focused on economic and technological improvements in order to keep up with (and, he hoped, to overtake) capitalism.

Introduction

9

The Khrushchev doctrine stated that the countries of East-Central Europe were people’s democracies with their own sovereignty, characteristics and traditions. The Soviet Union even offered them the possibility of consultations, but in exchange it expected loyalty and cooperation on strategic issues. Although shortly after sharing these views, Khrushchev was removed from his position as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in October 1964, this course did not change much with the appointment of Leonid Brezhnev. Integration and the appearance of consensus remained important to him, along with a regionally and internationally successful economy, and advances in science and technology.29 These concepts were the ones which the ‘permissive’ Kádár regime could identify with. Despite giving the impression of promoting more liberal values and structures of government, and of allowing a simulated, yet carefully observed public sphere, philosopher János Kis points out that the facts about the Soviet occupation and the necessity of the proletarian dictatorship minted in 1957 were regarded as untouchable. As critical sociology and philosophy demonstrated, social problems such as unemployment and poverty in rural areas were not open for debate. Having once been allies of the Kádár regime, sociologists and philosophers interfered with official politics when they articulated their antipathy to the Soviet military intervention in Prague in 1968, and political punishments followed. The conditions under which sociological research was undertaken then changed significantly, as did the party’s relationship with the intelligentsia.30 János Kádár’s personal integrity and his decision to suppress the 1956 upheaval, which was officially declared to have been a ‘counter-revolution’, could not be questioned. According to Kis, the party did not tolerate any form of political experimentation.31 A similarly suspicious, and often just uncertain, attitude was applied to artistic experiments. Experimentation in general was discouraged and often punished, especially in times of political tension.32 It is against this backdrop that Galántai’s chapel studio actions should be read. At the moment when Galántai extended the chapel’s circle of influence beyond the practice of simple studio work and created a public sphere without official authorization, he came into conflict with the communist state. The reasons behind this conflict between experimental, non-realist art and Kádárian cultural politics were manifold. In general, three factors caused it: personal disagreements between artists, artist colleagues and politicians; a shift in direction in domestic and foreign politics; and, relatedly, the government’s implementation of (new) aesthetic criteria for artworks. One, or a combination, of these three things determined whether an artwork or art event was within or

10

The Hungarian Avant-Garde and Socialism

overstepped the barriers of official acceptance. Additionally, as art historian Edit Sasvári has demonstrated in an essay on the Balatonboglár chapel studio’s closure, acts of approval and dismissal were often used by the Workers’ Party to set an example for disobedient agents in the Hungarian art scene. The approvals and dismissals of artists were messages sent to specified target groups either to reward or to discourage them, and were motivated by different political and personal factors.33 An example of how changes in politics could influence the course of sanctions or approvals occurred in the mid-1960s, when uncertainties brought about by the transition from the Khrushchev to the Brezhnev era, the Soviet Union’s conflict with China, and the ‘liberal’ attitude of the Kádár regime led to the emergence of influential currents within the Hungarian art community such as artistic Modernism and postmodernism, and openness towards abstraction and neo-realism. The 1965 party-organized ideological conference came up with ‘flexible aesthetic categories’ that could be applied to identify almost any kind of art as ‘socialist’ – but its opposite could also be true. Concepts that allowed for such a wide range of interpretations were also the source of disorientation.34 In the mid-1960s, cultural and artistic control was centred around the double purpose of differentiation and centralization.35 Permission and repression thus coexisted, and resulted (especially in this period) in inconsistent decisions about which kinds of art were to be tolerated, and which were not. In this regime, abstraction in painting, and modest, almost invisible performances, for instance, passed the filter of differentiation and centralization, while more extreme modes of expression were even then denied state support and public exposure. The introduction of the ‘happening’ in Hungary, for instance, generated mistrust and uncertainty among cultural-political bureaucrats. The happening was a series of orchestrated actions involving the creative use of bodies and different props and sites, mostly lying outside the institutional framework of museums and similar cultural facilities. The events that comprised the happening had unknown outcomes, and were often accompanied by a cathartic experience for the participants.36 The first Hungarian happening took place in 1966, at a time when official art directives were in a phase of liberalization and disorientation. This first happening was inspired by artist parties, experimental poetry, and neo-avant-garde music. The organizers, Gábor Altorjay and Tamás Szentjóby, were both poets who found the written and spoken word unsatisfying after a while, which is why they turned to physical artistic expressions involving the body instead. In the early 1960s, the artists were regular guests at gettogethers in the apartment of László Végh, an enthusiast of John Cage’s music. Végh, to some an important figure in early non-realist art networks in Budapest,

Introduction

11

introduced Altorjay and Szentjóby to a sound that redefined their concept of making art (see Chapter  3 for a more detailed discussion). The type of art Altorjay and Szentjóby produced was condemned in both secret police reports and the official press, which portrayed it as deviant and as a real threat to the country’s youth. The chaos, catharsis and non-linear narration which their art involved did not correspond with the traditional rules of disciplined bodies and stories. Official culture and art directives suggested that many rules were open to interpretation, but not without limits. Neo-avant-garde art in particular suffered greatly from the foggy official sense of what was acceptable and unacceptable art. In the end, just as Galántai was forced to give up on the Balatonboglár project as a consequence of the turbulent aftermath of the Prague Spring and the Hungarian government’s confrontation with critical intellectuals, Altorjay and Szentjóby were also pushed out of Hungary. Art that was aesthetically extreme, subject to (political) misinterpretation, and/or emerged under unfavourable political circumstances did not survive long in Kádárian Hungary. The story of neo-avant-garde art during state socialism in Hungary is one of a search for zones of wide-ranging creativity and of navigating fluctuating mechanisms of official admission and dismissal. The zones of creativity, which were sometimes physical and sometimes virtual, were the places where artists practised intellectual exchange and produced their artworks. In dissident intellectuals’ writings including, for instance, the work of author György Konrád,37 this sort of zone was called the second public sphere. Because the party did not allow a non-controlled public forum which Hungarian citizens could access, its public sphere was based on exclusion and selective admission. The public sphere of state-socialist ideology and bureaucratism was therefore not a public sphere in the sense of an ideal type of communicatory space which was accessible to any and all opinions. While this first public sphere filtered and regulated participation, the second public sphere promised to do the opposite; it softened the all-embracing structure of the first public sphere with pluralism. The second public sphere, which I elaborate upon in the following chapter, was the place where independence of thought and action became feasible. The first public sphere’s reach and influence operated on a large scale, as not even performances for a small circle of acquaintances in a private home were completely outside the state’s purview: the activities of the apartment theatre, for example, were observed and reported upon through a close member of the community, László Algol, who was artistically active while at the same time acting as a government spy.38 Autonomy was never complete because the correspondents of the official, first public sphere were also present throughout the unofficial, second public

12

The Hungarian Avant-Garde and Socialism

sphere. Alternative and official culture thus coexisted and interacted with each other. One of the great networkers and inspirations for the young generation of neo-avant-gardists, László Végh, was himself a double-agent between 1951 and 1962. He stopped before he became more deeply involved in nonconformist art circles, at which point he remained concerned about government surveillance and made subversive jokes about it.39 Nevertheless, thanks to the Hungarian political climate of the early and mid-1960s, which included more social and cultural actors in shaping state socialism, censorship lost much of its earlier rigidity.40 Loosening expectations of ideologically adequate behaviour went hand in hand with the appearance of dissent41 – in youth culture, intellectual and political circles, and in the art scenes. The party’s attention shifted from cultural affairs to the comprehensive New Economic Mechanism (Új Gazdasági Mechanizmus), the propaganda relating to which reached its peak in early 1967. The New Economic Mechanism was about reducing economic shortages, and emphasized the satisfaction of needs in the spirit of moderate competition and entrepreneurship.42 Such a transformation of Hungary’s economic structure could have made the country more flexible and able to react quickly to national and international financial transformations. The Workers’ Party also sought financial, diplomatic and cultural exchange. Soviettype systems throughout Europe became more interested in global phenomena and began to employ sociological methods as ways to understand them. However, the critical trend in sociology, along with equally critical currents in philosophy, began to ask more uncomfortable political questions and to develop alternative views to those of Kádárian state socialism.43 The second half of the 1960s was an era filled with hope that antagonism and open criticism of government could become a feature of reformed communism. This optimism was partly inspired by the 1968 Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, a short thaw in communist governance which allowed open criticism of the Soviet Union’s economic, political and cultural policies, and its influence in Eastern Europe.44 However, the optimism generated by this civic unrest quickly dissipated when the Soviet Union ordered the military invasion of Czechoslovakia, an act of force in which Hungarian troops were also involved as Soviet allies. The events of 1968 made it clear that socialism in Hungary and beyond could never be reformed from below. This meant that the second public sphere would need to stay where it was meant to stay: in the shadows of official culture. After 1968, the leadership of the Soviet Union emphasized to its EastCentral-European satellite states that the Eastern bloc’s borders were rigid. At the same time, the Soviet Union encouraged its allies to intensify economic,

Introduction

13

technological and scientific cooperation with one another. The outbreak of the energy crisis at the beginning of the 1970s prevented the consolidation of the region and shifted state socialisms towards the Western influence zone. Financial loans, cultural exchange and diplomatic manoeuvres by Western nations all contributed to the erosion of the Soviet system. The Helsinki Accord (1975), an agreement signed by the Soviet Union, East, Central and Southeast European communist states, and Western countries, with its emphasis on human rights and the intensification of cultural ties, further threatened Soviet control over its satellites, including Hungary.45 During this convergence of the blocs marked by the Helsinki Accord and the growing number of contact points between East and West, Kádárian Hungary pragmatically manoeuvred among the divided influence zones, seeking to gain as much autonomy as possible – indeed, Kádár did everything in his power to keep Hungary’s oscillating position intact. The paradoxes of the Kádár regime meanwhile continued to exist; while in 1973 the plurality of Marxism and (critical) sociology were officially abandoned, the party became willing to transform Hungary’s system of political institutions and to review the standards of its ideology. Economic and technological competition were still a core objective of party politics, but by the beginning of the 1970s, a coherent concept of socialism no longer existed there.46 Against this backdrop of both international and internal threats to socialism and the pragmatism and paradoxes of Kádárian politics emerged the neo-avantgarde movement in art in Hungary.47 One can either speak of ‘the long 60s’48 or of the extended 1970s, but it was between 1966 and 1973 when most defining features of the neo-avant-garde were developed and disseminated. As historian Jérôme Bazin and art historians Pascal Dubourg Glatigny and Piotr Piotrowski have put it, neo-avant-garde artists rejected modernist aesthetics, but not the modernist ideology of the autonomy of art understood to be the opposition in Stalinism, and post-Stalinism . . . [Autonomy] meant that art should not be directly involved in politics . . . [The neo-avant-garde was involved in] subverting the socialist regime, which promoted ‘political’ . . . art.49

Although cultural historian Beáta Hock argues that the Hungarian version of the neo-avant-garde ‘found its aesthetic ideal mostly in non-representational, abstracts modes of expression’,50 I argue that it also continued the (historical) avant-garde tradition of social awareness and the merging of art and life. Criticism, experiment, subversion, and often antagonism, core features of the neo-avantgarde in Hungary, were especially effective and intense in ephemeral art forms.

14

The Hungarian Avant-Garde and Socialism

The ascent of Hungary’s neo-avant-garde movement began in 1966, the year of the first Hungarian happening. This first happening marked a paradigm change in the art scene51 through which the influence of event-based-ness and intermediality had grown. Though it did not mark the debut of processual and intermedia art,52 performativity and intermedia had spread out into a variety of genres by 1966 and was able to unfold its potential until the party decided to systematically fight unconventional and nonconformist art. In the summer of 1973, artist György Galántai was able to organize the last summer art programme at the chapel studio of Balatonboglár. In closing the venue of contemporary, neo-avant-gardist and experimental art in Hungary, the government sent a clear message to the artists of the second public sphere that it intended to impose greater restrictions on their work. After 1973, however, a process of slow easing of restrictions lasted throughout the 1970s.53 State control became less direct, the differentiation of the art scene became more carefully guided, the party confronted critical tendencies with a schizophrenic attitude, and the triad of admittance, toleration and ban became more flexible.54 The fluctuation between permission, tolerance and the banning of art that the state regarded as subversive or politically problematic showed how adaptable the second public sphere needed to be. The triangle of Kádárian cultural politics (prohibition, toleration and support) invented by the main cultural ideologue of the party, György Aczél, was applied to the arts and literature depending on each particular situation. Each work went through the Aczélian review process and was categorized as prohibited, tolerated, or supported. Art historian Annamária Szőke highlights that this ‘system of qualification and requirements’ was never a precise concept, nor did it have a clearly defined set of rules, but was simply the ‘official understanding of arts and ideology’ that quite effectively ‘controlled “intellectual traffic”’.55 The system of three Ts (három T of tiltás, tűrés, támogatás) had been introduced in November 1957. The extent of banning, the circle of trusted artists, and the spectrum of tolerance changed with variations in political dynamics, but there was a general tendency towards indirect mechanisms of control. The Aczélian triangle was completely in line with the Kádár regime’s pragmatic manoeuvres, and only lost its integrity in the 1970s when Aczél’s post-1956 confederates began to die out, and those who remained asked for something in return for their loyalty.56 To the regime, only those who belonged to the Association of Hungarian Fine and Applied Artists (Magyar Képző- és Iparművészeti Szövetség) and had studied at the Hungarian Art Academy (Magyar Képzőművészeti Főiskola) were officially considered artists, because registration made their supervision comfortable and

Introduction

15

efficient. A membership of the Art Fund of the Hungarian People’s Republic (A Magyar Népköztársaság Művészeti Alapja) was also mandatory in order to obtain financial, professional and social security. Within this evolving artistic milieu, the Studio of Young Artists (Fiatal Képzőművészek Stúdiója) was a successful filter organization that functioned as a mediator between the young artists, the institutional system of cultural politics, and the wider public. As a minimum, belonging to the studio meant a certain presence on juried exhibitions,57 though it is perhaps unsurprising that some artists did not settle only for this kind of publicity. Many artists were simultaneously active in state-run institutions and in spaces that were only partly regulated (and perhaps sometimes overseen) by the state’s culturalpolitical machinery. Neo-avant-gardists were reliant on the infrastructure the party offered, but did not hold back from subverting these facilities’ original purpose. Twists in the official attitudes towards culture narrowed or broadened the second public sphere’s range of action, and shaped the strategies used by the neo-avant-garde to acquire an audience. As art historian Mónika Zombori argues, another turning point occurred in 1978, when the annual exhibition of the Studio of Young Artists took place at the Hungarian National Gallery (Magyar Nemzeti Galéria). Art that had previously only been accessible at alternative venues, small galleries and clubs migrated into a broader public sphere. The show featured artworks that were situated between genres including action art, conceptual art and installation.58 This happened at the same time as Kádár’s 1979 Moscow Declaration that Hungary desired a functioning economy, and was not willing to give up its living standards. This statement was Kádár’s way of arguing that Hungary should be allowed to make its own economic decisions, and to that extent, of asserting a form of Hungarian independence from the Soviet Union. At around the same time, a report of the Committee for Agitation and Propaganda (Agitációs és Propaganda Bizottság) described Hungary as an open society and economy without a state-controlled media, and with indispensable foreign connections.59 In the 1980s, most experimental artists were able to leave Hungary for the West, the cultural milieu was mostly liberal, and the country became a meeting place for East and West.60 These developments meant that the division into the first and second public sphere which had occurred in the 1960s and 1970s slowly disappeared. A more pluralist forum for public debate and action took their place that did not necessarily require alternative spaces in which to conduct and display non-officially sanctioned art, as had been the case earlier. The Kádár regime was able to fend off the institutionalization of political antagonism in

16

The Hungarian Avant-Garde and Socialism

the short term, but it could not continue to ignore the growing economic and information pressure, and the inspiration for political change drifting over from neighbouring countries such as Poland. When Hungary joined the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1982, and began to negotiate with the IMF about a new loan agreement at the end of 1984, Kádárian Hungary’s shift towards the West was made explicit. At the same time, the country reduced its collaboration with its former allies in the Eastern bloc.61 Further, the so-called Hungarian democratic opposition was increasingly openly criticizing the Kádár regime, and was encouraging political activism among all groups in society, including artists. In 1989, the liberal impulses in the country finally led to the fall of communism in Hungary.

Space and dissent The art and culture of communist Hungary, as seen through its public sphere, had no uniform structure. Recent studies on Eastern European post-war avantgardes have shown that artistic innovation, border-crossings and violations of tradition and form62 were able to create a second public sphere that existed in parallel to the regulated public sphere. The most penetrative neo-avant-garde expressions were ephemeral and combined different artistic media. The processbased and intermedia art produced by East-Central-European neo-avant-gardes established an aesthetic code that was, in the Hungarian case, both fleeting and collaborative – characteristics which ran counter to communist doctrine, whose requirements of materialism and obedience were often provocative to these artists, since neo-avant-garde aesthetics rejected any form of regulation. Performativity and intermediality, unfolding in a physical or virtual space, challenged the principles of publicness in the official culture of the Kádár era. The sites created and used by neo-avant-garde artists were the preconditions and media of expression for the second public sphere and artistic subcultures.63 Scholarly publications to date have rarely paid attention to the artistic spaces of the second public sphere,64 despite the fact that without these unofficial and semi-official venues, experimental art in Kádárian Hungary would not have been possible. The aim of this book is to analyse the second public sphere through investigating its artistic venues, which included artists’ studios, university and artists’ clubs, exhibition spaces, apartments, cellars and urban sites. The functionality of these venues often overlapped: the apartment, for example, served as a place

Introduction

17

for intellectual exchange, but also as a room for exhibitions, performances and art production. As this book moves through these spaces, I will introduce many discursive positions on the second public sphere. Each case study will provide a different perspective on how processuality and intermediality in art contributed to the diversification of socialism’s public realm. In Chapter 1, I outline the theoretical foundations of the book. A confrontation is unavoidable between the public sphere as an accessible, liberal discourse on the one hand, and its regulated yet constantly adapting official counterpart in a dictatorship on the other. Because the Habermasian understanding of the public sphere as an ideal type of communication space is not applicable in the context of communist regimes, different terms need to be introduced. Accordingly, I explain in greater detail my use of the terms ‘first public sphere’, which refers to the public realm that follows the communist societal order, and ‘second public sphere’, which refers to a realm that does not unconditionally obey the state’s rules. During their parallel existence, these ordered and non-obedient public spheres constantly influenced each other. What I am most interested in investigating is how artists and artworks in Kádárian Hungary responded to repressive government regulations by creating artworks and moments that together generated the countenance of a ‘real’ public sphere where more open communication and action was occurring. The artistic projects that turned their back on the ordered public sphere were exclusively linked to spatiality, as space, and especially alternative artistic venues, was needed for a meaningful second public sphere to develop. Many cultural players did not accept the communist makeover of space and looked for tools to creatively (re)invent (existing) sites as places of liberation. While most of the spaces discussed in the case studies in this book were physical spaces, as a scholar working in the field of performance studies I regard space as an ephemeral entity, a process that is in line with the material and immaterial nature of event-based and intermedia art.65 I argue that it is important to view the spaces of the second public sphere as spaces open to opportunities, and which as such stood in contrast to locations that were subject to state-enforced restrictions. Chapter 2 looks at a key performative work that represented a watershed in neo-avant-garde art production and demonstrated a clear-cut confrontation of the first and the second public sphere. Gábor Altorjay and Tamás Szentjóby organized the first happening in 1966 as a procession moving from poetry to event. The cellar where the happening took place became an emblematic place in which customary modes of perception were abolished, and a critical attitude towards Hungarians’ everyday resignation to their country’s dictatorship

18

The Hungarian Avant-Garde and Socialism

was promoted. This chapter discusses what it took to work with chaos as a creative tool, and to seek to challenge the population’s tolerance of communist bureaucracy and rule. Chapter  3 concerns the venues that demonstrated the avant-gardist connection between art and life. Artists’ studios, the intimate sites of an artist’s oeuvre, mark the origin of an artwork’s life cycle. In Kádárian Hungary, two artists’ studios were especially important: those of György Jovánovics and György Galántai. Jovánovics built a studio of his own in Budapest with reference to his sculptures and exhibitions. His self-designed place of creation not only represented a playful handling of illusion and a switch into immateriality, but was also an indirect reflection on the repressive conditions he lived under as an artist. While Jovánovics considered the artist studio to be his sole undertaking, Galántai made the Balatonboglár chapel studio a site of encounter and collective creation. The chapel studio was like an artists’ camp, open to all sorts of contemporary genres and experiments, among which the most popular were performative art and multimedia. Additionally, both Jovánovics’s and Galántai’s studios mediated as well as enacted the freedom of art production as a reaction to the sociopolitical circumstances of Kádárism. Chapter  4 outlines the nuances of how the first and the second public sphere were entangled with one another. Only a few art projects existed outside the authority of the party’s apparatuses. The creators of most non-realist contemporary artworks took advantage of state-run facilities and services, yet performed new functions in these official spaces; in doing so, communication and interactivity were important tools used in reshaping existing structures. After the organization of the innovative IPARTERV exhibitions in 1968 and 1969, both of which took place in the events hall of an architecture bureau in Budapest, artists further developed their strategies to communicate and share their works. Neo-avant-gardists adapted to political realities, and became more tactical and inventive. Simultaneously, the authorities turned more permissive and allowed experimentation within closely observed institutions, such as youth and university clubs. The Bercsényi university club and the Young Artists’ Club, for example, were home to multifaceted and non-hierarchical exchanges between artists. Through exploring each of these venues, I will highlight the relevance of a communication that fostered oral transfer and physical contact in order to introduce a non-obedient public sphere into already established institutions. The story of the second public sphere is the story of reinvention. Chapter 5 continues to explore the appropriation and changing meanings of space by

Introduction

19

analysing how private venues took on the role of public spaces. Apartment culture in Budapest flourished from the late 1950s onwards, and the chapter explores that phenomenon by investigating the case of the Zugló circle, a group of artists who practised self-education in the flat of one of their members. It also looks at the salon of Pál Petrigalla, where different cultural events took place from the second half of the 1950s until the early 1970s. Finally, the chapter examines the very existence and radical corporeality of the apartment theatre in Dohány Street in some depth, and argues that it questioned the legitimacy of the communist dictatorship. The final chapter of this book features case studies that look at the aftermath of socialism from the perspective of the second public sphere. Here, I am interested in how the relevance and the need for a non-obedient creative discourse changed from the 1960s onwards, through the end of communist rule in 1989/90. Immediately before and after the regime change from socialism to democracy, there was a certain enthusiasm to let the second public sphere dissolve, and for a genuine, open public sphere to gain influence. Gábor Bachman’s and László Rajk’s 1956 catafalque, which was erected in Budapest in 1989, sought to reinvent new images of identity for a transforming political system, while the site-specific art project Polyphony was set up to support social and critical art. This chapter also briefly looks at the anti-democratic tendencies that emerged in the 2010s which have forced artists and cultural players to reintroduce civic engagement in recent years in the manner of the historic second public sphere. That the strategies and methods that defined the second public sphere during the communist era are again needed and relevant in Hungary reflects the urgency of the need to rethink the possibilities and limitations of communication in historic terms.

Notes 1 2

Original Hungarian title: Darabbér. Egy munkás a munkásállamban. Published in English under the title Worker in a Worker’s State in 1977. Miklós Haraszti, Darabbér, Budapest: ‘Magyar Október’ Szabadsajtó, 1987, pp. 107–108. Informal economic activities at workplaces are not purely state-socialist phenomena though. Capitalism can also produce conditions under which ‘postmodern and flexible economic processes imply a shift from formal employment and the wage economy to informal work and the communal and household economy’. The production of tools for ‘personal clientele’ during the working day, for instance, has ‘empowering effects’ as the case of steel wage workers in the Sheffield of the

20

The Hungarian Avant-Garde and Socialism

early 2000s shows. Massimiliano Mollona, ‘Factory, Family and Neighbourhood: The Political Economy of Informal Labour in Sheffield’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 11, Issue 3, September 2005, pp. 527–548, here pp. 529, 535. 3 ‘1971’, Balatonboglári Kápolnaműterem. Available online: https://www.artpool.hu/ boglar/1970/kronologia70.html (accessed 3 July 2019). 4 Tamáés Scheibner, ‘Introducing Socialist Realism in Hungary, 1945-51: How Politics Made Aesthetics’, in Evgeny Dobrenko and Natalia Jonsson-Skradol (eds.), Socialist Realism in Central and Eastern European Literatures under Stalin: Institutions, Dynamics, Discourses, London: Anthem, 2018, pp. 237–259. 5 Melinda Kalmár, Történelmi galaxisok vonzásában. Magyarország és a szovjetrendszer, 1945-1990, Budapest: Osiris, 2014, pp. 277, 279. 6 Ibid., p. 297. 7 ‘1971’, Balatonboglári Kápolnaműterem. 8 György Galántai, ‘Hogyan tudott a művészet az életben elkezdődni? Adalékok a boglári történethez’, in Júlia Klaniczay and Edit Sasvári (eds.), Törvénytelen avantgárd. Galántai György balatonboglári kápolna műterme 1970–1973, Budapest: Artpool-Balassi, 2003, pp. 43–90, here p. 56; see also: ‘1971’, Balatonboglári Kápolnaműterem. Available online: https://www.artpool.hu/boglar/1971/710715k. html#16 (accessed 3 July 2019). 9 Galántai, ‘Hogyan tudott a művészet az életben elkezdődni? Adalékok a boglári történethez’; ‘1971’, Balatonboglári Kápolnaműterem. 10 György Galántai, email sent to the author, 17 November 2017. 11 Ibid.; Galántai, ‘Hogyan tudott a művészet az életben elkezdődni?’, p. 56. 12 ‘Véletlen pillanatképek’, in Júlia Klaniczay and Edit Sasvári (eds.), Törvénytelen avantgárd. Galántai György balatonboglári kápolna műterme 1970–1973, Budapest: Artpool-Balassi, 2003, pp. 39–42. 13 ‘1971’, Balatonboglári Kápolnaműterem. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. This would not be the end of Galántai’s large-scale project, however, and his battle with the authorities would continue until August 1973. See ‘1972’, Balatonboglári Kápolnatárlatok. Available online: https://www.artpool.hu/ boglar/1972/kronologia72.html (accessed 16 July 2019) and ‘1973’, Balatonboglári Kápolnatárlatok. Available online: https://www.artpool.hu/boglar/1973/ kronologia73.html (accessed 16 July 2019). 18 Kalmár, Történelmi galaxisok vonzásában, p. 274–275. 19 Ibid., p. 123. 20 Ibid., pp. 115–119.

Introduction

21

21 In Budapest Soviet troops appeared all over the city, the Hungarian Worker’s Party launched a military council to defeat the resistance, there was ambivalent information coming from the party leadership and the State Security Service executed unarmed protesters at the headquarters of the party journal Free People (Szabad Nép); Ferenc Fejtő, 1956, a magyar forradalom. Az első népfelkelés a sztálini kommunizmus ellen, Budapest: Holnap Kiadó, 2006. 22 Kalmár, Történelmi galaxisok vonzásában, p. 108. 23 Ibid., p. 107. 24 Ibid., pp. 110–111. 25 Ibid., pp. 119–121, 125, 127–128. Balancing between the Soviet Union’s influence zone and the intention of catching up with the Western countries in the politics and culture of Kádárian Hungary has been the subject of the recently published volume Edit Sasvári, Hedvig Turai and Sándor Hornyik (eds.), Art in Hungary 1956–1980: Doublespeak and Beyond, New York: Thames & Hudson, 2018. 26 Ibid., p. 141. 27 Ibid., p. 330. 28 Tamás Stark, ‘A szocializmus “aranykora”: A hatvanas-hetvenes évek’, in Mária Schmidt (ed.), Dimenziók éve – 1968. 2008. május 22-23-án Budapesten rendezett nemzetközi konferencia előadásai, XX. Század Intézet, 2008, pp. 210–214, here p. 210; János Kenedi cited in Ervin Csizmadia, A magyar demokratikus ellenzék (1968-1988). Interjúk, Budapest: T-Twins, 1995, p. 195. 29 Kalmár, Történelmi galaxisok vonzásában, pp. 210, 224, 232, 242. 30 Ibid., pp. 321–322. 31 János Kis, The Hungarian Restoration of 1956-1957 in a Thirty Year Perspective, manuscript, source: Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives, pp. 74–75. 32 Edit Sasvári, ‘Miért éppen Pór? A kádri “üzenési” mechanizmus természetéhez’, in Évkönyv VIII., Budapest: 1956-os Intézet, 2000, pp. 124–159. Available online: http://www.rev.hu/ords/f?p=600:2:::::P2_PAGE_URI:kiadvanyok/szovegek_ evk2000/sasvari (accessed 4 July 2019). 33 Ibid. 34 Kalmár, Történelmi galaxisok vonzásában, pp. 277–278. 35 Ibid., p. 205. 36 Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, environmentek & happeningek, Budapest: Artpool – Balassi Kiadó – BAE Tartóshullám, 1998, pp. 54–55, 64–67. ­37 ‘“Ich weiß aber, Ungarn ist ein gedankenhungriges Land.” Aus einem Gespräch mit dem Soziologen und Romancier György Konrád’, Frankfurter Rundschau. Feuileton, Issue 191, Saturday, 18 August 1979, p. III. 38 Kata Krasznahorkai, ‘Surveilling the Public Sphere: The First Hungarian Happening in Secret Agents’ Reports’, in Katalin Cseh-Varga and Adam Czirak (eds.), Performance Art in the Second Public Sphere: Reflections on Event-Based in

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East, Central and Southeast Europe under Late Socialism, London and New York: Routledge, 2018, pp. 127–137. 39 Emese Kürti, ‘Experimentalizmus, avantgárd és közösségi hálózatok a hatvanas években. Dr. Végh László és köre’, PhD dissertation, ELTE Film-, Média- és Kultúrelméleti Doktori Iskolája, 2015, pp. 4–5. 40 Ádám Tábor, A váratlan kultúra. Esszék a magyar neoavantgárd irodalomról és művészetről, Budapest: Balassi, 1997, p. 17. 41 György Földes, ‘1968 és Magyarország’, in Eszter Bartha and Tamás Krausz (eds.), 1968: Kelet-Európa és a világ. Kelet-Európai tanulmányok III., Paris and Via Bava: L’Harmattan – ELTE BTK Kelet-Európa Törtnénete Tanszék, 2009, pp. 19–27, here p. 22.; Kalmár, Történelmi galaxisok vonzásában, p. 244. 42 Kalmár, Történelmi galaxisok vonzásában, pp. 250–252; On the persisting effects of the New Economic Mechanism in the 1970s see also Tamás Gerőcs and András Pinkasz, ‘A KGST a világrendszerben’, Eszmélet, Issue 113, Spring 2017, pp. 15–36. 43 Kalmár, Történelmi galaxisok vonzásában, pp. 280, 299, 305, 313. 44 Tamás Krausz, ‘1968 – A történelmi örökség sokfélesége. A kelet-európai “eset”’, in 1968: Kelet-Európa és a világ, Budapest: L’Harmattan – ELTE BTK Kelet-Európa Története Tanszék, 2008, pp. 9–18, here pp. 12–18. 45 Kalmár, Történelmi galaxisok vonzásában, pp. 339, 353, 357, 361, 451. 46 Ibid., pp. 374, 380, 382–383, 398, 400, 407. 47 Tábor, A váratlan kultúra, p. 132. 48 The ‘Long Sixties’ refer to the period between 1956 and 1968. It was the subject of the research project The Long Sixties (2010–), a cooperation of the Institute of Art History (Hungarian Academy of Sciences); the Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest; the Moravian Gallery, Brno; the Adam Miczkiewicz University, Poznań; and the Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava. 49 Jérôme Bazin, Pascal Dubourg Glatigny and Piotr Piotrowski, ‘Introduction: Geography of Internationalism’, in Jérôme Bazin, Pascal Dubourg Glatign and/Piotr Piotrowski (eds.), Art beyond Borders: Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe [1945–1989], Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2016, pp. 1–28, here p. 16. 50 Beáta Hock, Gendered Artistic Positions and Social Voices: Politics, Cinema, and the Visual Arts in State-Socialist and Post-Socialist Hungary, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2013, p. 183. ­51 Emese Kürti in conversation with Gábor Altorjay, Kecske utcai Műteremház, Budapest, 24 February 2015, An accompanying event of the exhibition Altorjay Gábor a német avantgárdban – 1967–1970, DVD, Source: Artpool Art Research Center. 52 Katalin Cseh-Varga, ‘On Conceptual Art and Performativity: Miklós Erdély’s Unguarded Money on the Street’, Revista ARTA, Special Issue: Conceptualism in Eastern and Central Europe, Vol. 6, Issue 20–21, 2016, pp. 28–30; Kürti,

Introduction

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Experimentalizmus, avantgárd és közösségi hálózatok a hatvanas években; Emese Kürti, ‘Intuitive Actions’, Acta Historiae Artium, Vol. 56, Issue 1, 2015, pp. 193–204. 53 Mónika Zombori, ‘Stúdió kiállítások a korabeli dokumentumok tükrében. 2. Rész: A hetvenes évek’, artmagazin, Issue 83, 2015, pp. 60–65, here pp. 60–61. 54 Kalmár, Történelmi galaxisok vonzásában, pp. 412, 416. 55 Annamária Szőke, ‘piros – fehér – zöld’, Sub Minervae Nationis Praesidio. Tanulmányok a nemzeti kultúra kérdésköréből Németh Lajos 60. születésnapjára, Budapest: Az ELTE és az ELTE Művészettörténeti Tanszék közös kiadása, 1989, pp. 330–340. Available online: https://www.artpool.hu/harmas/trikolor/nevek/ Szoke.html (accessed 18 July 2019); all translations from Hungarian, if not otherwise noted, are from the author (K. Cs.-V.). 56 Kalmár, Történelmi galaxisok vonzásában, pp. 123, 418. 57 Mónika Zombori, ‘Stúdió kiállítások a korabeli dokumentumok tükrében. 1. Rész: A hetvenes évek’, artmagazin, Issue 82, 2015, pp. 32–37. 58 Katalin Cseh-Varga, ‘The Troubled Public Sphere: Understanding the Art Scene in Socialist Hungary’, in Galina Mardilovich and Maria Taroutina (eds.), New Narratives of Russian and East European Art: Between Traditions and Revolutions, London and New York: Routledge, 2019, pp. 166–179. 59 Kalmár, Történelmi galaxisok vonzásában, pp. 455, 435. 60 Lóránd Hegyi, ‘Neue Identität in der neuen Situation. Ungarische Kunst der achtziger Jahre’, in Hans Knoll (ed.), Die zweite Öffentlichkeit. Kunst in Ungarn im 20. Jahrhundert, Dresden: Fine Arts, 1999, pp. 256–289, here p. 258. 61 Kalmár, Történelmi galaxisok vonzásában, pp. 421, 443, 455–456, 469. 62 Probably the most popular examples and concepts are the following: Piotr Piotrowski’s ‘horizontal art history’ model (Piotr Piotrowski, ‘Towards a Horizontal History of Modern Art’, Writing Central European History. PATTERNS_Traveling Lecture Set 2008/2009. Reader, p. 4); Klara Kemp-Welch’s current book Networking the Bloc: Experimental Art in Eastern Europe, 1965–1981 (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2018) and her reinvention of Andrzej Kostołowski and Jarosław Kozłowski NET-manifesto (1972), see, for instance, Klara Kemp-Welch and Cristina Freire, ‘Artist’s Networks in Latin America and Eastern Europe: Special Section Introduction’, ARTMargins,Vol. 1, Issue 2–3, 2012, pp. 3–13; and ‘NET, Jarosław Kozłowski in Conversation with Klara Kemp-Welch’, ARTMargins, Vol. 1, Issue 2–3 2012, pp. 14–35; Alexei Yurchak’s investigation of the overlap between the language of Soviet authoritarianism and that of the experimental, creative discourse (Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until it Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Dietmar Unterkofler’s and Miško Šuvaković’s investigations into Yugoslavia’s internationalism and tactical networking in cultural politics (Dietmar Unterkofler, ‘Connection to the World – Internationalism in Postwar Avant-Garde Art from Yugoslavia’, in Katalin Cseh-Varga and Adam Czirak (eds.), Performance Art in

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the Second Public Sphere: Reflections on Event-Based in East, Central and Southeast Europe under Late Socialism, London and New York: Routledge, 2018, pp. 45–59; Miško Šuvaković, ‘Tactical Networking: The Yugoslav Performing and Visual Arts between East and West’, in Katalin Cseh-Varga and Adam Czirak (eds.), Performance Art in the Second Public Sphere. Reflections on Event-Based in East, Central and Southeast Europe under Late Socialism, London and New York: Routledge, 2018, pp. 32-44.). 63 Zsolt K. Horváth, ‘A gyűlölet múzeuma. Spions, 1977–1978’, Korall, Vol. V 11, Issue 39, 2010, pp. 119–144, here p. 124. 64 See also: The Pluralization of the Public Sphere: Art Exhibitions in Romania between 1968 and 1989 (project manager: Cristian Nae), New Europe College, 1 October 2015–30 September 2016; Klara Kemp-Welch, ‘Species of Spaces in Eastern European and Latin American Experimental Art’, post. Notes on Modern & Contemporary Art around the Globe, 29 February 2016. Available online: http:// post.at.moma.org/content_items/761-species-of-spaces-in-eastern-europeanand-latin-american-experimental-art (accessed 18 September 2017); KempWelch’s book, Networking the Bloc, also has a focus on spaces ‘which people and objects passed through at various rates of intensity – places that generated further encounters and exchanges’. Kemp-Welch, Networking the Bloc, p. 143. 65 Adam Czirak, Partizipation der Blicke. Szenerien des Sehens und Gesehenwerdens in Theater und Performance, Bielefeld: transcript, 2012, p. 148; Erika Fischer-Lichte, Ästhetik des Performativen, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004. I will elaborate on this in more detail in the next chapter on theory and methods.

­1

Public Spheres and Spatiality

In the neighbourhood of the Hungarian Art Academy in Budapest, the Rose Espresso (Rózsa presszó) café was often visited by the academy’s students. It was not just a café; it was also a site of social and cultural encounters for those young artists, who were more experimental in their creative approaches than most of their teachers – or the academy’s conservative curriculum. In the 1960s and 1970s, Rose Espresso became a venue for art installations, event-based art and textual discussions, and was a place where artists circulated their own translations of art-related texts and photographic displays. Two generations of the avant-garde movement established a fruitful dialogue there by which students’ undertakings were supported by the more experienced artists frequenting the café. Further, while discussions, events and shows by ‘problematic’ students were banned from the Hungarian Art Academy, emerging artists still had access to the rich contemporary art collection in the academy’s library. For instance, many of the events at the Rose Espresso were based on the Art Academy’s collection of international art periodicals, and on the exhibition catalogues of documentas and biennials.1 The Rose Espresso is an example of how the first and second public spheres in communist Hungary were connected with one another. Because Hungarian art students were severely restricted in their intellectual and creative freedom during the Kádárian dictatorship, and because the Art Academy refused to offer them a public forum at which they could present and discuss their often experimental work, the young artists created a space of their own where their artistic experiments could reach a wider audience. The public sphere they created (the second public sphere) was a substitute for a democratic and accessible public realm built from below that the regulated and ordered public sphere of the Kádár era (the first public sphere) denied them. Yet, despite being formally opposed to each other, the first and the second public sphere were also entangled. As the academy’s library collection demonstrated, the first public

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sphere could never fully control the art world or artists, even though the Rose Espresso was subject to state surveillance (the name ‘Rose Espresso’ appeared in a number of secret service reports).2 The relationship between the ordered and disobedient public spheres was therefore complementary. The story of the art events at the Rose Espresso is a story of how artists reacted to dependency and regulations. By reinventing the café as an art venue, they also created a site for physical gatherings and non-restricted communication. The events that took place at the Rose Espresso were not only formal experiments that went beyond the socialist artistic canon, but the space itself reflected the very social and cultural circumstances from which it emerged. This chapter, with a focus on theory and methodology, will analyse the tense relationship between the first and second public spheres in Kádár’s Hungary by contrasting it with the ideal harmonic public sphere as understood by Jürgen Habermas. In doing so, it will concentrate on these contested public spheres’ spatial dimensions as aesthetic and sociocultural phenomena, and will investigate how art regulations, censorship and directives in cultural politics determined the structure of the first public sphere. Despite official governmental control of all art production and dissemination, ‘islands of freedom’ emerged in the Kádár era that were recognized by, studied by and popular among dissenting intellectuals in the 1970s and 1980s. Here, the focus will be on these theoretical positions, and particularly on the paradox of a critical and sceptical approach towards the regime which emerged through the entanglement of the ordered (first) and the disobedient (second) public sphere. Together, the sections in this chapter demonstrate that the artists of the neo-avant-garde in Hungary cleverly challenged state restrictions by creating their own space for artistic expression, and by forging opportunities that existed in parallel to the control mechanisms and apparatuses employed by the socialist state.

The first public sphere and the regulation of expression What we usually call ‘the public sphere’ has its origins in the Western world of liberal democracies, in which society has historically been divided into polis and oikos: the public and the private spheres. Matters concerning the community were debated and acted out in the polis, while what mattered to the individual, such as labour, family and the family’s property, belonged to the oikos.3 The characteristics of the public and private spheres changed through time, but the goal of the public sphere as a place of openly exchanging information

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and debating ideas always held great popular appeal. When Jürgen Habermas reviewed the transformation of the public sphere from feudalism through to the modern and postmodern eras in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), his initial point of reference was the Greek model. His concept of the public sphere was that of a forum for conversation that all social groups could access.4 Habermas’s definition of the public sphere was discursive; it was not a precise physical space where discussions are carried out; rather, it encompassed the various communication channels across the economic and political layers of society. The free circulation of information and the uncensored articulation of opinions are the bases of the ideal type of public sphere. According to Habermas, while the public sphere declined during the feudal era in Europe, it re-emerged during the Enlightenment with the flourishing of civil society.5 Although Habermas harshly criticized the increasing capitalization of the public sphere in the bourgeois, Western European context, his ideas have since been attacked for their perceived exclusivity against certain minorities, geopolitical areas and conflicts. One important critic of Habermas who challenges his narrow vision of what constitutes the public sphere, his alleged failure to account for cultural diversity, and his Eurocentrism, is Nancy Fraser. Fraser argues not only that the public sphere should be defined by political activism but also that it includes multiple ‘publics’, meaning multiple opinions and interests which are in a permanent state of conflict.6 This view contrasts with the homogeneous communication that Habermas’s bourgeois conception of the public sphere initially appeared to suggest. While Fraser describes the public sphere as a battlefield of social, political and cultural ideas, Habermas argues that the free circulation of information and the equally free creation of public opinion should lead to a consensus. In other words, Fraser’s public sphere is characterized by division and debate, while Habermas’s ideal of the public sphere features harmony and intellectual agreement. No matter how much fracturing and conflict the public sphere has experienced over the last few years,7 the concept of the ideal public sphere has persisted. The public sphere seems to imply the basic democratic right of consuming and spreading information: this means the right to have access to news, to freely discuss it with others, and to form opinions not only in private but also which can be expressed in the streets. This ideal type of communication secures the accessibility and visibility of any idea.8 To sociologists Jürgen Gerhards and Friedhelm Neidhardt, the spectrum of the public sphere reaches from spontaneous or planned encounters with the physical presence of, and

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interactions between, participants, to the mass media, which transcends the need for physical presence.9 Each part of this spectrum should foster open communication in the ideal version of the public sphere, but historically the autonomous operation of these types of communication has frequently been violated by social and political hierarchies. The control of the public sphere in its extreme was particularly visible in dictatorships. In 2010, the historian Jan C. Behrends claimed that sociological deliberations on the public sphere, including Jürgen Habermas’s classic formulation of it, are not necessarily helpful in analysing Eastern Europe’s communist dictatorships.10 The lack of a free civil society in those countries during the communist period suggests that the Habermasian public sphere simply did not exist in the former Eastern bloc. In these societies, only approved individuals could participate in public conversation, which was limited to certain ideas, and communication often rested on commands rather than dialogue. Moreover, both the content and scope of public discussions were determined by the dictates of political leaders. In this environment, official censorship and secret service surveillance led to self-censorship among citizens. The overall effect of this situation was that civil society in communist East Europe was actually the opposite of the Habermasian vision of a free and open public sphere. According to historian Stefan Wolle, the public sphere that existed under Soviet-type regimes was part of the state’s sphere of influence – he therefore named it the ‘ordered public sphere’ (‘verordnete Öffentlichkeit’). This ordered public sphere tended not to tolerate departures from ideological norms, and had perfected its structures of control and punishment.11 Although the aim of this state-controlled public sphere was to be allencompassing, it never completely achieved this objective. In socialist Hungary, for example, government repression of certain forms of public discourse led to the emergence of an alternative, deviating public sphere in which state infrastructure gained new meaning or was ignored in support of unregulated, creative actions. The activity of the non-obedient, which included artists, authors, intellectuals and opposition politicians, prevented the tightly controlled dialogue between citizens that the ordered public sphere aimed for. Despite the many layers of the public sphere, its separation into two spheres becomes obvious: one that is obsessed with control, and another which was unwilling to be controlled. The first public sphere, the equivalent of the ordered public sphere, and the second public sphere, which rejected state authority, should not, however, be regarded as opposing communicatory venues; indeed, the second public sphere required the first public sphere for its own existence. While the first public

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sphere attempted to oversee individuals’ actions in the communist countries, great efforts were made to undermine this agenda within the second public sphere. The first public sphere seemed more homogeneous because it was shaped by the ruling mechanisms and ideologies of Kádár’s regime (which itself was heavily influenced by the Soviet Union). It was the coexistence and the dialogue of the first and second public spheres that characterized the public realm in communist Hungary. The official Kádárian public sphere was not the battlefield of oppositional opinions as Nancy Fraser imagined, nor was it accessible to everyone in the Habermasian sense. Those who did not completely accept the first public sphere had the option of an escape route into the second public sphere, and vice versa: the second public sphere could not have existed without the observing eye of an ordered public sphere. The interplay of these two zones was inherent in the very dynamics of the public sphere under state socialism: the state needed dissent in order to maintain its repressive public sphere, and the second public sphere required a repressive state in order to exist as a disobedient force. Among its other effects, the first public sphere restricted citizens’ access to virtual and physical spaces of communication. The example of art regulation in the Kádár era can be used to demonstrate the extent of the limitations being imposed. In the period between 1958 and 1962, the Kádár regime fought openly against Modernism and Western imitation.12 During the Rákosi regime, the exclusive directive of art had been that of socialist realism, but this changed during János Kádár’s dictatorship when the rules of art became less formal, and were replaced with a general monitoring of artistic practices and the threat of reprisals if the authorities disapproved of an artist’s work. Unlike Kádárist cultural politics, socialist realism mirrored Stalin’s Terror in its grip over artists’ decisions across the Eastern bloc at the time.13 Socialist realism,14 and adherence to socialist ideology (pártosság), were required, though they were not clearly spelled out in order for the regime to retain room to manoeuvre between permission and censorship. Intense debates over the directive of ideology between 1962 and 1966 reached the following conclusion on the occasion of the 9th Workers’ Party congress in 1966: ‘We support socialist and other humanist works addressing the masses, we offer space to efforts that are nor politically and ideologically hostile, however we exclude politically hostile, anti-humanist manifestations or those violating public ethics.’15 While party propaganda, and other texts by socialist intellectuals, often referred to culture and art as instruments of political mobilization and lifestylereform, the Kádárist government failed to implement any notable changes

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to  artistic policy in the 1960s and 1970s. As literary historian Péter Agárdi observes, this was on the one hand due to the party’s general dogmatism and its economy-focused technocracy, and on the other hand to culture as a subject of politics. A third reason for the failure was the conservative, or even hostile, view of many leading politicians towards culture and intellectuals in general.16 According to cultural historian Péter György, official uncertainty about how progressive, contemporary and truly socialist art should look lasted from the mid-1960s until the beginning of the 1970s.17 Still, state censorship persisted until Hungary’s democratic regime change in 1989–1990; only the rigidity of control fluctuated over time. The lack of a clear directive confused both policymakers and policy-enforcers, and further complicated the first public sphere, raising the key questions: could the state assert authority over artists? How wide was the scope of the ordered public sphere? The task of attempting to answer these questions about how to interpret socialist attitudes and policies towards art fell to official organizations of art regulation. Four main institutions dictated and shaped the Hungarian art scene between 1964 and 1989: the Ministry for Culture, the Association of Hungarian Fine and Applied Artists, the Art Fund and the Lectorate for Applied and Fine Arts (1963–2007). Ideology and regulations were set by the Ministry of Culture, and the party’s Central Committee (Központi Bizottság) and Political Committee (Politikai Bizottság). György Aczél, who played a key role in all three bodies, had a particularly deep influence on defining what kind of art could be produced in Hungary between 1967 and 1982, which was expressed through his three Ts approach: ‘ban–tolerate–promote’. Membership of the Artist’s Union guaranteed artists a licence to work officially, while the Art Fund took care of their finances by providing a moderate income and ensuring the distribution of artworks and creative products.18 The execution of ideological orders was the task of the Lectorate, including the authorization of exhibitions and any other public appearance of art. In other words, the Lectorate’s appointed jury was responsible for deciding which artworks to put on display. The temporary members of the Lectorate were artists regarded as loyal to the party.19 Together, these four institutions produced a huge number of protocols, legal contributions and reports that today can be regarded as documenting the first public sphere’s radius of activity. Cultural politics navigated between the twin poles of permission and repression throughout the entire existence of the Kádár regime. At times, the authorities tolerated exhibitions of experimental art at venues with limited audiences such as artists’ and university clubs, where admittance was based

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on membership. Performances that involved the presentation of the naked, vulnerable body at public institutions were almost always banned. After Kádár consolidated his power and guidelines for socialist art were set, abstract painting enjoyed a renaissance. Even neo-avant-gardists were allowed to show abstract works, at both domestic and international exhibitions. A famous example of how the ideologically confused politics of the 1956 revolution’s direct aftermath could influence permission and repression was the Spring Show (Tavaszi Tárlat) organized in 1957 in the Budapest Art Hall (Műcsarnok). Long-neglected abstract painters such as Dezső Korniss and Lajos Kassák appeared on the walls, and socialist realism was termed naturalism in the exhibition catalogue.20 At the very moment when cultural politics accepted abstract art as possibly adhering to socialist ideology, neo-avant-gardists began to travel abroad; for example, the painter László Lakner received many scholarships in Germany throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and was able to accept them.21 At the same time, politically provocative artworks whose message could be misunderstood, or which were openly critical of the regime, were almost always immediately banned – even in the more liberal 1980s. The government’s net of censorship also included institutions with lower rankings in the state hierarchy; for instance, the artists’ studios that could directly keep track of emerging artists’ work. The directors of art institutions and local authorities in rural areas also had the power, after consultation with the four central organs, to decide which artworks could be presented to audiences (in exercising this power, they sometimes even favoured experimental art over more realist tendencies).22 These censoring entities acted in addition to the carefully organized system of secret government agents, many of whom managed to infiltrate even the most intimate artistic circles.23 The last type of restriction that existed in the art world under Kádár’s regime was self-censorship, which in Hungary under state socialism meant the individual being obliged to suppress his/her opinion, and/or the intentional or unintentional avoidance of delicate matters. This way of failing to conform to the ideal public sphere is inherent to dictatorships, and is an important form of abuse of the freedom of expression because it manipulates people’s ways of thinking.24 The only options for those unwilling to self-censor their works, and who did not wish to openly confront ideological dogmas, were actual or inner emigration (belső emigráció).25 Surveillance and self-censorship are signs of the first public sphere’s infiltration into the intimacy of the private sphere. These different layers of censorship and bureaucratic repression ensured that an official state version of culture and art dominated the first public sphere

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during the Kádár era. Only voices promoting the vision of a communist utopia were publicly broadcast, and open criticism against the communist system was rarely tolerated. But criticism, which was sometimes subtle and sometimes very explicit, was nevertheless possible. This brings the discussion back to the question of conflict and the multiple publics within socialist Hungary. At first glance, it may seem that Hungarian citizens were completely deprived of a right to public discourse, or that they could only participate in the Kádárian version of the public sphere. However, despite the state’s extensive control over the public sphere, some gestures and acts did challenge the power of Kádár’s regime, in a public discourse that existed in parallel to the first public sphere. This limited publicity was either overseen by the authorities, tolerated by them, or formed part of a strategic decision by the state authorities to allow some forms of very limited dissent. These instances where the second public sphere came into public focus were mostly temporary, as they generally only occurred until the party decided that they belonged to a banned category of expression. However, voices were nevertheless heard that did not fall within the set parameters of socialist art. In the arts, the conflict between non-obedient artists and the party leadership was mainly carried out in silence or, as in the case of the Balatonboglár chapel studio, against the backdrop of the denouncement of deviant artists in the official state media. And, because the second public sphere was a product of a group culture26 within which participants had different interests and priorities, in the case of Kádár’s Hungary it is meaningful to talk about multiple publics.

The second public sphere Indeed, despite the party’s control over the public discourse in socialist Hungary, many voices were unwilling to echo its ideological dogmas, and gestures and actions of non-obedience were therefore present in everyday life. In exchange for their political neutrality, János Kádár allowed Hungarians a degree of freedom in the niches of the ordered public sphere. Further, a complementary public sphere, which acted as a substitute for the controlled public sphere, emerged with minimal state and party involvement. Extensive surveillance of average citizens was rare,27 which meant that Hungarians could make casually critical comments of the communist government, and even organize get-togethers for small circles of acquaintances to commemorate the 1956 revolution.28 In the eyes of many people, the regime had lost its prestige by the late 1960s, so such

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gatherings proved popular. To many Hungarians, socialist ideology was ‘little more than window-dressing for the efficient establishment of bureaucratic industrial society’.29 People knew that they could not expect much from the promise of the communist commonwealth, and under Kádárian socialism they generally did not take state propaganda too seriously. Yet, Hungarian citizens still understood that in order to keep peace with the authorities they needed to maintain the illusion that they supported the communist regime. In The Power of the Powerless (1979), the Czech writer, playwright and dissident Václav Havel presents the example of a greengrocer hanging a propaganda sign exclaiming ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ in the window of his shop. The greengrocer does not identify with socialist ideas; he hangs the sign simply because he wishes to fulfil the expectations of the regime in a highly public way.30 The expectation of the party was thus to receive silent acceptance, even if this was just a façade. To many people, state socialism meant the repetition of ideological signifiers that evoked minor acts of resistance. In this context of general disillusionment, the ordered public sphere could not, and would not, be absolute, and niches existed in which self-determination could triumph over control. Given this disobedient approach, situations, actions and locations gained new functions and meanings, in that, for example, symbols of socialist iconography appeared in alien contexts where they carried critical potential and drew attention to the realities of living under socialism. The second public sphere thus necessarily remained within a dictatorial regime, but did not comply with it. This public sphere consisted of numerous little islands of autonomy, which often overlapped with both each other and the first public sphere. In his book on the forms of cultural opposition found within the Hungarian neo-avant-garde, communication studies scholar József Havasréti reconstructs the nature of publicity in the non-obedient art scene. Because abstract art, performances and intermedia art were not usually welcome at larger statefunded institutions, their production and presentation took place outside the public sphere from which they were excluded.31 Havasréti also argues that the Hungarian neo-avant-garde was an elitist group culture that, because of its exclusion, remained relatively isolated from other social groupings. Neo-avantgardists were mysterious to those outside the movement. To Havasréti, the lack of an open public sphere meant restricted access to a broad audience, which in turn prevented the development of a meaningful social, political and cultural dialogue. In other words, the neo-avant-garde art movement was participating in a public sphere without a (real) public.32

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The question also arises as to the role played by other institutions and venues in differentiating the two versions of the public sphere operating side by side in Kádárian Hungary. In Poland, as sociologist Elzbieta Matynia shows, a type of public sphere realized in private intimacy existed because the official public sphere was rarely open to all opinions and did not allow creative engagement. This publicized privacy seems to have had a kind of independence from the state’s observing eye.33 In Hungary, by contrast, the spheres of official and unofficial action were inseparable from each other. Without the observing eye of the first public sphere, there would have been no impulse to express counteropinions in the second public sphere. Members of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde were not only active in the apartments and basements of private houses but also in state-run locations. Universities, youth clubs, studios and culture houses (kultúrházak) belonged to institutions that, despite their integration into the system of art control, were popular among neo-avant-garde artists since they were sometimes open to experimental tendencies. Directors, curators and programme heads could often decide relatively freely on what to show to these institutions’ members and their invited guests because the audience was relatively isolated.34 As well as this more obvious form of dependency between the first and second public spheres, creative works that migrated into nature, the urban environment, abroad, or to abandoned rural sites were not necessarily ignored by the first public sphere. Although the second public sphere lacked independence, permanence and autonomy, Havasréti defines it as an urge to create a forum of free communication and action that could not be provided by the socialist authorities.35 Even during the vengeance that followed in the wake of the 1956 revolution, there were minor islands of cultural opposition, such as the gatherings in László Végh’s apartment. Dissident activity had increased by the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, characterized by a growing number of illegal publications, radio broadcasts and episodes of passive resistance.36 Much of this growing spirit of subversion can be traced to a booming international counterculture at the time, from which Hungarians drew inspiration.37 In this context, important figures of East and Central European dissent thoroughly analysed their divergence from the first public sphere in an attempt to realize a public sphere under order. Sociologist, philosopher and literary historian Elemér Hankiss, for example, was among the most well-informed intellectuals of Hungarian dissent as well as a passionate researcher of both everyday and high culture. His work includes important writings on the constitution of the public sphere such as his book Eastern European Alternatives? (Kelet-Európai

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alternatívák?, 1989), an important sociological analysis of the present and future opportunities that Eastern Europeans had at the end of the 1980s to create a real public discourse. The publication features some of the extensive Hungarian scholarly work on the terminology of the ‘Grey Zone’, a hidden dimension in state-socialist societies that allowed for seemingly free talk and action within the regime.38 Hankiss’s references also include a wide range of thinkers from East-Central Europe who openly discuss and analyse the existence and shape of alternative public spheres and, this way, contribute to our current understanding of the second public sphere. Political activist and mathematician Václav Benda, author Ludvík Vaculík, Václav Havel, author Milan Kundera, politician Jacek Kuroń from Czechoslovakia, and historian Adam Michnik from Poland all appear in Hankiss’s book.39 Václav Benda and the poet and ‘ideologue’ of the underground band The Plastic People of the Universe, Ivan M. Jirous, were arguably the most important inspirations for Hungarian dissident intellectuals interested in cultivating and exploring an autonomous sphere of artistic activity in the 1970s.40 They also each introduced concepts that can be used here to illustrate the contours of the second public sphere identified in the present book. Jirous’s concept of a second culture concerned a proposed plan for the future, a directive of how the ‘Grey Zone’ could end its subordination to the cultural domination of state authorities: ‘The goal of our underground is to create a second culture, a culture completely independent from all official communication media and conventional hierarchy of value judgements put out by the establishment.’41 Autonomy, selfmanagement and a caring society were key factors in Jirous’s model, and certain similarities can be traced between the second culture and Václav Benda’s parallel polis. Specifically, Benda confronts the homogeneous social regime with the heterogeneity of the underground, noting that the parallel polis he articulates ‘was both a refuge from the “violence” of the party-state, as well as a crucible of non-violent resistance, where values of pluralism and tolerance – often in the guise of a Bohemian, countercultural lifestyle – were cultivated’.42 Compared to the second culture,  the parallel polis was more of a characterization of given structures. To better understand the second public sphere, the parallel polis is relevant for two reasons: on the one hand, it highlights the simultaneous existence of an alternative culture and an official one; on the other hand, it stresses that the second public sphere is a substitute for the first, because it steps in to facilitate an accessible public discourse, since state socialism has failed to do so. Although in Eastern European Alternatives? Hankiss thoroughly investigates the social structure of the state socialism that existed at the time of writing,

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his findings also address the question of the public sphere. According to him, society in Kádár’s Hungary could be split into three categories: the first, the second and the alternative society. The first society represents the order of the state and its hierarchical and centralized foundations, while the second society, corresponding to this book’s definitions of the first and the second public spheres, is its opposite. In other words, the second society rebels against the rules of centralized organization and is highly deconstructive. Meanwhile, the alternative society constitutes Hankiss’s idea of a utopian social arrangement. This kind of society would have horizontal structures, a bottomup constitution of power, non-social forms of property, autonomous social and economic actors, and a balance between social differentiation and integration.43 Hankiss predicts that if the second society gained influence over the first society, it could deconstruct the former’s rigid system, and that the outcome of this transformation could be the emergence of an alternative society.44 The experience of dissent and other forms of resistance on the one hand, and the failures of centralized politics on the other, determined Hankiss’s alternative society model. To many Hungarian intellectuals, mostly in the democratic opposition, envisioning an alternative society was part of the spirit of reform that grew in momentum in the late 1980s. Despite the future orientation of Hankiss’s concept of an alternative society, he was convinced that state-socialist countries could only achieve this ideal through gaining thorough knowledge of what determined the formation of the official and unofficial spheres. The Grey Zone included forms of financial sabotage and a free market existing in parallel to the planned socialist economy;45 it also involved different cultural groups reaching beyond workers and bureaucrats. Besides the second society and the second economy in state socialism, Hankiss identifies a third phenomenon that he calls the ‘second social consciousness’. People living under socialist dictatorships publicly act as though they have internalized the requirements of the official ideology and political practice, just like Havel’s greengrocer, yet think and speak differently in their private lives.46 Indeed, many Hungarian citizens lived double lives, similar to the artists who produced commissioned works for state institutions and firms while simultaneously engaging in creative experimentation through their membership of the artistic circles of the second public sphere.47 In addition to a second economy, a second society and a second social consciousness, Hankiss argues that the second public sphere can also pave the way towards the future alternative society. To him, the second public sphere belonged to clearly identifiable social groups and circles, such as those involved in publishing political messages in

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opposition to the government. This was a discursive arena where information circulated to all layers of the second society without control being exerted by any centralized institution.48 There were other dimensions to the second public sphere too; it also encompassed everyday encounters, conversations behind closed doors, and the spread of rumours, as well as the defence against, and critical review of, the official public sphere’s news (and fake news). The second public sphere operated next to the first public sphere, and often found itself in opposition to the authorities. Following the many ups and downs in repression and permissions over the decades of the Kádár era, in the second half of the 1980s, those in the second public sphere began to more assertively demand participation in the first public sphere, as they were no longer content to simply exist outside the spotlight.49 Some artists succeeded in travelling abroad without encountering  insurmountable bureaucratic hurdles, and the democratic opposition began organizing street protests and gatherings. This was the time when influential intellectuals such as Elemér Hankiss, György Konrád and Miklós Haraszti began to recognize the second public sphere and second society’s potential for bringing about genuine political change. In the decade of democratic opposition, publications envisioning and promoting an alternative society grew in number as more and more readers recognized the second public sphere’s political potential. As the decentralization of the political sphere went hand in hand with the decentralization of the public sphere, the long-standing second public sphere appeared to offer a model of how to restructure socialist society in a way that was conducive to personal autonomy and creative expression. The second public sphere therefore had significance for intellectuals, ordinary people and artists because it provided spaces for autonomous expression for those who were dissatisfied with communist rules. It offered an escape route from the rigidity of a controlled public sphere that simultaneously simulated the conditions of a ‘real’ public sphere. Inventiveness and the bypassing of censorship were the two main ways in which the second sphere undermined the first public sphere. Nevertheless, Václav Havel warned against the heroic overestimation of alternative culture, just because it seemed to represent an ‘authentic’ position compared to an ideology of dictatorship.50 Indeed, the second public sphere was either idealized or met with scepticism – both during its existence and retrospectively. Optimists believed that it could expand or even break down the restrictions of the first public sphere, while pessimists echoed Havel’s criticism; to them, the second public sphere was little more than a myth, and was limited in its ability to spark political and cultural transformation. The truth about the

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second public sphere probably lay somewhere in between these two positions, as to some extent it managed to maintain a sense of being a real public sphere under the pressure of, and/or in line with, the first public sphere.

­The art of the second public sphere In the Kádár era, cultural and artistic life were often characterized by double meanings. In this dual world (megkettőzött világ), as József Havasréti called it, each word and gesture had at least two meanings.51 An artwork, for instance, could possess both an officially acceptable message and a direct or indirect reference to something unacceptable.52 This division also characterized the public sphere, as communication was either controlled, or tried to escape regulations. Rather than two completely equal and separate domains, one should imagine the second public sphere as forming part of the ordered (first) public sphere. Miklós Haraszti’s The Velvet Prison: Artists under State Socialism53 (1986) outlines the relationship between the two public spheres in the art world at the time. Haraszti deals with how censorship had turned into a decisive component in the constitution of the (literary) author and his/her intellectual product. The Velvet Prison investigates the status and mutual conditionality of regulative bureaucracy and the cultural creator. It concerns a public sphere where control and observation are relentless. Haraszti sees intellectual autonomy as invaluable, and in state socialism each form of self-management and freedom represented a denial of the given order.54 Haraszti further argues that because many artists accepted the non-written agreement between the author and the police state, they implicitly agreed to party norms; this meant that censorship and its impact permeated the national culture.55 This is the background to Haraszti’s concept of the ‘public sphere between the lines’ (‘sorok közötti nyílvánosság’; my emphasis), which refers to a phenomenon typical of the dual world in which communication reaching beyond state acceptance had to be carried out undercover. As a ‘laboratory of consensus’, the public sphere between the lines contained tensions between the first and second public spheres.56 This kind of public sphere is similar to the concepts of the parallel polis and the second society that existed as a forum of refuge within the dictatorship, a zone of in-between where participants could articulate a disobedient opinion. The public sphere between the lines comprised a collection of information, dispositions, interests and needs that were waiting to appear in a real public discourse. According to Haraszti, waiting for a transformation in the public sphere was pointless; he

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did not believe that the public sphere between the lines (an ‘embryonic public sphere’57) could expand into the first public sphere.58 Haraszti drew a clear distinction between the public discourse created by literature and that created by the arts. To him, a radical artistic opposition took effect in a confrontational public sphere. In this ‘wild art’, direct contact with the audience and the generation of a feeling of immediacy in the audience were necessary in order to shake up perceptions and draw people out from the stultifying convenience of everyday reality.59 The breadth of examples of directness reached from interactive exhibitions to participatory performances, and Haraszti’s confrontational public sphere was characterized by this confrontation, and by the break with the state monopoly of control. He believed that not even the resistant attitude of some artists and artworks could change the structure of the public sphere in socialist dictatorships, and that artistic opposition could never amount to much more than a romantic attempt to add an additional layer to the ordered public sphere. For the neo-avant-garde, then, there was no escape from the first public sphere because it was constantly exposed to the changing rules of cultural politics.60 Haraszti’s assumptions proved true for radical avant-gardists, as many of those who confronted the aesthetic norms of Kádárist cultural politics, such as Gábor Altorjay and Tamás Szentjóby, ultimately had to leave the country. The sceptical undertone of The Velvet Prison was also motivated by the personal experiences of the author, who had experienced the prohibition of his earlier book, Worker in a Workers State.61 The pessimism resulting from this experience meant that Haraszti refused to romanticize the art of the second public sphere, but instead explored its weaknesses, while at the same time highlighting its attempt to create a forum for free communication. The Velvet Prison was not only concerned with picturing the dependent relations of the state-socialist public sphere but also with setting out practical strategies of survival for artists (and authors) in the aesthetic regime of the Kádár era. Haraszti was right to state that there was no ‘outside’ of the socialist culture factory.62 Art could, however, make a difference by inventing sophisticated responses to dependency.

Spatiality and (artistic) dissent The construction of urban space in Hungary in the 1950s was rooted in the ideal that socialist buildings would support the creation of a new and better society. According to historian Márkus Kellér, in this new society women would not be required to keep to the household and could instead be free to

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devote themselves entirely to earning activities, just like men. Urban spaces and socialist architecture would establish an environment in which the home would no longer be at the centre of life, as public spaces and facilities would assume this role. Private housing, as the early socialist model proposed, was not a commodity, but instead was ‘an infrastructure provided by the state’.63 This proposition of an ideologically uniform architecture and urban space remained an ideal because, particularly in the decades immediately following the Second World War, the construction of new buildings primarily had to be cost-efficient. In these decades, only the façades of houses fulfilled the architectural ideals of socialist realism, which aimed to influence peoples’ ways of living through spatial arrangements.64 Márkus’s study of home building in the 1950s reveals that despite the comprehensive efforts of nationalization, neither private housing nor public urban sites created the ‘new forms of collective living’ that the communist regime had envisioned. The state sought to control architecture, and to some extent managed to do so through the production of buildings, but this control was never complete because families with enough money to build their homes privately opted to do that, and the architecture of these homes did not conform to socialist design principles. Individuals’ ‘stubbornness’, Márkus argues, created a ‘specific form of “consumer autonomy”’, even in a Stalinist-type system.65 The 1960s did not bring movement towards a completely unified and homogeneous architecture. Besides ‘the mass production of housing blocks and prefabricated housing projects’ of the 1960s, family houses were still built privately, and Modernism reappeared in many instances over the decade.66 The design and construction of industrial buildings flourished, and in most cases these did not follow political standards.67 In the 1970s, some housing blocs were even decorated with abstract forms and painting, in an effort to refresh the urban landscape.68 The 1980s brought a growing involvement of the private sector in construction.69 These developments all show that there was a clear divergence between the ideologically desired yet heterogeneous concept of a socialist urban space, and its actual realization. In these circumstances, disobedient protagonists could choose to use spaces for their own purposes, where they could gather with like-minded people. In other words, they required spaces in which they could create and exercise the second public sphere. Jean-Luc Nancy has described political action as the disclosure of space. The act of creating space, metaphorically speaking, is an act of freedom.70 Having access to space and using it without restrictions, as Nancy discusses, was precisely what happened with the art of the second public sphere. While the importance of virtual art-making and exchanges such as correspondence and

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the practice of mail art should not be underestimated in understanding how art functioned in the second public sphere, Hungarian neo-avant-gardists under the Kádár regime eagerly sought face-to-face contact with their audiences and colleagues. To satisfy their desire, these artists needed physical sites where they could produce and present artworks. This was one of the reasons why the shirt painting at Galántai’s chapel art studio and gatherings at Végh’s apartment, both explored in the introduction, were so important. Most neo-avant-gardists simply reinvented already existing venues. Private homes became forums for collective listening to experimental music; youth clubs were used as performance sites; and abandoned rural locations were transformed into creative camps. Hungarian neo-avant-gardists worked with the toolkits they had at their disposal, turning either nature, rural sites, apartments, streets, or even state-owned facilities into parts of an art scene. This inversion of power structures through spatial practices was perhaps most obvious in the example of party-run youth and art institutions. Youth, university, artist clubs and the Studio of Young Artists were ideal venues for artists to present their work, as the necessary infrastructure was available at such places, including event rooms, equipment, membership benefits and a monthly programme sheet. Sometimes cultural politics were more permissive, allowing alternative artworks to be staged in these venues, while at other times artists found ways to circumvent state censorship, for instance by organizing shows for a short period of time that did not require official approval. By occupying spaces officially belonging to the first public sphere and using them for their own purposes, neo-avant-gardists loosened the hegemonic constellation of Kádárist culture. Creative public discourse is understood in this book as a force capable of destabilizing and challenging a dominant spatial order. This mainly happened in Hungary through the repurposing of space. Physical space had an official meaning and purpose, but neo-avant-garde artists altered that purpose when they entered the space, and made it into something else. Artists of the neoavant-garde used symbolic spaces to reflect on their marginal positions; they created spaces for a community where art and life merged; they subverted staterun institutions into experiments; and they turned private locations, such as apartments, into sites of public gatherings. Through artistic interventions, the spaces and places of Kádárian Hungary became less exclusive and hierarchized. Acts of autonomy at the level of art production challenged Kádár’s politics of inclusion because these new or reinvented spaces were rarely the result of topdown initiatives.

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The spaces of the second public sphere were spaces of transformation because they multiplied the meaning of a site whose purpose had originally been different. The cellar of the happening, the artist’s studio turned into an artwork, and the apartment repurposed as an exhibition venue were the results of a change of function, purpose and form that happened through a series of actions. Neo-avant-gardists were not willing to accept limitations to their creative freedom imposed by the communist state and always looked for forums for adventurous exposure.71 As a result, these artists turned spaces with clearly defined original functions into open spaces for opportunities.72 The cellar was originally intended as a storage space for a private house, and the artist’s studio a large space in which to produce an artwork. Both of these purposes were approved by the first public sphere, but what happened to them through neoavant-gardist subversion and interference was that these officially accepted meanings were opposed. The art of the second public sphere was art with a double meaning. The transformation of space from official purposes to venues of creation (and often subversion) was most obvious in performative and intermedia projects of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. A foundational thesis of performance is that space is not simply given; instead, it is made by those who act in it; in other words, in process-based art, actions generate space. This space that emerges through a performative work is temporary and constantly changes over the course of its creation. The roles of object and subject are not clearly defined, and are renegotiated during a performance. Richard Schechner, one of the founders of performance studies, explains that performers can use space in two ways: ‘First, there is what one can do with and in a space; secondly, there is the acceptance of a given space. In the first case, one creates an environment by transforming space; in the second case, one negotiates with an environment, engaging in a scenic dialogue with space.’73 The activities that took place in and around the chapel studio of Balatonboglár are good examples of how performative interventions in a given space can produce spatial transformations. The chapel was originally built as a site of religious worship, but Galántai turned it into a physical and mental site of the often-abandoned artistic experiment and a symbol for the neo-avant-garde as a community of artists pursuing similar goals. As site of performance art, the chapel’s physical contours were appropriated for artistic ends. In a culture where new material goods were never made available in abundance, repurposing space had a special resonance, as it involved reusing and recycling elements of surroundings that originally served different purposes. Event-based works by

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Hungarian neo-avant-gardists thus deconstructed existing spatial settings in order to reconstruct them as spaces of the second public sphere. In addition to repurposing existing space, neo-avant-garde artists also created a space of ‘in-betweenness’ through their creations, particularly in the early to mid-1960s when a new phase of nonconformist art in Hungary was taking shape. Above all, artists ranging from poets to painters experimented with different types of media. Theatre studies scholar Gabriella Schuller proposes Victor Turner’s concept of liminality in relation to clandestine performance activities in seeking to capture this movement. To her, the entanglement of life and theatre in an intense and excessive way was in active opposition to the conventions and cultural requirements of dictatorship.74 Turner also argues that liminal space, no matter how distant it may seem from normal modes of social action, also thoroughly examines the nature of the society and culture in which it appears.75 Seen from this perspective, the performative space in itself is an analytical field in which the structures of a society can be investigated. The in-between space is no less important in discussions about intermediality. When different types of media are brought together in the same artistic creation, they create a semiotic and a material space that does not belong to any of the individual media which have interacted. In this space of amalgamation and inbetweenness, Birgit Neumann states that ‘exchange, transfer and translation become possible, while material, social and functional differences between media are made visible’.76 Different media are in a dialogue with each other, but there is space for conflict too. This is a good mirror of the relationship of the two public spheres, which are separate but in dialogue with each other, and which exist in a condition of mutual dependency. Further, Neumann brings together the concepts of intermediality and Homi Bhabha’s in-between spaces, observing that they both denote cultural spaces that are inherently liminal; as such, they are testing grounds for social and ethical values, and politics with transgressive boundaries. Translated into intermedial artistic strategies, in-between spaces ‘assume[s] transgression, interaction and exchange’.77 Intermediality, like ephemeral and live artwork, also creates an open space for opportunities. The attitude of crossing borders and building tensions goes beyond merely formal experiment, aiming at a space for public discourse. In this sense, intermediality is a mode of communication conducive to fostering the type of dialogue that existed in the second public sphere, and was therefore a technique employed by many neo-avant-garde artists. Despite Haraszti’s pessimistic view that the second public sphere did not, and indeed could not, bring about political change, those who created the second

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public sphere did not see it simply as a powerless or futile act of rebellion. The second public sphere’s manifestation as a space of in-betweenness diversified the culture of order in the Kádárist state. Intellectuals such as Benda, Jirous and Hankiss clearly saw the appearance of disobedience at all levels of state socialism, which gave them hope for the potential reform of the ordered public sphere that would be built from the bottom up. Each act undermining the party infrastructure and bureaucratism with the (re)invention of accessible and participatory spaces was a critique of the forced and false egalitarianism promoted by the state, and allowed individuals to imagine an alternative future. The concepts discussed in this chapter have revealed the close relationship between two different types of spheres and spaces, and the areas in which they came into conflict in socialist Hungary. Out of their entanglement and conflict, new spaces emerge that reflect their respective sociocultural environments and herald a world of dual meanings. The rest of the book analyses the liminal spaces in the light of state regulation, and in the context of the critical, restless avant-garde.

Notes 1 2 3 4

5

6

7

Krisztina Üveges, ‘Tiltott és Tűrt, avagy fotóalapú grafikai eljárások a hetvenes és nyolcvanas években’, Fotóművészet, Issue 1, 2016, pp. 58–67, here p. 59. Kürti, ‘Experimentalizmus, avantgárd és közösségi hálózatok a hatvanas években’, p. 51. J. Roy, ‘“Polis” and “Oikos” in Classical Athens’, Greece and Rome, Vol. 46, Issue 1, April 1999, pp. 1–18. Berenika Szymanski, Theatraler Protest und der Weg Polens zu 1989. Zum Aushandeln von Öffentlichkeit im Jahr der Solidarność, Bielefeld: transcript, 2012, p. 41. Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft, Neuwied: Hermann Luchterhvand, 1962, p. 97. Nancy Fraser, ‘Transnationalizing the Public Sphere’, republicart, No. 3, 2005. Available online: http://www.republicart.net/disc/publicum/fraser01_en.htm (accessed 19 September 2017). Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, New York: Zone Books, 2005; Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, Winchester: Zero Books, 2017; Pia Wiegmink, ‘Performance and Politics in the Public Sphere,’ Journal of Transnational American Studies, Vol. 3, Issue 2, 2011, pp. 1–40.

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8 Charles Taylor cited in Christopher B. Balme, The Theatrical Public Sphere, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 7. 9 Szymanski, Theatraler Protest und der Weg Polens zu 1989, p. 49. 10 Jan C. Behrends, ‘Repräsentation und Mobilisierung. Eine Skizze zur Geschichte der Öffentlichkeit in der Sowjetunion und in Osteuropa (1917–1991),’ in Ute Daniel and Axel Schildt (eds.), Massenmedien im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts, Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau, 2010, pp. 229–254, here p. 229. 11 Stefan Wolle, Die heile Welt der Diktatur. Alltag und Herrschaft in der DDR 1971–1989, Bonn: Bundeszentrale, 1999, p. 135. 12 Péter Agárdi, ‘Közelítések a Kádár-korszak művelődéspolitikájához,’ Eszmélet. Társadalomkritikai és kulturális folyóirat, 1 January 1993. Available online: https:// www.eszmelet.hu/agardi_peter-kozelitesek-a-kadar-korszak-muvelodespolitikaja/ (accessed 23 July 2019). 13 Péter György, ‘A hely szelleme,’ BUKSZ, Vol. 16, Issue 4, Winter 2004, pp. 328–335. 14 Especially how philosopher György Lukács imagined it in the 1930s and 1940s: as an enriched, new form of ‘big’ realism with a social mission. György Lukács, Esztétikai írások 1930–1945, Budapest: Kossuth Könyvkiadó, 1982, p. 753. 15 Extract from the 9th Workers’s Party congress cited in Ignác Romsics, Magyarország Története a XX. században, Budapest: Osiris Kiadó, 2010. Available online: https://www.tankonyvtar.hu/hu/tartalom/tamop425/2011_0001_520_ magyarorszag_tortenete/ch07s05.html#ftn.id631315 (accessed 23 July 2019). 16 Agárdi, ‘Közelítések a Kádár-korszak művelődéspolitikájához’. 17 György, ‘A hely szelleme’. 18 Mónika Zombori, ‘Az állami mecenatúra fél évszázada, avagy a művészek bevonulása az Alapba,’ artmagazin, Issue 4, 2016, pp. 70–72; György Horváth, A művészek bevonulása. A képzőművészet politikai irányításának és igazgatásának története 1945–1992, Budapest: Corvina, 2015. 19 Tibor Wehner, ‘Magyar Művelődési Intézet és Képzőművészeti Lektorátus,’ artportal. Available online: https://artportal.hu/lexikon-intezmeny/magyarmuvelodesi-intezet-es-kepzomuveszeti-lektoratus/ (accessed 23 July 2019). 20 Kürti, ‘Experimentalizmus, avantgárd és közösségi hálózatok a hatvanas években,’ p. 56. 21 Ibid., p. 157. 22 On the complex mechanisms and motivations of censorship see: Anna CsekeHorányi, ‘A cenzúra diszkrét bája. Kiállítás az OFF-Biennálén – Interjú Zombori Mónikával és Zsikla Mónikával,’ kortárs online, 2 June 2015. Available online: https://www.kortarsonline.hu/aktual/kepzo-a-cenzura-diszkret-baja.html, last (accessed 23 July 2019). 23 On the many stratifications of the Hungarian art world from the point of view of an intellectual and cultural history see: József Havasréti, ‘Az életmű kulcsai. György

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Péter: Apám helyett,’ Jelenkor. Irodalmi és művészeti folyóirat, Vol. 54, Issue 10, October 2011, pp. 1075–1089. 24 Miklós Haraszti, A cenzúra esztétikája, Budapest: AB Független Kiadó, 1986, p. 69. 25 József Havasréti, Alternatív regiszterek. A kultúrális ellenállás formái a magyar neoavantgárdban, Budapest: Typotex, 2006, p. 20. ­26 Ibid., p. 99. 27 Árpád von Klimó, ‘Nonnen und Tschekistinnen. Vorstellungen der ungarischen Staatssicherheit von einer katholischen Gegenöffentlichkeit in den frühen Fünfziger Jahren,’ Gábor T. Rittersporn, Rolf Malte and Jan C. Behrends (eds.), Sphären von Öffentlichkeit in Gesellschaft sowjetischen Typs. Zwischen partei-staatlicher Selbstinszenierung und kirchlichen Gegenwelten, Frankfurt and Vienna: Peter Lang, 2003, pp. 307–334, here p. 309. 28 Szeg., ‘A forradalom hangja,’ Beszélő, Issue 8, 8 October 1983, p. 57. 29 Joe Grim Feinberg, ‘The Unfinished Story of Central European Dissidence,’ Issue 145, 2008, Telos, pp. 47–66. 30 David Danaher, ‘Teaching Havel,’ in Craig Cravens, Masako F. Fidler and Susan C. Kresin (eds.), Between Texts, Languages, and Cultures: A Festschrift for Michael Henry Heim, Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2008, pp. 35–42, here p. 41. 31 Havasréti, Alternatív regiszterek, p. 98. 32 Ibid., p. 99. 33 Elzbieta Matynia, Performative Democracy, London and New York: Taylor & Francis, 2015, p. 31. 34 In the early to mid-1970s László Beke began to organize exhibitions and events at the Young Artists’ Club (Fiatal Művészek Klubja, FMK) in Budapest that clearly favoured experimental tendencies. As Klara Kemp-Welch writes: ‘Under Beke’s watch there were also solo shows of Western figures as Ken Friedman (1975) and Robert Filliou (1976) . . . Kozłowski was invited in 1975 by his Hungarian colleague to have an exhibition at the FMK’. Kemp-Welch, Networking the Bloc, pp. 294–295. 35 Havasréti, Alternatív regiszterek, p. 96. 36 Kalmár, Történelmi galaxisok vonzásában, pp. 319, 381. 37 On the Hungarian reception see: Cseh-Varga, ‘The Troubled Public Sphere,’ New Narratives of Russian and East European Art. 38 ‘There were more and more who referred to a shadow society (Zsille (1980)), an informal, inscrutable and uncontrollable social sphere (Bruszt (1984), (1985)), a hidden dimension of social existence (Bogár (1983)), a certain second Hungary (Forintos (1982)), concealed political groups and platforms (Pokol (1980))’. Elemér Hankiss, Kelet-Európai alternatívák? Budapest, 1989, manuscript, Source: Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives, p. 92. 39 Ibid., p. 93.

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40 This was an assumption made by art historian Klara Kemp-Welch at the preparatory meeting of the DFG Young Academic Network application Aktionskunst jenseits des Eisernen Vorhangs (13–14 July 2013, Collegium Hungaricum Berlin). ­41 Ivan M. Jirous cited in Klara Kemp-Welch, Antipolitics in Central European Art. Reticence as Dissidence under Post-Totalitarian Rule 1956–1989, London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2014, p. 4. 42 Barbara J. Falk, ‘Reflections on the Revolutions in Europe: Lessons for the Middle East and the Arab Spring,’ in Friederike Kind-Kovács and Jessie Labov (eds.), Samizdat, Tamizdat, and Beyond: Transnational Media during and after Socialism, New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2013, pp. 281–315, here p. 285. 43 Hankiss, Kelet-Európai alternatívák?, p. 110. 44 Ibid., p. 119. 45 Norbert Izsák, ‘Hankiss Elemér egy autonóm polgárság kialakulásáról. “Mit kezdhetünk magunkkal?”’ HVG Extra, 2012, pp. 20–21, here p. 21. 46 Hankiss, Kelet-Európai alternatívák?, pp. 98, 100. 47 Katalin Cseh-Varga, Interview with György Galántai, 21 August 2014, Budapest. 48 Hankiss, Kelet-Európai alternatívák?, p. 97. 49 Ibid., p. 100. 50 Václav Havel, ‘Six Notes on Culture,’ in A. Heneka, Frantisek Janouch, Vilém Precan and Jan Vladislav (eds.), A Besieged Culture: Czechoslovakia Ten Years after Helsinki, Budapest and Vienna: The Charta 77 Foundation and International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, 1985, pp. 129–141. 51 Havasréti, Alternatív regiszterek, pp. 49–50. 52 Ibid. 53 Original Hungarian title: A cenzúra esztétikája. Published in English under the title The Velvet Prison: Artists under State Socialism in 1987. 54 Haraszti, A cenzúra esztétikája, pp. 13–20. 55 Ibid., pp. 31, 49–50. 56 Ibid., p. 80. 57 Matynia, Performative Democracy, p. 31. 58 Haraszti, A cenzúra esztétikája, p. 84. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., p. 87. 61 Gábor Klaniczay, ‘Még egyszer A cenzúra esztétikájáról,’ Beszélő online, Vol. 1, Issue 4, September 1982. Available online; http://beszelo.c3.hu/cikkek/meg-egyszer-acenzura-esztetikajarol (accessed 24 July 2019). 62 Miklós Haraszti, ‘A hivatalos kultúra életereje,’ in Endre Karátson and Ninon Neményi (eds.), Belső tilalomfák. Tanulmányok a társadalmi öncenzúrázásról, Leiden: Hollandiai Mikes Kelemen Kör, 1982, pp. 70–80, here p. 71.

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63 Márkus Kellér, Szocialista lakhatás? A lakáskérdés az 1950–es években Magyarországon, Budapest: Országos Széchenyi Könyvtár – L’Harmattan, 2017, p. 15. 64 Ibid., p. 223. ­65 Ibid., pp. 225–226. 66 László Munteán, ‘Molnár, Virág. 2013. Building the State: Architecture, Politics, and State Formantion in Postwar Central Europe,’ Hungarian Cultural Studies, e-Journal of the American Hungarian Educators Association, Vol. 7, 2014, not paginated. 67 Mihály Kubinszki, ‘Visszapillantás a szocialista realizmusra,’ Magyar Szemle, Vol. 16, Issue 3–4, pp. 169–172. 68 Mihály Kubinszki, ‘Visszatekintés a huszadik század Magyar építészetére,’ Magyar Szemle, Vol. 10, Issue 3–4, pp. 112–135. 69 Munteán, ‘Molnár, Virág. 2013’. 70 Jean-Luc Nancy cited in Oliver Marchart, Die Politische Differenz. Zum Denken des Politischen bei Nancy, Lefort, Badiou, Laclau and Agamben, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010, p. 106. 71 Klara Kemp-Welch recently argued that an attitude like this should be called experimental. Kemp-Welch, Networking the Bloc, p. 6. 72 Juliane Rebentisch, Ästhetik der Installation, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003, pp. 56–57. 73 Richard Schechner, ‘6 Axioms for Environmental Theatre,’ The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 12, Issue 3, Spring 1968, pp. 41–64, here p. 50; my emphases. 74 Gabriella Schuller, ‘Szabadság tér 69–85. Kassák Ház Stúdió, Lakásszínház, Squat: autonóm terek,’ in Zoltán Imre (ed.), alternatív színháztörténetek. alternatívok és alternatívák, Budapest: Balassi, 2008, pp. 222–241, here p. 233. 75 Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969, p. 156. 76 Birgit Neumann, ‘Intermedial Negotiations: Postcolonial Literatures,’ in Gabriele Rippl and Hubert Zapf (eds.), Intermediality: Literatures – Image – Sound – Music. Handbook of English and American Studies, Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2015, pp. 512–529, here p. 514. 77 Ibid.

­2

The Happening and the Consolidation of the Art of the Second Public Sphere

In the glimmering light of an abandoned basement, two men smashed up furniture, and released mice to scurry among the rows of seating, striking fear and astonishment among the gathered audience. These two artists had vomited at a certain point in proceedings, and they also used animals including a live chicken as ‘props’. They treated their assistant as they had the mice and the chicken: as a fitting in their arrangement of a live installation involving a variety of objects. They used ropes to tie each object, human, and segment of space to one another. The two protagonists also rubbed the objects, people and spatial elements with soap and toothpaste. A combination of avant-garde and classical music and an array of additional noises formed the aural backdrop of this disturbing series of actions.1 The story of the first Hungarian ‘happening’ described above, which was organized by artists Gábor Altorjay and Tamás Szentjóby, is the story of a confrontation between the first and second public spheres. Taking place in a house in Budapest in June 1966, the happening comprised a series of carefully orchestrated events with unknown outcomes. Formally titled The Lunch (In Memoriam of Batu Khan) (Az ebéd [In memoriam Batu kán]), the performance was attended by fifty to sixty people.2 As an event, it revolutionized the Hungarian art world, as up until this point most Hungarians had regarded art as a static object of passive spectatorship. In contrast, the happening was undoubtedly a sensory experience, and it paved the way for the event-based art forms that later emerged at the end of the 1960s until the mid-1970s. As intense and chaotic as it was, the happening challenged the notion that art should be in the service of the state’s ruling ideology, a stance that brought it into conflict with the authorities. The first Hungarian happening undermined the Kádár regime for the simple reason that it promoted chaos, while the state promoted (a repressive form of) order. The happening altered space, while

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the state sought an ordered space. In all these ways, The Lunch embodied the opposite of the socialist idea in practice. The happening’s main stylistic motifs of destruction and damage had nothing in common with the optimistic propaganda of the socialist state, with the clarity offered by abstraction, or with the linear structure of future-oriented narratives. Art critics close to the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party thus regarded the happening as illogical, confusing, irrational and mystical, and feared that it might disorient the Hungarian youth who were exposed to it.3 The first public sphere, dominated by party interests, required art that was predictable in its effect, and that reaffirmed spectators’ positions in, and the goals of, Kádárist society. Instead, the happening became a point of reference for the establishment of aesthetic radicalism in Hungarian art: indeed, it was an independent, bottomup initiative that helped to inaugurate a neo-avant-garde. The first Hungarian happening had not followed the Western ‘standards’ of happenings, which had been introduced by the US-American painter Allan Kaprow in Assemblage, Environments & Happenings (1965). In this small booklet, Kaprow stipulated the ideal foundation for happenings, which was that the optimal happening venue should have multiple large spaces that can easily be transformed by the performers, because a single, static site can only fulfil the requirements of a black box’s typical theatre setting. He also expressed the aim of extending the spatial dimension of the happening, to move away from coherent artwork in order to encroach upon life. The physical extension of these constitutive elements might have had the power to generate new, different interpersonal relations. Therefore, a happening’s central concern as conceptualized by Kaprow was to encourage the participants to establish their own connections with the art they were witnessing, and thus to apply the event to their own realities.4 The manipulation of space would help this to occur. Happenings were common throughout East, Central and Southeast Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, taking place in countries such as Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia. The extent to which these events challenged rigid state structures varied from case to case, with some carrying radical messages and others representing minimal, almost invisible challenges to state socialisms and order in general. A happening could aim to change a community, or could serve very personal purposes. Across the Eastern bloc, happenings aimed for therapeutic, energizing, activating effects, and occasionally had political intentions.5 It appears that the happenings across the region, especially The Lunch, not only called standardized aesthetic expectations into question but also confronted the emotional and social conditions in which they had come into being.6 The first

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Hungarian version did so through performative gestures of interruption and chaotic (anti-)structures. And although the organizers of the first happening in Hungary were in 1966 not aware of Kaprow’s formalities introduced for the happening, they worked with participants instead of spectators and incorporated settings that were similar to environments.7 This chapter discusses the first Hungarian happening in June 1966 as the consolidation of the artistic underground. The underground is a reference to the radicalism of The Lunch’s aesthetic dimension, something that had hitherto been non-existent in Hungarian art. At the same time, because the happening took place in a basement, the underground is also an analogy for the situation faced by experimental artists at the time. That this uncompromising neoavant-garde needed to go under the ground, not just metaphorically but also physically, highlights its rejection by the ordered public sphere. A specific reason for the secrecy of the happening was the format of the artistic performance itself. More specifically, the happening, as a manifestation of the international movement towards radical performative art in the post-war era, deconstructed and reconstructed reality with each performative action and transgression of the media it involved. During the first Hungarian happening and the subsequent event-based art practices it inspired, space gained a dual meaning. This transformative form of event-based art was a continuation of the artwork’s expansion into additional dimensions.8 The purpose of the happening was to evoke change, ideally with the participation of the ‘audience’. Most happenings, including those that were initiated by Altorjay and Szentjóby, were based on a concept and a sequence of events which could be modified during the live event. The incorporation of chance, directness and the de-constructivist, a-linear approach were met with mistrust by the ‘socialist’9 authorities in these years of aesthetic-ideological disorientation. In the following chapter, I will provide a detailed description of The Lunch, after which the happening will be analysed as a destructive, overwhelming ritual, with the intention of shedding light on how the conditions of life were manipulated in the ‘socialist’ state. I then shift the discussion towards an exploration of the origins of the happening, which began in poetry and was further developed through Altorjay’s and Szentjóby’s close connection to the Polish avant-garde art scene, the international Fluxus movement,10 and other ‘happeners’, as well as through Altorjay’s and Szentjóby’s encounters with experimental music. After that, I briefly describe the sociopolitical and cultural context within which the first Hungarian happening took place, with special attention paid to how it challenged the Kádárian dictatorship. In the closing section of the chapter, I

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discuss Altorjay’s and Szentjóby’s event-based work from the perspectives of the ordered and the disobedient public spheres. The confrontation between the two positions emphasizes their radical collision.

­Invitation for lunch The Lunch (In Memoriam of Batu Khan) was staged at a house and garden in the first district of Budapest. According to Altorjay’s recollections, which were first published in the journal New Symposium (Új Symposion) in 1968,11 it began at the garden entrance, from where the invited participants needed to find their way into the cellar. This cellar was assumed to have been built in the fifteenth to sixteenth century, and Batu Khan, the Mongol ruler and founder of the Golden Horde, a division of the Mongol Empire, after whom the happening was named, might once have visited the place. From the front garden, an arbour of about 10 metres in length led to the entrance of the basement. At the access point to the arbour, the participants were ‘welcomed’ by a pushchair containing two battered dolls embracing each other. After the guests passed the arbour, they were confronted by Tamás Szentjóby, buried up to his waist in the ground, typing relentlessly on a typewriter. Next to him was a shovel with a rope tied to a dusting rack, and a live chicken sat in a pot fastened to the other end of the rope. Using a string, Szentjóby pulled the chicken-pot up and down. In the meantime, in the background, another pushchair caught fire.12 The next stop at this happening was the dark cellar, where only the glowing lights of huge amplifiers could be seen. After the guests had spent about fifteen minutes fumbling around in almost complete darkness, composer Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960) started playing at a very high volume. Because of the distorted sound, almost no one could recognize the music. In the front area of the basement a table for two had been set up with a tablecloth, vase, and a lunchbox on it. Altorjay and Szentjóby went to the table, sat down on mildewed secession-style chairs. First, they set a bouquet of roses on fire, which provided temporary light. The rest of the basement’s furniture included a big frame, with a fridge to the right of it. Above the fridge, a rusted wheel hung from the wall, and in the centre of the space was a grandfather clock. On both sides of the cellar were boxes full of various items, with a chair in the middle. Another mildewed armchair, with a small pot with holes in it, was fixed on the wall next to the audience. The chicken was tied to a pot lying beside the table.13

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Altorjay and Szentjóby’s outfits were unremarkable: they wore white shirts, jackets and ties, and their heads were decorated with green sunshades. After the roses had been burned, Miklós Jankovics, the third participant and live prop in the happening, turned on the light. The whole series of actions had so far taken place against a very loud, continuous sound backdrop generated by a microphone through a loudspeaker, both of which were kept on until the end of the happening. However, the central element of the happening was the lunch: the meal was a typical Hungarian dish of paprika potatoes (paprikás krumpli). Altorjay and Szentjóby sat down and started to eat, then Altorjay got up and switched the clock on. After some time, he got up again and stopped it.14 This action was repeated many times during the happening. The clock gave out a soft, buzzing tone, and, together with the wheel, it rotated around its own axis. Part of the sound backdrop was formed by the alarm clock ringing periodically. Szentjóby tried to feed the chicken with paprika potatoes, and put the squawking animal close to the microphone. When the chicken’s beak hit the microphone, the loud sound created by the collision was nearly unbearable. After Altorjay and Szentjóby had finished lunch and drunk from a thermos, they grabbed nylon bags and began to throw up into them. Szentjóby then put the chicken into the bag and pulled it over Altorjay’s head. He then beat nails into the dishes they had been eating from. Altorjay fetched two white gloves from a

Figure 2.1  Gábor Altorjay and Tamás Szentjóby, The Lunch (In Memoriam Batu Khan), 1966. Courtesy of the artists.

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box. Jankovics, who was standing next to the frame, was again involved when Szentjóby and Altorjay put the white gloves on him.15 Altorjay then started to smash the table and chairs with a meat cleaver. The protagonists took down a small black handbag from the frame next to which Jankovics was standing. There were two white mice in the bag. They greased it with toothpaste. Altorjay and Szentjóby then handed over the handbag to the audience, at which point the animals escaped and ran among the rows of seating because the participants wanted to get rid of them. Neither Altorjay nor Szentjóby allowed the audience to shake the mice off; again and again, they gave the animals back to the very reluctant guests. Altorjay and Szentjóby turned to Jankovics to fasten a military helmet onto his face, while they were tying him to the frame – again, he was treated like an object.16 At the centre of the chopped table, a kind of sculpture was being erected out of a wheel of a bicycle and rusted scooters. Altorjay and Szentjóby proceeded to rub the entirety of the construction, including Jankovics, with soap, and some of the remaining toothpaste. As the climax of The Lunch approached, a large quantity of feathers of a torn bulge had also been strewn across the installation and over all the protagonists. Altorjay and Szentjóby, accompanied by the chicken, then decorated the whole anti-monument: the protagonists threw feathers at the audience, who threw everything back at them, at which point they repeated the action of the guests. Flypapers were then thrown in the air, while some of the participants in the back rows spontaneously tried to light a fire, an act that Altorjay prevented. In the meantime, Szentjóby prepared gypsum mixed with red and blue. The main target of the gypsum greasing and pelting was Jankovics, but the audience could not escape having it poured over them too, and some hit the walls. The whole cellar floor was by now covered ankle-deep with red feathers. Szentjóby and Altorjay then filled pink-coloured gypsum into a condom; the rubber inflated massively. While this was all going on, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ode to Joy was played at an unbearable volume. The condom, through the gypsum slowly hardening into a firm bar, was bound to a large ring, with a burning candle underneath. The whole spinning object-collage thus hung from the ceiling.17 In the final phase of the performance, Szentjóby continued to create the giant montage. He fixed a number of objects onto the ceiling, the wall, the frame, and even onto Jankovics. Altorjay and Szentjóby treated him like a human prop; he was covered in a huge amount of gypsum powder, and Altorjay tied him even more tightly to the frame. Szentjóby then tore the mildewed chair off of the wall. In the following moments there was an attempt to bind each

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item, the three protagonists, and the audience to each other with ropes. The happening ended with Szentjóby breaking the only bulb with the thermos they used earlier to drink salted water from to vomit. After the bulb broke the cellar fell into complete darkness. Szentjóby and Altorjay then waited silently until the audience started to move. It was impossible to get out though since the basement exit had been blocked by someone in the meantime. Finally, the participants removed the barricade and left the cellar.18

The first happening as a paradigm change in neo-avant-garde art According to Emese Kürti, The Lunch (In Memoriam of Batu Khan) represented a twofold paradigm change in Hungarian fine art and performance art.19 First, it marked a milestone in the intermedialization and processualism of monochrome, static art. The declaration of The Lunch as the first happening in Hungary20 meant that Hungarian artists now joined the international extension of the artwork into space and time; through the happening, Altorjay and Szentjóby encouraged fellow artists to engage with event-based practices in their art. Second, the chaotic nature of the happening shook up the existing aesthetic, cultural and social traditions by temporarily bypassing the ordered public sphere, and by destroying the comfortable aspect of artistic engagement by which a person enters an exhibition space or theatre auditorium as a passive observer. Altorjay and Szentjóby introduced many like-minded colleagues to an art based on event, immateriality and different genre crossovers. The Lunch, Kürti argues, thus paved the way for a liveness and an a-linearity in Hungarian poetry, painting, photography and sculpture.21 The happening sought to evoke many different experiences, but cannot be said to have been a ‘comfortable’ experience in which the separation of artwork and viewer continued to exist and the observer could remain comfortable or passive. It contained no direct allusions to life and politics under the Kádár regime – instead, it brutally shattered the conventions of art production and art perception. Furthermore, The Lunch confounded spectators’ expectations when they underwent a bodyto-body experience. By appealing to each of the five senses, and by destroying the customary behavioural patterns of art consumption, the first happening in Hungary confronted the official public sphere with an alternative public sphere. Most of the components of the performance happened as though they had been sketched in a script.22 Despite the structure, however, a participant might

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have had the impression of disorder as events rushed towards an unknown climax. Although the separation of The Lunch into ‘acts’ is barely possible, a certain cycle of events is perceptible. Most notably, the happening began with a procession from light into darkness, and ended with the cathartic exodus from darkness into light. Observed closely, an emphasis on sharp contrast can be seen in The Lunch. Examples of this include the oscillations between light and dark, and silence and loudness. One of the most distinctive contrasts is between artificial (humanproduced) materials and organic materials found in unrefined forms in nature. Most of the objects arranged in the basement were mounted on the wall; those that were used were subject to corrosion, rotting and erasure. The process of rotting, as represented by the mildewed chairs, might have been intended as an allusion to the fleeting nature of life and to its final stage: annihilation. The confrontation between these extremes and the complete lack of orientation shocked those present. The two main actors elevated the attendees’ senses and tested their powers of endurance. Altorjay and Szentjóby relentlessly tried to motivate their audience to participate more, but the reaction they received was (active) refusal. This refusal may have been due to the audience’s surprise at the events that were unfolding, and total uncertainty regarding how to react to the absurdity of a live, threedimensional (de-)collage. It must also have been extremely disorienting to see how the protagonists pressed ahead in the action with live props, including animals, and even their own assistant. Here too, the rearrangement of spatial elements modified the original purpose of the cellar; the basement was no longer an abandoned space or a storage facility, but acted as the auditorium and stage for an experimental artwork. The cellar was also turned into a site of exhibition built from bits and pieces through the course of live action and as a real-time experience. As in the case of the German artist Wolf Vostell’s Dé-coll/age, by which he meant the deconstruction and reassembling of materials, objects and human beings, the huge installation presented by Altorjay and Szentjóby served the dual purpose of artistic experiment and glorified chaotic art over disciplined aesthetics. The audio experience of the first Hungarian happening was another important structural element. From the audience’s perspective, the sound was unconventional, and sometimes even disturbing, mainly because of the extreme volume and the mixture of contemporary and classical music. Contrast was important in the case of music too, because it maximized the effect of the de-collage. The de-collage’s scope expanded, in the performative sense, from

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material objects to the immaterial sphere. In this way, The Lunch operated at the level of all senses: hearing, seeing, feeling, tasting, and even smell. As was described above, the core event of the happening was the lunch itself. The consumption of food was no longer a regular, necessary ritual of everyday life; instead, it became the core act of the happening – a real ceremony. From the perspective of a ritual that has to be executed properly in order to serve a certain purpose, it is no surprise that Altorjay experienced ecstasy and delirium as though in the stages of a ritual.23 The ritualistic structure seemed to have its analogy in space. The garden served as an introductory venue for The Lunch, as an open space representing a fringe area before descending below the surface. The in-between point of above and below the surface was marked when the audience passed Szentjóby half-buried in the earth of the garden. The typewriter that Szentjóby was relentlessly typing on can be seen as the equivalent of a radical neo-avant-gardist’s samizdat lifestyle24 and may also have alluded to Szentjóby and Altorjay’s transition from poetry to process-based art. The main action of Altorjay and Szentjóby’s piece took place in a historic basement, a location that symbolically exiled radical art-making to under the ground. Indeed, the term ‘happening’ was demonized by party propaganda after the event, and therefore its designated place was the underground.25 The cellar was a hermetic place, beyond cultural awareness and somewhat off the neo-avant-garde map. It was simultaneously mysterious, like the hard-to-decipher characteristics of Szentjóby’s ‘nihilistic’ art, segregated like a creative experiment, and used as a secret vessel for mental as well as physical revelation from the ordered public sphere. In a 1971 interview with László Beke, Szentjóby briefly mentioned that the architecture of the space fundamentally co-determined the happening’s character. According to Szentjóby, the cellar was already compromised as a location of youth organizations and clubs, because these were places where the ‘communist’ authorities were known to have infiltrated. The Lunch was therefore an attempt to symbolically liberate the basement from such ‘burdens’. This liberation was only possible through returning to a moment in time – the Tatar siege of Hungary in the thirteenth century – and finding a vault marked by history. The choice of the venue was intended to bring the audience back to a purer era, long before ‘socialist’ repression. Each gesture, movement and act was attached to the space as well as the objects in and around it.26 To Szentjóby, the happening, in its transitoriness, produced space. After the lunch was finished, the protagonists’ impact on the spatial environment was reminiscent of an unconventional construction site.

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Altorjay and Szentjóby applied the practice of de-collage and de-montage through moving objects and people in the cellar, nailing them to the floor, the wall, or to each other, tying them together, or hanging them from the ceiling. In the final third of the happening, it became clearer that the happeners were building a giant installation. Nailing, fixing and binding thus had an end in the last act, which was to tie everything to everything else. Objects and humans alike were held together with strings and rope in an organic performative monument built from diverse materials and layers. The finale of The Lunch was abrupt, intense and awakening; hit by a new experience on the edge of art, life and destruction, the audience left the scene without resolving the tensions during the happening. The seismic disturbance to the customary way things are may have served as an impulse with which to consolidate the wide spectrum of the second public sphere’s intermedia and performative aesthetics.

On the path towards the happening Before organizing The Lunch, both Gábor Altorjay and Tamás Szentjóby were young poets at the beginning of their respective careers. Szentjóby’s poetry was characterized by the gesture of the here and now, in which time gained dominance over the written word. Because Szentjóby’s poetry was always alive, in action and bound up with the artist’s presence, Ádám Tábor called it ‘happening-poetry’ (happening-költészet).27 Like a number of neoavant-garde artists, Szentjóby came to view text alone as insufficient for instituting social change, coming to prefer physically embodying language. Altorjay found his motivation for ‘turning performative’ in poetry and music. Contemporary French poetry in translations by Sándor Weöres, and the militant communism of author, translator and poet György Dalos influenced Altorjay at the beginning of the 1960s.28 His rebellious and formbreaking ambitions were also inspired by the Circle of Stupid Poets (Buta Költők Köre), a gathering of young Hungarian poets including László András and Zoltán Tárkányi. Art historian Annamária Szőke, like Tábor, defines the Circle of Stupid Poets as an intellectual workshop producing intense, collective and tendentious art production.29 The get-togethers of these poets, including Altorjay and Szentjóby, were far from simple readings. The

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participants developed a format that prefigured slam poetry,30 and applied montage techniques to language.31 The spirit of processualism was planted in this closed circle. In the early 1960s, Altorjay and Szentjóby were frequent guests at László Végh’s apartment in Budapest, one of the first important sites of the second public sphere. Végh,32 as a networker and an experimental music enthusiast, infected the young poets with his passion for extending art into additional dimensions, and merging it with life. Végh’s home was a venue for costumed parties, poetry evenings, lectures and presentations of avant-garde music, and the authors of the earliest pieces of action art in post-war Hungary were Végh himself and members of the circle around him. The relaxed atmosphere and the genre-transgressing attitude at Végh’s set the path of the emerging poets to embodiment and motion.33 Another important stream of inspiration came from Altorjay’s contacts with Western European avant-gardists, and his and Szentjóby’s regular trips to Poland to attend art events of the kind unavailable in Hungary. Altorjay’s correspondence with Wolf Vostell and Dick Higgins, for instance, reflects his interest in happening and Fluxus. While Szentjóby’s letter to Joseph Beuys expresses the artist’s involvement in alternative education.34 The emphasis of the artistic process over the final artistic product, and the schematized or excessive use of everyday actions as part of performative acts, was tempting to a young artist seeking a challenge beyond simply producing predictable, ideological art. Both Altorjay and Szentjóby sketched dozens of planned and realized actions, including action concerts and happenings, and sent summaries of their ideas to influential figures in the (Western) art world in attempts to transcend the borders of the obedient public sphere.35 Altorjay and Szentjóby not only reached out to fellow German and American artists but also to one of the most important initiators of the Central and Eastern  European happening scene, Tadeusz Kantor; indeed, after the first happening, Altorjay and Szentjóby sent summaries of The Lunch to Kantor. Altorjay later met Kantor in person in Cracow in 1967, while Szentjóby was invited to Kantor’s famous Panoramic Sea Happening in August the same year. Following this large-scale event, Szentjóby and Kantor stayed in touch. He also regularly corresponded with the leading experimental art venue, the Foksal Gallery (Galeria Foksal) in Warsaw.36 The network Altorjay and Szentjóby established reached beyond the contours of the ordered public sphere, and crossed the East/West frontier.

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In the creative process that led to the organization of The Lunch, Altorjay and Szentjóby’s Polish contacts were important for another reason. Besides extending poetry into space and time, live action, and a mixture of different media, such as sound, installation and performance, avant-garde music profoundly influenced the happeners. As the thorough research of art historian Emese Kürti has recently shown, this inspiration reaches back to Altorjay’s and Szentjóby’s Polish connections during the first half of the 1960s. Both artists participated in the international Polish festival for contemporary music, Warsaw Autumn (Warsawska Jesień), in 1965. They were inspired by what they saw there, particularly Cornelius Cardew’s homage to John Cage, in which: ‘The sole musician on stage pulled the piano aside, pushed the chair and pulled it back, then rolled the piano farther on.’37 The concert was thus not to be found in the music played on the instrument, but instead in the sounds the objects made in rubbing the floor. Szentjóby even interfered with the musical performance: he bought popcorn in the lobby and offered it to the musicians during the concert on stage.38 To Altorjay, the encounter with this unconventional musical performance felt like a catharsis. It was also a key moment in the development of the new ‘intermedial way of thinking’,39 which would characterize happenings and Fluxus. Kürti’s main argument is that Cage and his circle provided an essential input for Altorjay and Szentjóby to prepare their experimental and Fluxus art.40 Given these circumstances, the aesthetic radicalism of the happening was the next necessary step for these two artists in their decision to leave the linearity and mono-dimensionality of the written word behind. In a draft letter to Wolf Vostell, Altorjay praised the concept of Dé-coll/age.41 Applied to actions, the Dé-coll/age was like an intervention in reality; a twist of the customary. The first Hungarian happening featured the characteristics of an inverse collage, as with its radical reworking of reality, it deconstructed the first public sphere and reassembled it as a second public sphere. The live actions, in which Altorjay and Szentjóby experimented with space and time, did not follow any linear track or logical order, but were a continuation of the two artists’ anti-poetry. The happening crossed many borders, including those of different media, and of the ‘socialist’ state’s toleration. On the one hand, the first happening liquidated the customary modes of perception, while relating to international trends of process-based art. On the other hand, its ritual-like character with the experience of a liminal space provided a reflection on Kádárian society and culture (and existence in general), because the happening highlighted the fact that accepting the status quo was about personal convenience and the avoidance of conflict. To achieve a kind of ruthless awakening, The Lunch praised disorder over a disciplinary order.

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‘Dictated’ thaw The liminal space of the happening and ritualistic character challenged normal human perception. The spatial setting and location were unconventional; there was no clear-cut separation of auditorium and stage; the sequence of events had no rational meaning; there was no causal story line; and spectators were subject to a constant shock therapy caused by the extremely loud sounds as well as what was going on around them. The Lunch’s second public sphere therefore resembled a stern challenge to the attendees’ senses and was both an attack on aesthetic conventions, and a stimulation of meditativeness about the context in which its attendees were living. The year 1966 saw a continuation of the Kádárist politics of differentiation and centralization that had begun in around 1963, and as such, belonged to an era of top-down reform which was still carefully controlled by the party. It was located between the watersheds of the defeated 1956 revolution and Hungarian troops’ involvement (as a Warsaw Pact ally of the USSR) in the crushing of the Prague Spring uprising in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Hungary’s international connections intensified on a number of fronts by 1966, as the country continued to support North Vietnam with aid and loans during the Vietnam War, visa restrictions between Yugoslavia and Hungary were abolished, and the first postwar appointment of ambassadors between Hungary and the United States took place. It was as a result of the Hungarian government’s politics of social and cultural inclusiveness that foreign-language minorities living in Hungary, such as Germans, had their first state-organized events. Art was also used as a means of engaging with the world, as ten centuries of Hungarian artworks were put on display in Paris.42 The general sense in 1966 was that the socialist state was gradually opening up, and to a limited extent this pattern was visible in domestic affairs too. Avant-garde filmmakers such as Miklós Jancsó received more official attention, as their work was included in cinema programmes. The year 1966 also saw official celebrations of the anniversary of the 1848–1849 revolutions within the framework of Revolutionary Youth Days (Forradalmi Ifjúsági Napok).43 This nineteenth-century struggle for freedom from Austrian Habsburg rule was one of the most important events in Hungary’s modern history, and as such, is regarded as a milestone in the creation of Hungarian national identity. It was part of the larger wave of European revolutions in 1848, and sought to secure a declaration of Hungarian independence from the Habsburg Monarchy. The commemoration of this nation-building event had not been welcomed by the communist authorities for almost two decades due to fears that it expressed

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nostalgia for Hungary’s bourgeois past. However, in 1966, the government decided that it was now acceptable for the people to celebrate the milestone. Besides the loosening of cultural restrictions, the period was also marked by social investments; one especially visible example of investment were large-scale housing projects with identical ‘estates’ across the country. Financial reform was another objective pursued by the government that year. A family allowance introduced in the agricultural sector gave reason for optimism among Hungarian citizens,44 and by the end of the year, the 9th congress of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party had finalized the guidelines of a New Economic Mechanism.45 All these events, along with a massive disorientation regarding ideologically correct aesthetic directives for the arts, happened at the peak of János Kádár’s consolidation of power. Although the social and political climate made everyday life more bearable in the socialist dictatorship, and there were even moments of apparent freedom, the reforms had their limitations. No matter how many cultural events were financed by government funds, nor how many international connections flourished by the early and mid-1960s, artistic freedom and experiments were only tolerated up to a point. The provocative aesthetic form of the first Hungarian happening, for example, clearly exceeded what the authorities were willing to tolerate. Gábor Altorjay and Tamás Szentjóby, the initiators of the happening, therefore became subjects of secret service investigation and interrogation.46 Their aesthetic radicalism irritated the regime, while the regime also irritated them.47 As a consequence, Altorjay emigrated to West Germany in 1967, and Szentjóby was later forced to leave the country in 1975. The two artists were among the few neo-avant-gardists who were not willing to make a compromise with the Kádár regime – their art went to the extremes, and thus reached well beyond the approved art of the first public sphere.

The impact of the happening The Lunch (In Memoriam of Batu Khan) represented a paradigm change not only in fine arts and performance but also in terms of what was possible within the political climate from which it emerged. This first happening was a response to an official culture that frowned upon any signs of spontaneity or destructive force, and as such, the happening directly challenged the logic of ‘socialism’. As art historian Klara Kemp-Welch puts it:

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Szentjóby was interested in what he called ‘a kind of parallel process’. The Happening seemed to provide a zone of freedom, avoiding compromised official circuits and flying in the face of the rituals of official culture and the forms of artist/spectator relations they demanded. Szentjóby argued that ‘at the edge of convention, the individual recognizes his own position between the absurdity of the historical past and the possible happening-future.’ He recognizes, in other words, the autonomy of the individual.48

Here, Kemp-Welch touches upon the fundamental considerations in assessing the importance of the first Hungarian happening. From the point of view of the initiators, or at least of Szentjóby, The Lunch created a temporary framework within which the principles of the status quo were suspended. In doing so, the happening provided a transitional forum-space of free, autonomous action, which negated state rules not only on art but on citizens too. Because these rules and party expectations were present in all aspects of social and cultural life in ‘communist’ Hungary, and because many citizens resisted (or did not resist) in their own ways, only the destructive and sobering energies of a happening could awaken people from the vague dream of an unfulfilled yet ‘comfortable communism’. Kemp-Welch also stresses another perspective on Szentjóby, which is that The Lunch eliminated the usual separation of art-producer and art-consumer. Just as a well-functioning public sphere would allow, Szentjóby imagined an ‘interchangeability of dialogue-roles’,49 albeit through doing rather than talking. With his every action between the mid-1960s until his exile in 1975, Szentjóby merged art and life, often in a provocative manner; it is therefore unsurprising that László Najmányi compared his everyday footsteps to a happening.50 Szentjóby respected no rules; instead, he used provocation on every possible front, in his happenings and in Fluxus actions, to break down the barriers of convenience. His event-based art also deconstructed the fixed roles of performer and spectator, as was the case with the first happening. To Szentjóby, the happening undermined hierarchical structures and conventional dichotomies, while at the same time privileging direct, personal and democratic ways of establishing contacts. The aim of the happening was to offer the chance to rearrange the collage at any time.51 The Lunch was thus not just about building a live environment; it was concerned with creating an open space in which many possibilities could unfold. The happening, both in general and in the understanding of Szentjóby, was an active site of participation and production, and as such, it acted as a substitute for a

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genuine public sphere. It was a project that reached beyond simple aesthetic amusement and cut into life. Szentjóby saw in it a forum for the intersection between art and life. The importance of this simultaneity to the artist was revealed in an interview in 2009: ‘The parallel-situation is the complete and simultaneous presence of physical, transcendent and metaphysical realities. It is the consciousness of change – in accordance with each participant’s individual standard freedom.’52 The live environment of the happening allowed all these elements to coexist and intensely unfold in a relatively small physical space. Within the intimate space of the cellar, Szentjóby and Altorjay intended to address the spectators directly, and by doing so, to force them out of their comfort zones. While the constant refusals by the invitees to actively participate suggests that the artists did not fully realize their goal, the devastated expressions on the faces of the spectators as they left indicated that the experience of the happening had been internalized. In many respects, The Lunch therefore corresponded to the catalogue of ideas pulled together by Kaprow. As a series of previously planned actions with unforeseeable outcomes, the first Hungarian happening was also refusing representational aesthetics and the ‘consumption’ of art for art’s sake. Smaller or larger twists in the flow of the action were attempts by the artists to manipulate the behaviour of the attendees.53 Because happenings in general and The Lunch specifically dissolved traditional patterns of perceptions and performer– spectator relations, they (and it) indirectly denied the existence of the ordered public sphere. The happening was not art for art’s sake, but a (de-)collage built from the fundamental components of reality. It appeared along with the newly emerging political and social consciousness of the 1960s, at which time antagonism and refusal were pushing changes in art internationally. For this reason, happenings did not emerge in the art world purely as aesthetic cracks, but rather as activities inscribed into their sociopolitical contexts. They demonstrated freedom of action,54 and accentuated certain aspects of life through rearranging them and presenting a completely different, yet temporary, ‘end-product’ that challenged everyday experiences of art and reality.55 The tools that the happeners applied were inspired by performance, televisualisity, and other trending media, such as radio. This is why The Lunch had a huge effect on all the senses. The combination of the planned, the spontaneous and the random intensified this effect.

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Conclusion The happening was an important part of the genesis of event-based art in Hungary. To László Beke, the first performative artworks of the neo-avantgarde were actions, body art pieces and happenings;56 these works laid the groundwork for the more explicitly performative arts pieces to come in the late 1970s.57 Indeed, there is a consensus that the happening was one of the first manifestations of a performative turn in the art scene of the Kádár era. Although the performative turn in the arts had already occurred internationally before 1966, the confrontation with specialist literature on happenings occurred only after The Lunch took place.58 Strangely enough, Altorjay and Szentjóby borrowed the term ‘happening’ from an article in the official press that discussed the phenomenon in a derogatory tone.59 This text was publicist and critic Mária Ember’s ‘Happening and Anti-Happening’ (‘Happening és antihappening’), which was published in the state-run weekly Film Theatre Music (Film Színház Muzsika) in May 1966. In the article, Ember highlighted the irrationality and ephemerality of the phenomenon in general. She expressed concerns about the happening’s perceived inability to adapt to any kind of system, and its rebellious attitude. Because the happening exerted an effect through scandalizing its audience, the article argued that it absolutely did not educate young people in socially adequate behaviour.60 A year later, the critic and literary historian Béla Pomogáts expressed similar worries about the happening’s effect on youth under Kádárist socialism, arguing that youth falling under the influence of ‘bad hobbies’ will fail to serve a socialist culture.61 The tone of a secret agent’s reports about The Lunch was even more condemnatory, as besides describing the preparations and ‘scenery’ in the cellar in great detail, and providing a list of all the participants, secret agent ‘Mészáros’ seized the chance to elaborate on its harmful effects on youth, and its politically and morally destabilizing impact. According to Mészáros, this disaster of socialist aesthetics could have been avoided by erecting bureaucratic barriers and planting undercover agents in Szentjóby’s intimate circle of friends.62 Although the state did not prevent it from taking place, the presence of secret agents at the first Hungarian happening63 illustrates the entanglement of the disobedient and the ordered public spheres. Despite the fact that the Kádár regime identified happenings, and most of their performative derivatives, as hostile acts hindering socialist progress, a provocative proposition by Gábor Altorjay can be seen as confirming the intersection of the first and second public spheres. Indeed, Altorjay’s statement

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emphasizes the mutual dependency of the disobedient and the ordered public spheres. According to him, The Lunch was a ‘cooperative project between them (the artists) and the Secret Service, without which they would never have been desperate, eager and radical enough to organise such an event – particularly if they had not been under such strong surveillance and control’.64 In a different context, Szentjóby remarked on how much his art had been inspired and fuelled by state interference and monitoring; his answer to the provocation of party measures was provocation through art.65 The deconstructive and upsetting attitude inscribed into the first Hungarian happening thus returns in Altorjay and Szentjóby’s words. The official opinion and state measures governing art direction forced Szentjóby and Altorjay into the unofficial (and doomed) category. Their reaction was rebellious and annihilatory. The Lunch provides a case study of how the Hungarian neo-avant-garde acted upon a powerful impulse to engage with process, and with a combination of diverse media. Both events as a basis for art and intermediality belonged to the second public sphere, and through the first happening they took on an elite position in disobedient art circles in Hungary, which lasted well into the 1980s. The combination of international connectedness, an actionist approach, experimental music and embodied language with its destructive directness created a liminal space that questioned both the sociocultural setting and the aesthetic regime imposed in and beyond the Kádár era. The happening’s live site, with strategic elements of shock and chaos, was intended to awaken the sleeping populace who had come to uneasy but rather somnambulant terms with the general rule. With its intervention in reality, The Lunch transformed the conditions of order and constructed an anti-system that contrasted with the ordered public sphere. It was an indirect yet effective critique of society’s private toleration of the regime, and ‘world order’66 itself. Although it was set up like a ceremony, through its in-between space The Lunch still contained elements of spontaneity and chance that lent it the ability to interfere with real life. The aesthetic provocations carried out by Altorjay and Szentjóby in the late 1960s ushered in a decade of the neo-avant-garde in Hungary. The shock of their audience during The Lunch expanded to the wider art scene and spread through painting, conceptual art, performance and sculpture. The invitation to the happening, which clearly stated that The Lunch was the first such event to be held in Hungary, was a declaration of a new formal language that went hand in hand with a specific lifestyle and artistic attitude. This complex constellation of reflexive art and unconventional ways of living, which inspired the art of

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what I call the second public sphere, is explored in the next chapter through an examination of the artist’s studio as a place of intimacy and community.

Notes 1 ‘The Lunch (In Memoriam Batu Khan). The Recollection of Gábor Altorjay,’ in Zsuzsa László and Tamás St.Turba (eds.), Az ebéd (In memoriam Batu Kán) [The Lunch (In memoriam Batu Kán)], Budapest: tranzit.hu, 2011, pp. 42–44. 2 V-156455 sz. dosszié (‘Schwitters’), Secret Police File, Source: Történeti Hivatal Budapest, pp. 103–113, here p. 104. Available online: http://www.c3.hu/collection/ tilos/103.html (accessed 10 August 2019). 3 Béla Pomogáts, ‘Happening,’ Magyar Ifjúság, 6 May 1967, not paginated. 4 Kaprow, Assemblage, environmentek & happeningek, pp. 54–55. 5 Günter Berghaus, ‘Happenings in Europe: Trends, Events, and Leading Figures,’ in Mariellen R. Sandford (ed.), Happenings and Other Acts, London and New York: Routledge, 1995, pp. 310–388, here p. 360; Pavlína Morganová, ‘Action! Czech Performance Art in the 1960s and 1970s,’ Centropa: A Journal of Central European Architecture and Related Arts, Vol. 14, January 2014, pp. 23–38, here p. 25; Ken Friedman, ‘Fluxus Performance,’ in Gregory Battock and Robert Nickas (eds.), The Art of Performance. A Critical Anthology, New Work: E.P. Dutton, pp. 56–70, here pp. 65–66. 6 Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989, London: Reaktion Books, 2009, p. 249–250. 7 It is especially the activity of participants that was stressed retrospectively by Altorjay. The Lunch worked in a manner to chase the participants into more and more action. That was one of the most intense points of irritation for the party authorities. Gábor Altorjay, email to the author, 11 September 2021. 8 See also: Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, New York: Praeger, 1973. 9 Per request of Tamás Szentjóby the terms socialist, socialism, communist and communism were put into quotation marks in the chapters and sections interpreting his work. 10 Fluxus was an international and interdisciplinary artistic movement of the 1960s and 1970s with a focus on artistic experiment and an emphasis on the creative process. 11 ‘The Lunch (In Memoriam Batu Khan),’ p. 9. 12 Ibid., p. 43. 13 Ibid.

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14 When working the clock showed the passing of one hour just within a minute. Altorjay, email, September 2021. 15 ‘The Lunch (In Memoriam Batu Khan),’ p. 43. Though Altorjay admitted he was unsure of this point. 16 Altorjay stressed the object/victim status of Jankovics and points to his involvement as a passive prop as something atypical to happenings. Altorjay, email, September 2021. 17 ‘The Lunch (In Memoriam Batu Khan),’ p. 43. 18 Ibid., pp. 44–45; with additions and suggested correction by Tamás Szentjóby from 6 and 8 August 2021. 19 Emese Kürti in conversation with Gábor Altorjay. 20 See the invitation card reprinted in Zsuzsa László and Tamás St.Turba (eds.), Az ebéd (In memoriam Batu Kán) [The Lunch (In memoriam Batu Kán)], Budapest: tranzit.hu, 2011, pp. 28–29; this invitation card also mocked the official format of similar printed documents which stated that showing up was mandatory for invitees. According to Altorjay an appeal like this could not be accepted by the authorities. Altorjay, email, September 2021. 21 Kürti, ‘A szabadság anti-esztétikája’. 22 Folder about Gábor Altorjay and Folder about Tamás Szentjóby, material collected by Annamária Szőke, Source: Artpool Art Research Center. 23 Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985. 24 The typewriter was an actual reference to self-publishing since it was the machine on which seven issues of the first Hungarian art samizdat Laura? were produced. Altorjay, email, September 2021. 25 One possible later example was an anti-propagandistic article entitled ‘Happening in the grave’, which was published on the occasion of the chapel studio’s closure. László Szabó, ‘Happening a kriptában,’ Népszabadság, Vasárnapi melléklet, 16 December 1973, p. 1. 26 ‘Beszélgetés Szentjóby Tamással. Hangszalagra vette Beke László, 1971. március 11én,’ Jelenlét, Vol. 1, Issue 1–2, 1989, pp. 252–262, here p. 256. 27 Tábor, A váratlan kultúra, p. 97. 28 Valaminek lenni unalom. Altorjay Gáborral beszélget Szőke Annamária, panel discussion and screening, 13 February 2015, Budapest, Kecske utcai Műteremház, DVD, Source: Artpool Art Research Center. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Emese Kürti, ‘Generations in Experiment: The Cage Effect in the Early Sixties of Hungary,’ in Katalin Székely (ed.), The Freedom of Sound: John Cage behind the Iron Curtain, Budapest: Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, pp. 134–515,

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here p. 149; Katalin Keserü, ‘A nyelv flörtje a művészettel Magyarországon,’ Holmi, Vol. 2, Issue 2, 1990, pp. 1020–1023, here pp. 1021–1022. 32 ‘Actually, a provocateur for the secret police.’ Addition by János Gát, from 31 July 2021. 33 Emese Kürti, ‘A szabadság anti-esztétikája. Az első magyarorszégi happening,’ exindex, 24 August2015. Available online: http://exindex.hu/index. php?l=hu&page=3&id=967 (accessed 31 October 2018). 34 Addition by Tamás Szentjóby from 8 August 2021. 35 Folder about Gábor Altorjay. 36 Kürti, ‘A szabadság anti-esztétikája’. 37 Kürti, ‘Generations in Experiment,’ pp. 148–149. 38 Addition by Tamás Szentjóby from 8 August 2021. 39 Kürti, ‘Generations in Experiment,’ pp. 148–149. 40 Ibid.; Kürti, Experimentalizmus, avantgárd és közösségi hálózatok a hatvanas években. 41 Folder about Gábor Altorjay. 42 ‘Kronológia – 1966,’ Beszélő online, Vol. 2, Issue 8. Available online: http://beszelo. c3.hu/cikkek/kronologia-%E2%80%93-1966 (accessed 10 August 2019). 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Kalmár, Történelmi galaxisok vonzásában, p. 294. 46 Krasznahorkai, ‘Surveilling the Public Sphere’. 47 Katalin Cseh-Varga, Interview with Tamás Szentjóby, 21 August 2014, Budapest. 48 Kemp-Welch, Antipolitics in Central European Art, pp. 106, 110. 49 Jürgen Habermas cited in Ferenc Fehér and Ágnes Heller, Eastern Left, Western Left: Totalitarianism, Freedom and Democracy, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1987, p. 121. ­50 ‘Oral History Kürti Emesének. Beszélgetés Najmányi Lászlóval,’ Wordcitizen’s Virtual Home, 3 November 2011, Budapest. Available online: http://www.freewebs. com/wordcitizen18/interviews.htm#833536937 (accessed 30 December 2018). 51 Dóra Hegyi and Zsuzsa László, ‘Interview with Tamás St.Auby,’ in Az ebéd (In memoriam Batu Kán), pp. 51–55, here p. 54. 52 Tamás Szentjóby, ‘On the Happening (excerpts),’ in Az ebéd (In memoriam Batu Kán), pp. 45–49, here pp. 46–47. 53 Kaprow, Assemblage, environmentek & happeningek, pp. 54–55, 64–67. 54 Henry Martin, ‘Happenings or Dance Happenings or Happening Theater or Theater Happenings or Collage Events or Situations and All the Various Things they have been Called . . . ‘ in Achille Bonito Oliva (ed.), Ubi Fluxus ibi motus 1990–1962, Milan: Gabriele Mazzotta, 1990, pp. 62–66, here pp. 64–66. 55 Günter Berghaus, ‘Happenings in Europe,’ p. 313.

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56 László Beke, ‘The Hungarian Performance – Before and after Tibor Hajas,’ in Igor Zabel, Joseph Backstein, Radislav Matuštík and Jurij V. Krpan (eds.), Body and the East, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999, pp. 103–107, here pp. 103–104. 57 László Beke, ‘Dulden, verbieten, unterstützen. Kunst zwischen 1970 und 1975,’ in Hans Knoll (ed.), Die zweite Öffentlichkeit, Kunst in Ungarn im 20. Jahrhundert, Dresden: Fine Arts, 1999, pp. 212–233, here p. 231. 58 Petra Stegmann (ed.) ‘The Lunatics are on the loose . . . ’ European Fluxus Festival 1962–1977, Potsdam: Down With Art, 2012. 59 Hegyi and László, ‘Interview with Tamás St.Auby,’ p. 52. 60 Mária Ember, ‘Happening és antihappening,’ Film Színház Muzsika, 13 May 1966, p. 18. 61 Pomogáts, ‘Happening’. 62 Kata Krasznahorkai, ‘Codename Schwitters: The First Hungarian Happening in a Secret Agent’s Report,’ Social Art Seminar on Art and Espionage, Lecture, 27 February 2009, Courtauld Institute for Art, London. 63 Two secret agents were present during the happening. One of them left earlier in the performance because he felt sick. Altorjay, email, September 2021. 64 Krasznahorkai, ‘Surveilling the Public Sphere,’ p. 132; Gábor Altorjay makes a remark that in the conversation with Kata Krasznahorkai he only mentioned how precise the description of the agents was. Altorjay, email, September 2021. 65 Cseh-Varga, Interview with Tamás Szentjóby. 66 Expression of Tamás Szentjóby. Addition in the manuscript from 8 August 2021.

­3

Places of Resonance: Artist Studios

The public usually picture an artist’s studio as a space of creation belonging solely to the artist, where their ideas become reality. It is a place of creative refuge, and a venue for the unfolding of inspiration. In the Hungarian neo-avant-garde art scene, like elsewhere, artists’ studios met these expectations. But, they also acquired additional functions, particularly from the mid-1970s onwards. For instance, the studio that sculptor György Jovánovics built for himself in Fillér Street (Fillér utca) in Budapest in around 1975 was both a space for creating artworks and an artwork in itself. At the studio, Jovánovics’s sculpting work was merged with a larger space-construction: wrinkled white surfaces revealed different objects with changes in lighting. The same surface concept determined the studio’s space. Jovánovics’s interest in (optical) illusion was, on the one hand, part of his enthusiasm for experimentation. On the other hand, it was a metaphor for the social and political conditions under which he was working; Jovánovics developed subtle and complex commentaries on marginalized art, for instance, because he often preferred to experiment out of the public eye over a regulated presence at the venues of the controlled public sphere. The artist therefore created a unique spatial constellation built up of physical objects and ephemeral activity. Although Jovánovics, who was very active from the 1960s until the 1980s, focused primarily on sculpture, in the 1970s he became inspired by conceptual art and its immateriality. Indeed, in almost every aspect of his sculpting there is an ephemeral component. This was especially true at the Fillér Street studio, a place where Jovánovics’s photo-works emerged as a result of combining different media such as sculpture, live action, installation and photography.1 While Jovánovics’s building of a studio on his own was a lonely undertaking, in contrast, the Balatonboglár chapel studio created by György Galántai resembled a summer camp for artists and other individuals wishing to experience the intersection of art and life. Run between 1970 and 1973 near Lake Balaton, the

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chapel studio was a site for social encounters and collective creative expression. The abandoned chapel that Galántai had rented from the Catholic Church became a venue for, among other things, neo-avant-gardist performances, spontaneous actions, concerts and curated exhibitions. Not only was it an artmaking location but also it acted as a forum for talking about art and making it accessible to passers-by from the most popular domestic holiday area around Balaton. Galántai intended the chapel studio to be a place where the order of Kádárian culture was temporarily suspended. This neo-avant-garde microcosm lasted for only four summers, though, as the state had shut it down in 1973 due to changes in the political constellation. György Jovánovics’s Fillér Street studio and the chapel studio in Balatonboglár run by György Galántai were both creative spaces specifically designed in opposition to the sociopolitical and cultural order promoted by the Kádár regime. As substitutes for a genuine public sphere, they reacted to both the individual and the collective need for a space for unregulated creation. Both studios, acting as spaces of liminality located between the artist’s life as a public figure and his work as a solitary creator, enabled artistic freedom in different ways. At the Fillér Street studio, Jovánovics could experiment with the application and combination of different media, and with the creation of artworks that challenged human perception. The Fillér Street studio’s existence as a place of lonesome refuge was a reflection on the carefully controlled Kádárist culture, the politics of which Jovánovics did not obey. The liminality of the chapel studio was enacted through different event-based artworks that took place there in the early 1970s, but also through the intense, often collective, experience of how close art and life could be to one another. Not only did minor or sometimes more overtly provocative critique in performances and actions respond to the first public sphere, but the different lifestyle that the collective activities at the chapel studio represented also offered a response to it. This chapter begins by introducing György Jovánovics’s interest in the manipulation of sensual equivalence and the ephemerality of art production in order to demonstrate his subtle and subversive aesthetic reflection on the Kádárian socialist regime. It then proceeds to focus on the camera obscura as the visual template on which he modelled his studio, sculptures and exhibitions. The following section analyses the insertion of Jovánovics’s white reliefs into exhibitions or intermedia artworks as a performative aspect. The Fillér Street studio, a camera obscura filled with content, is then examined from the perspective of sensual manipulation. I also discuss how Jovánovics’s studio’s use of intermedia, an aesthetic attitude of the neo-avant-garde, is central to

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understanding the second public sphere, and how art and life merged into what György Galántai called ‘behaviour art’.2 The second part of the chapter is devoted to Galántai’s chapel studio project. It begins with a discussion about the studio as ‘attitude art’, and as an extensive work of art that continued with the foundation of Galántai’s art archive, Artpool. The central theoretical sections explore the relationships between permanent creation, process-based art, reflections on living under socialist rule, and the first and second public spheres. After this, the chapel studio is analysed as a space of intellectual necessity and as a substitute for an ideal public sphere. Here, I present the chapel studio as an example of the repurposing of space through performative actions with elements of interruption. Overall, the chapter demonstrates how both the Fillér Street studio and the chapel studio in Balatonboglár critically reflected on the marginalized status of neo-avant-garde experimentation and (co)existence within state-socialist structures.

The studio in Fillér Street As an artist continuing the tradition of constructivists such as Lajos Kassák, László Moholy-Nagy and László Péri,3 and as someone who studied and worked in Vienna (1964), Paris (1965), Essen (1971) and West Berlin (1980s), György Jovánovics was interested in challenging and manipulating human perception.4 He did so by integrating diverse media into his artwork and its surroundings. His white plaster stone sculptures (so-called reliefs) can be characterized as threedimensional constructivist paintings, or as knitted wall-hanging draperies. Seen from different perspectives and under different lighting conditions, they suggested different meanings to spectators. This ambiguity defined Jovánovics’s oeuvre in the 1970s, a period in which he addressed dichotomies of truth and fiction, as well as reality and unreality.5 Many of Jovánovics’s installations were constructed of physical materials but had ephemeral qualities; for example, his 1971 installation Construction Pressing into the Ceiling (Mennyezetreszorító szerkezet) was the result of a series of actions captured in photographs. Using only wood and springs, Jovánovics first pushed his chair, and then a table and a newspaper, up onto the ceiling of his apartment. This artwork was itself a piece of conceptual art when printed on photographic paper. Three other artists were also involved in the project: Miklós Erdély, László Lakner and Tamás Szentjóby. All three set up variations of the Construction in their own homes using different objects: Erdély’s construction included an arrow

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and a balance weight; Lakner pushed his hand up to the ceiling, followed later by his favourite György Lukács book, and finally a photograph of his hand bound to the book. Szentjóby’s photo-action installation was the most extreme because it included the artist himself, a Molotov cocktail, a cat and a dog. The cat, which had been sitting on the construction, jumped off when frightened by the dog appearing in the room, before trying to climb up again. When climbing up, the Molotov cocktail shattered on the floor and exploded.6 The installation, in all four cases, deconstructed and alienated the spatial structure of the intimacy of the home. While the conceptual artworks were the resulting photographs that Jovánovics sent to West German artist and author Klaus Groh,7 their construction through action was lacking material structure, and was therefore immaterial. In addition to perception-related experiments, Jovánovics’s artwork also explored the schizophrenic living conditions that characterized Kádárist Hungary, and the illusion that both the population and the art community passively accepted the communist regime. Jovánovics did not directly engage with the politics of the day in the traditional sense, but neither did his ongoing confrontation with the censorship of the Kádárian state leave him unresponsive. He shared a subtle form of criticism of the regime with some of his fellow artists, which sometimes involved using communist symbols and information channels in subversive ways. Most artists knew the bureaucratic apparatus inside out, so they were aware of its weak points. A specific form of subversion was ‘subversive affirmation’, a term coined by the curator and theoretician Inke Arns and the Slavicist Sylvia Sasse. According to Arns and Sasse, ‘subversive affirmation is an artistic/political tactic that allows artists/activists to take part in certain social, political, or economic discourses and to affirm, appropriate, or consume while simultaneously undermining them’.8 For instance, the symbols and rituals belonging to the first public sphere were removed from their original context – then reappeared in the second public sphere with an additional, and sometimes even completely different, meaning. Jovánovics’s subversive artistic approach and reflection on the socialist living conditions targeted the information channels of the authorities. The sound/voice piece with which he opened his 1970 exhibition in the Adolf Fényes Hall (Fényes Adolf terem)9 was one of his most significant artworks, and was simultaneously both fleeting and socio-critical. In it, Jovánovics created an audio recording of a fake radio broadcast praising his controversial oeuvre (as the authorities regarded it), which he played to an astonished audience.10 Jovánovics’s manipulation was successful, as the sound/voice became an essential part of the

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exhibition context and the spatial sculpture. The dual primary motivations of the sound intervention were to experiment with form while protesting against the discrimination faced by abstract neo-avant-gardists – artists who often rejected aesthetic Modernism and were often critical of the socialist dictatorship. Mocking a live broadcast of the state-owned Kossuth Radio with a fake tape was a bold way of providing indirect political commentary. Art historian Dávid Fehér described the intervention as follows: Jovánovics regarded it a pataphysical artwork: an anonymous action the aim of which is not to solve a situation or to revise things, but to highlight certain problems through tiny changes. The invisible unity of action and artwork reflects . . . on the characteristics of a schizophrenic world. I believe that the 1970 action of Jovánovics is a conceptual one and therefore is, trompe l’oeil, a hidden political allegory reflecting on the social milieu. It is a manipulation and, this way, it indicates the manipulation of things, simultaneously ironically pointing out the Hungarian avant-garde’s impossibility to existentially unfold itself.11

This subversive sound intervention was not a simple act of provocation aimed at the communist regime in Hungary. Rather, it enabled the spectator’s metaphorical confrontation with the sociopolitical circumstances and creative ‘amputations’ of the neo-avant-garde. Reality was turned on its head at the moment that

Figure 3.1  György Jovánovics, the opening of the exhibition in Adolf Fényes Hall, Budapest, 1970. Courtesy of the artist.

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Fehér described as the reflection on facts. The pataphysics (patafizika) of the sound/voice piece consisted in its potential to create reality. This temporary selfdetermined reality was a substitute for a restricted reality. Construction Pressing into the Ceiling and the sound intervention at the Adolf Fényes Hall not only demonstrated Jovánovics’s interest in expanding his sculpture into the fourth dimension but also his recognition of the significance of space. To Jovánovics, even photography and his sound/voice pieces12 had a spatial dimension. The First Camera Obscura (Az első Camera Obscura, 1970), for example, was simultaneously spatial and immaterial: in it, a constellation of white curtains, white ropes and a horizontal carved cuboid were photographed through a hole in a piece of cardboard. In the 1970s, Jovánovics concluded that two-dimensional photography could replace three-dimensional sculpture, which is why he deemed The First Camera Obscura, next to the fake broadcast, to be one of his most important works.13 To art historian Márta Kovalovszky, the piece represented ephemerality and temporality. According to Kovalovszky, Jovánovics’s camera obscuras were diminished stages or emptied puppet theatres that the artist slowly filled up with fragmentary objects and figures reminiscent of humans.14 He treated his beloved studio in Fillér Street in a similar manner to how Kovalovszky described the camera obscuras; the studio was like an open space of possibilities, a setting that was home both to physical entities and to ephemeral activities. Jovánovics rarely commented directly on political reality, but, as his interest in the camera obscura shows, he often aimed to create a nonideologized space of constant transition that was obviously distinct from the highly ideologized first public sphere. Just as the pinhole image of the camera obscura appeared from nowhere in a darkened room, the artist used the camera obscura metaphor as a clean setting upon which to build his own parallel neoavant-gardist microcosm. The camera obscura as a motif constantly reappears in Jovánovics’s oeuvre, reflecting his interest in spatial experiments, sensory manipulation and ephemerality. Over the years, he brought these three interests into a harmonic relationship. In his 1980 exhibition at the Budapest-based French Institute (Francia Intézet), Jovánovics achieved a symbiosis of sound intervention, installation, figurative sculpture, camera obscura, puppet theatre, light play and visitor participation. The ambience was reminiscent of a colossal camera obscura.15 The white reliefs, with their crinkled and folded surfaces, their many layers of collage, and their structures that altered in appearance in changing light conditions, brought back memories of movement. The arrangement of Jovánovics’s reliefs also mimicked movement. The composition of the objects

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Figure 3.2  György Jovánovics, The First Camera Obscura, 1970. Courtesy of the artist.

and diverse media maximized the possibilities of the French Institute’s available space16 so that visitors experienced continuous changes in perspective, which turned the show into a set of elements to be embraced performatively.17 Jovánovics’s show invited visitors to participate actively in the creation of space with all their senses. This form of cooperation between the audience and the artwork, which had similarly occurred during the first Hungarian happening in 1966, was an important characteristic of the second public sphere too. Jovánovics developed a method of designing and producing spaces of high complexity. He combined three-dimensional objects, sound and two-

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dimensional photography that extended into the fourth dimension: that of time. In Jovánovics’s oeuvre, where almost every artwork is related to every other artwork, the origin of this complex space was the studio. By contrast, László Beke, who often worked together with Jovánovics and analysed his artworks, thought of the studio as a potential venue for exhibitions.18 While the space in Fillér Street never served this purpose, its form was partly inspired by an exhibition. The hall that Jovánovics built for the 8th Paris Biennial in 1973 provided the ceiling pattern for the Fillér Street studio. This construction consisted of ‘gypsum ribs’ placed at the top in the studio, while in Paris they had been placed on the ground.19 The white reliefs, with their knitted and folded texture and their many layers, determined the atmosphere both of the space at the Biennial and at the studio.20 Jovánovics recycled his white sculptures and the idea of the camera obscura in order to build a large hall, which then became the birthplace of his future artworks. This studio was a place of his own, a continuation of his mission to create another, parallel, sphere for creative freedom. The studio in Fillér Street was akin to a stage that could be filled up with content, either through the process of creating artworks or through the arrangement of different art objects. Among these objects was Liza Wiathruck, a life-sized female plaster mannequin sculpted by Jovánovics. He dressed her in traditional woman’s clothing to resemble a character who had mostly appeared in Jovánovics’s photographic story about her.21 Liza was thus both a fictional figure and a silent companion during the studio’s construction. The sculpture was not only a part of the studio but also, via photography, an instrument through which the artist was able to challenge the perception of spectators. In the photographic sequences Jovánovics made of her, Liza appears as a ghost-like person wandering from place to place. Each photograph in the series picturing her was geometrically composed, mostly with a blurry effect, which meant that viewers of the images could have mistaken Liza for a real person. As the 1970 exhibition opening at Adolf Fényes Hall showed, Jovánovics sought to undermine assumptions of real and unreal, and clearly signposted this when he posed together with the character he had invented. Particularly memorable is a photograph of Jovánovics and Liza playing chess in the Fillér Street studio. The view into the studio is like viewing through the whole of the camera,22 which offers an insight into the work in progress. In Beke’s opinion, the personified mannequin enjoyed the safety of the studio and was subsumed by the environment of production of which she was a part.23 The spatial extension of the studio was ultimately fulfilled through expanding into additional dimensions of reality vs non-reality. Photography and sculptures exhibited elsewhere spread the atmosphere of the studio.

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Figure 3.3  György Jovánovics, Fillér Street studio space, Budapest. Courtesy of the artist.

Jovánovics’s Fillér Street studio was thus a creative ‘container’ of the second public sphere that encompassed the production process, objects, the artist himself and photographic (re)productions of his work. Plasticity and ephemerality played equally important roles in shaping the studio’s space. As was evident in the sound intervention at Adolf Fényes Hall and in the Liza Wiathruck photo series, the many layers of metaphors and allusions that could be packed into a single work of art was often astonishing. Jovánovics’s exhibition at the French Institute in 1980 was another fruitful encounter of diverse production methods and media. The complex code and the combination of different media were

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Figure 3.4  György Jovánovics and Liza Wiathruck in the Fillér Street studio space, 1976. Courtesy of the artist.

representative of the practice of Hungarian neo-avant-gardists more generally. The blend of installation, sculpture, process, photography and conceptualism was alien to the Kádárist state’s approved visual regime, which meant that it was fruitful ground upon which to stage creative dissent. To theatre and media studies scholar Barbara Büscher, who has thoroughly analysed the aesthetic counterculture within the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR), the coexistence and amalgamation of diverse artistic media was a defining feature of the Central European neo-avant-gardist attitude of the 1960s.24 The combination of painting, performance, photography, sculpture, film and so on found in the GDR was open, non-regulated and promoted border-crossings via materials and technology. The same could be said for the neo-avant-garde art scene in Hungary at the same time. Jovánovics’s studio and his exhibition projects, along with his sculptures and installations, can be seen as examples of the productive entanglement of diverse media. In general, intermedia emerges from the mixture and deconstruction of single forms of media, which have been assembled to form a hybrid of all the components. Intermedia is thus not just an in-between

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form of different media but also a single output of (de)construction. As was summarized in Dick Higgins’s essay ‘Intermedia’ (1965), the interlocking of media was particularly significant in socialist states for the important reason that as an artistic attitude, it enabled the artist and those exposed to their work to escape from institutional and bureaucratic constraints. Ignoring borders in a world of boundaries meant greater creative freedom. Tamás Szentjóby, who was very active in the Fluxus art movement, and who co-organized the first Hungarian happening, argued that the attitude of intermediality also expanded into the artists’ (private) lives.25 For instance, László Najmányi pointed out that Szentjóby entering a restaurant could easily be mistaken for a provocative happening;26 in this way, he embodied the complete fulfilment of the (neo-) avant-gardist mindset. Viewed from an abstract perspective, intermedia reflects the logic of the second public sphere. Because intermediality involves the free combination of diverse elements with a fluid balance between them, it models the mechanisms inherent in the ideal type of public sphere. Mobility and accessibility are constituent parts of a democratic public discourse. The nature of both intermediality and the disobedient public sphere are very similar, as intermedia celebrates the artistic experiment, while the second public sphere in socialist Hungary was engaged in subverting the limitations imposed by the guardians of the first public sphere. Jovánovics’s liminal space, as represented by the Fillér Street studio, shared the experimental freedom promoted by intermedia art. Challenging human senses and making subverted, indirect comments on the neo-avant-garde artists’ working conditions were the cornerstones of his project of repurposing space. The camera obscura-like studio was open to any creative expression offering a different perception of state-socialist reality.

The chapel studio at Balatonboglár The chapel studio of Balatonboglár (1970–1973) was perhaps the single most important art project of the second public sphere in Hungary. According to Gabriele Detterer and Maurizio Nannucci, ‘[t]he aim was to create an art venue open to various media, but free from group interests and economic or political concerns; to provide an up-to-date and valid presentation of the then-current developments of Hungarian and international art; and to foster artistic communication independent of the politically-defined world and is indeterminately real and, therefore, liberated.’27 As a vital part of György

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Galántai’s oeuvre and Gesamtkunstwerk, the chapel was a milestone in the evolution of the non-obedient public sphere’s spatial manifestations. To art historian Edit Sasvári, the chapel studio itself was a medium that transmitted artists’ perspectives and aesthetic statements against the restrictions imposed on them by the Kádár regime.28 The activities that took place within and around the chapel can only be understood and reconstructed through understanding a number of key factors: the initial sympathy that local people had for the artists and the project, followed by a series of governmental attacks; the systematic marginalization of the neo-avant-garde; and the international publicity which focused on the venue.29 All these factors influenced the art production and presentation that happened in Balatonboglár. Unlike the Fillér Street studio, the chapel studio was not an isolated undertaking; it had been founded by an individual, but acted as a home for the collective making and display of art. The intersection between life and art, a core part of the (historical) avant-garde’s utopian vision, came into being in Balatonboglár. In seeking to describe this neo-avant-garde microcosm, the term ‘life-form community’ (életformatikus közösség) is appropriate, a phrase first used by author and actor Péter Lajtai to describe the activity at the apartment theatre in Dohány Street. This was a space in which people both performed and lived, thereby blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality.30 Art became lifestyle, and vice versa. Inspired by Lajtai’s description of the apartment theatre, József Havasréti reinvented the notion to apply it to the chapel studio. According to Havasréti, publicness and intimacy crossed over, life was aestheticized, and social reality was treated as a field of art experimentation, all in a commune-like manner.31 To Galántai, the chapel studio emerged not only because of an existential necessity in an overly regulated political system but also as part of a wider vision. For him, Balatonboglár was the starting point of a creative process that resulted in the foundation of the Budapest-based Artpool Art Research Center in 1979: a documentation and research centre for contemporary, mostly nonconformist East-Central European art from the 1970s and other new art movements and directives. The close relationship between the chapel studio and Artpool was also recognized by Jasmina Tumbas, a historian of modern and contemporary art and art theory: ‘At the same time, he [Galántai] viewed his early Balatonboglár Chapel Studio activities and his subsequent work with Artpool as “a unique Fluxus Product”, namely the recognition of art as “an institution-work”.’32 Neither the chapel studio nor the research centre were typical institutions; in the context of Kádárian bureaucratism, both places represented revisions of static institutional structures. Artpool was considered to be an active archive, not a

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simple repository of documents, while the chapel studio, as an anti-institution, changed with each event – similarly to the archive, it was a place of process. Galántai retrospectively shared the Fluxus artist Robert Filliou’s concepts of the permanent artwork, the permanent celebration and ‘The Eternal Network’.33 Processuality was one of the key ideas behind the permanent artwork and permanent celebration, as phenomena of progress and constant change. The 1968 idea of ‘The Eternal Network’ recapitulated the permanent artwork and the permanent celebration, in the words of Roddy Hunter, ‘as a network-as-artwork that could enable collaboration, exchange and dialogue across space and time in the interest of “permanent creation”’. For Filliou, artists rather than institutions are the real creators of art, as they are the ones who keep exchange and collaboration alive. He further saw virtual and physical networking as a natural attitude in the global art world and beyond.34 The idea of ‘The Eternal Network’ not only opposed the binary values and political divide of the Cold War, but could also be applied to certain artworks and artistic events. The chapel studio of Balatonboglár was therefore a project that demonstrated the logic of Filliou’s network. While the chapel had limitations in its ability to bridge space and time, Galántai’s studio was indeed a place of permanent creation. Balatonboglár was a venue where people immediately experienced art; it functioned as a collective where the realization of projects in groups and the exchange of ideas occurred on a daily basis. With its non-hierarchic organizational structure and constant evolution, the chapel studio was a venue for dissent. Among the many different genres and artistic media made and presented in Balatonboglár, event-based artworks were the most important. Artworks that only existed in the moment of their making – and that were the outcome of physical action – did not fulfil the party’s requirement for obedient bodies. As the first Hungarian happening had shown, the authorities feared that they could easily lose control over individuals’ service in support of the socialist goal. It was no coincidence that a condemnatory article about the chapel studio was published in December 1973, entitled ‘Happening in the crypt’ (‘Happening a kriptában’),35 with a reference to the alleged shamefulness and hostility of the happening-like art events taking place at the chapel. While the reception received by a painting could be regarded as more or less predictable, the effects of performances and actions were almost impossible to foresee, which was another reason why the authorities often treated event-based art with extreme caution. Performance operates like a form of communication in which the spectator needs to interact with the space, performers, other participants, and the message of the performance. This experience is likely to be more intense than

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the predictable act of viewing an image. During the liminality of a performative event, the ongoing feedback loop interferes with the spectator’s individual, historic and cultural context.36 The (co-)presence of bodies and the performer’s suggestiveness in communication with others were cornerstones of a second public sphere in Hungary that was difficult to regulate and which, through its very existence, obstructed and challenged the first public sphere. In presenting her concept of the performative democracy, sociologist Elzbieta Matynia argues that certain forms of ephemeral, bodily practices which lay beyond the party’s control were able to enact a form of democracy. Gatherings of people for whom performing became a part of everyday life at venues such as the apartment theatre in Budapest’s Dohány Street ensured a ‘vital experience of the public’.37 This (non-obedient) public sphere had both aesthetic and affective dimensions, exerting an immediate effect on those taking part in event-based artworks.38 The destructive happenings of Gábor Altorjay and Tamás Szentjóby and actions consisting of simple poses by György Galántai in Balatonboglár, to give just two examples, each showed the existence of a public through body, space  and time. Speaking generally, a rather intimate public sphere exists between performing and observing/participating bodies, and in the whole atmosphere of such an event. But, as theatre studies scholar Christopher Balme states, the exterior of this intimate relationship is just as much part of theatre’s (and performance’s) public sphere.39 This explains why the social and political context of the Kádár era resonated in processual artworks. That resonance functioned the other way around too, as, according to Balme, a performance can also be an agent of a ‘wider public discussion and liberation’,40 which reaches beyond the intimacy of its direct space and time. Because the Hungarian neoavant-garde was a group culture comprised mostly of well-connected smaller communities, the performative (second) public sphere could easily have broadened. To the party, these performance characteristics represented a major threat to its authority. Galántai selected the site of his future studio almost by accident. Initially, he had searched for a mill to serve as his studio. Unlike a mill, to him the chapel was only a tiny space at the edge of intimacy. Despite its new role under Galántai, the chapel retained some of its religious character, and visitors often felt a certain sacredness when they were in it. It acted as a space for people to come together and share in a way reminiscent of a co-presence during a religious ceremony or ritual.41 To Galántai, the chapel represented a felesleges tér (superfluous space),42 not necessarily in terms of physical need, but from the perspective of intellectual need, as it had to be discovered, produced and kept. This sort of space only

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serves a purpose if one feels pressure, or feels paralysed or oppressed. Those who recognized the importance of felesleges tér and used it as an intellectual refuge might have enjoyed a more liberated self-perception than those lacking a similar space at their disposal. If several people with such self-perceptions were to gather and constitute a community (of exchange), then in the view of Galántai, that occurrence would have exceptional value to society as a whole.43 A community built on the grounds of self-perception could (by definition) not be subject to hierarchy and control. If the second public sphere was a substitute for an ideal (Habermasian) public discourse, the felesleges tér fulfilled the intellectual and creative needs that the venues of dictatorship could not. György Galántai’s goal in creating the chapel studio was to bring artists together; to build a community of creative individuals to whom official exhibition sites were either inaccessible, or unchallenging to their creativity. The chapel studio was by its very nature emancipatory and open to bottom-up participation. In this way, it represented a complete opposite to Kádárist politics. In Balatonboglár, a balance was struck between lasting and fleeting moments. There, conventional and innovative presentations of neo-avant-garde art and inventive art production coexisted with documentary methods. Despite the presence of material artefacts, it was the act of appropriating space that made the studio an exceptional art venue. Taking possession of the chapel as a collective space through performative gestures was the most vital and expressive strategy of artists working in a non-obedient public sphere whose actions reinvented the sacred space. Balatonboglár was thus a place of an ‘absolute break with . . . traditional time’, a site where time was experienced ‘in its most flowing, transitory, precarious aspect’.44 Process-based art had created a counter-universe where live artworks were temporary and suspended the dominant official space and time by creating a felesleges tér through collective effort.

Performing the chapel On 2  July 1972, sculptor Gyula Gulyás performed Direction-Showing Action (Irányjelző akció). Three sequences staged for the camera show how Gulyás and four other individuals positioned themselves in relation to an L-shaped white stripe painted on the entrance floor outside the chapel. The first photograph shows Gulyás lying on the stripe having adjusted himself to the geometric shape. The second image is also of Gulyás, standing on the L, his gaze directed above, straight into the camera. The first and second photographs were shot by

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György Galántai from above. The third image is of Gulyás and the four other men standing on the outer rim of the strip, again with a direct look into the camera. Direction-Showing Action was a minimalist and conceptual body art piece addressing the problem of the relation between geometrical abstraction and the environment. The juxtaposition of the human body to the simple two-dimensional shape, on the one hand, reinforced the tension between the organic and schematic. On the other hand, both the organic and the schematic corresponded with each other: the momentary pose adopted by Gulyás and his companions was as static as the stripe itself. Standing still, their lingering in the paused moment was both an interruption and a glimpse. Direction-Showing Action might have been an analogy for the second public sphere as an exception to the party’s attempt to foster a homogeneous culture.45 The moment of pause and pose was also present in György Galántai’s Sign Action in the Chapel (Jel ackió a kápolnában, 15  August 1972).46 Immediately after an exhibition in the chapel, a white square still remained on the floor. Galántai spontaneously interpreted the square as a sign and used it for a ‘sacred and contextual’ photo-performance.47 Similar to Gulyás’s piece, in Galántai’s the relation between the human body and a two-dimensional geometric shape was revealed. Sign Action is preserved in two photographic images. In the first

Figure 3.5  György Galántai, Sign Action in the Chapel, Balatonboglár, 15 August 1972. Photograph by György Galántai. Courtesy of the Artpool Art Research Center – Museum of Fine Arts.

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‘scene’, Galántai cowers in a white square form, his hands clutching his legs. In the second scene, he is lying on the floor with his legs out straight while his hands form a line horizontal to his body. In this latter posture, the artist’s head rests on one corner of the white square. The first sequence was the contextual action; the second was the sacred. One possible interpretation of the first conceptual photo-action is that the crouched body expresses desertion and the feeling of being committed – mental torments that many individuals experienced in the Kádár era. In contrast, the second pose was much more open as, with an open-armed gesture, Galántai beckoned to the camera. It was no coincidence that his whole bearing, including the position of the head resting on the square, reminded viewers of the crucified Jesus. Indeed, the white quadratic shape could even have been a possible allusion to the aureole in Christian symbolism. If this was a reference to the crucified Christ, considering the site where the intervention happened, then the second part of Sign Action also contains indications of solitude and the feeling of being extradited. Galántai succeeded in bringing together the sacral and non-human dimensions of the chapel with the neo-avant-garde’s experimental actionism and conceptualism. The work can also be read as drawing an analogy between the precarious situation of the second public sphere’s art and the Catholic Church’s conflict with the socialist authorities. While Gulyás’s and Galántai’s minimalist actions were reticent and indirect examples of the neo-avant-garde’s position in between toleration and prohibition, many of Gyula Pauer’s works in the 1970s openly dealt with manipulation as a condition of everyday life. This was a topic he dealt with at the chapel in Flyer Action (Röpcédula-ackió, 2 July 1972): At that time, I [Pauer – K. Cs.-V.] produced flyers. Miniskirts were the prevailing fashion and a young girl bent down to pick up a flyer from the floor. She was photographed from behind when picking up the flyer, so one could see her bottom in underwear. She could not lift it, because it was glued to the ground. So, these pieces of paper were not real flyers, but slips of paper stuck to the pavement and to the street. People were busy scratching them up, although they did not represent anything.48

­ auer’s action, leaving its profound sexism and voyeurism aside, turned a P routine, unimportant action into art. As with other artworks he made during that period, Flyer Action was based on delusion. Flyer Action is only intelligible through reference to Pauer’s concept of the PSEUDO (PSZEUDO). For Pauer, PSEUDO as a form, methodology and

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philosophy was a framework for the creation and presentation of art. It described a kind of art that reflected on the manipulations with which people in Hungary had to live. Artworks produced with the PSEUDO motto simultaneously affirmed and denied their subject.49 Because the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party constantly purported how socially and politically conscious Hungarians should live, and set the conditions for artistic expression, Pauer’s understanding of manipulation can be interpreted in this context. For example, the First Pseudo Manifesto (Első Pszeudo Manifesztum, 1970) refers to ‘manipulated existence’ (manipulált egzisztencia), a possible allusion to the ordered public sphere’s stifling attitude. Ideological constraints and expectations constituted a (pseudo) reality with an inevitable echo in avant-garde art. PSEUDO gave Pauer a way to respond to the contradictions of the regime under which he worked. The message of the Second Pseudo Manifesto (Második Pszeudo Manifesztum, May 1972) was more radical than that of the first: ‘IF YOU ARE MANIPULATED, MANIPULATE BACK! . . . Through PSEUDO you can realize that what is sold to you as art is actually a means through which a power economically and ideologically manipulates’.50 As he had in Flyer Action, Pauer directly addressed the individual, his tone urging them to mobilize and not to remain paralysed by forces of order. His aim in the Second Pseudo Manifesto was to turn spectators into doers; to transform voyeurism into action. Mobilization, when not serving the communist purpose, was met by the authorities with understandable suspicion. In Flyer Action, Pauer attracted the attention of visitors to Balatonboglár with flyers. Flyers also happened to be the most common means through which the state distributed propaganda and promoted its regime. Many passers-by guessed that the leaflets might contain something worth looking at, and those who managed to pick them up from the ground were surprised to see that the white sheets only included a small image (Pauer’s miniature black-and-white selfportrait) and a short label (‘PAUER:PSZEUDO 1971, BOGLÁR’).51 Although the information on each piece of paper was minimal, it gave hints that could be used to interpret Flyer Action: the place and time of the action, the artist’s name, and the creative concept. The goal was for visitors to notice the leaflet and pick it up. Flyer Action, however, captured the moment in which those bending down realized that they were being fooled. Pauer thus exploited people’s curiosity with a small, almost invisible act of interruption in the flow of everyday life. This minor manipulation, understood in the context of a society-wide manipulation, was a reference to how the Kádárian regime exploited the people through presenting false or misleading information.

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Manipulation, like the appropriation of space and the act of posing, also formed part of the photo-action Space Confusion (Once we went) (Egyszer elmentünk, May 1972). The subjects of this series of poses in the chapel and its surroundings, captured as photographs, were the bodies of the participants. Space Confusion was a spontaneous, playful collaboration between Miklós Erdély; architect, painter and graphic designer Tibor Gáyor; György Jovánovics; graphic designer, painter and film director Dóra Maurer; and Tamás Szentjóby. Carrying a camera, they drove from Budapest to Balatonboglár where they shot a series of thirty-six photographs.52 Both the photographs and the initiators’ memories suggest that the poses and actions at the chapel were unplanned, simply cheerfully and spontaneously emerging.53 The artists took snapshots of bodies while they were moving, with the chapel and its surroundings in the background, thus creating images of blurred bodies floating in the air. Other photographs showed individuals posing in natural surroundings or inside the chapel; sometimes they were even playing around with objects in unusual ways. Referencing the chapel’s original function, Maurer and her collaborators also commented on Catholic iconography. For instance, they took photographs of Maurer imitating the Madonna, while Jovánovics, Gáyor and Szentjóby represented the saints surrounding her. A different parody, in cheerful response to the artists’ highly ideologized context, was of icons of communist ideology, including Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin (Jovánovics, Gáyor, Erdély, Szentjóby).54 Here, the four artists’ poses referenced countless photographic and painted reproductions of socialism’s four founding fathers. The most-cited photograph of Space Confusion was an ad hoc composition that played with optical illusion. The piece explored aesthetic manipulation by testing photography’s potential as a medium of fiction and reproduction. The poses adopted by Jovánovics, Erdély, Gáyor and Szentjóby appeared to defy gravity: the first three were pictured standing horizontally on, and next to, the vertical front wall of the chapel, while Szentjóby was shown reading a book whilst horizontally floating in front of a bush. Playing with human perception and the use of illusion was a common aesthetic practice in the second public sphere (most notably in the works of Jovánovics and Pauer). Along with spontaneity, deception was a popular tool of creative critique. The neo-avant-garde attitude evoked the ad hoc production of artworks because most contemporary non-realist artists did not accept the order and rigidity that the party wished to impose upon them. From the perspective of the party, the actions at the chapel studio were creative disruptions. Inspired by conceptual art or by an interest in expanding fine art into new dimensions, these actions transformed the studio into an event

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Figure 3.6  Dóra Maurer, Space Confusion (Once we went), (photo-actions), Balatonboglár, 1972, participants: Miklós Erdély, Tibor Gáyor, György Jovánovics, Dóra Maurer and Tamás Szentjóby. Photograph by Dóra Maurer. Courtesy of the Artpool Art Research Center – Museum of Fine Arts.

site that never lacked an audience. With the co-presence of performers and spectators, each spontaneous or planned action became a collective experience that threatened the party’s social control. The solitude of the studio as a place of pullback was no longer valid; instead, the studio’s embryonic public sphere offered a refreshing refuge from order and discipline. With each pose, each attempt at manipulation, and each playful act of spontaneity, performing artists invited the attendees of the Balatonboglár summer programme to be part of an artwork in progress.

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Figure 3.7  Dóra Maurer, Space Confusion (Once we went), (photo-actions), Balatonboglár, 1972, participants: Miklós Erdély, Tibor Gáyor, György Jovánovics, Dóra Maurer and Tamás Szentjóby. Photograph by Dóra Maurer. Courtesy of the Artpool Art Research Center – Museum of Fine Arts.

Besides an interest in aesthetic manipulation, spontaneity and different uses of  the body, the artists at Balatonboglár also had another mission: to guide visitors’ transitions from spectator to participant. The event series organized by Gyula Pauer and Tamás Szentjóby, DIRECT WEEK (DIREKT HÉT, 6–9 July 1972), was dedicated exclusively to this neo-avant-garde project. Szentjóby remembered the preparations as follows: With this [the notion of the DIRECT WEEK – K. Cs.-V.] we wanted to express that we do not intend to create an indirect relationship between the audience and the artwork, but to develop a direct link between the two. With this we understood – living in an image-destructing environment –, with this we wanted to achieve that the artwork does not become isolated from the audience and that no contemplative meaning, indirect relationship arises, but everything which belongs to this framework should unite as an organic whole. This is how we summarized the basic idea and multiplied it with the help of a typewriter. After that we sent it to those, of whom we thought that they might want to participate in this direct mission.55

­ he diverse programme, which included László Beke, Miklós Erdély, conceptual T artist Péter Legéndy, and Endre Tót, mostly combined conceptual and event-

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based art. The main theme of DIRECT WEEK was immediacy – the direct encounter and engagement between artwork, artist and spectator. Szentjóby and Pauer curated the events around different artistic positions of directness because they ‘intended to provoke the inhibited, introverted way of thinking’.56 Pauer, Szentjóby, and like-minded artists had become irritated with the comfortable distance between the production of art and its presentation. The intention of DIRECT WEEK was therefore to destabilize naturalized behavioural patterns. To the authorities, this approach had similar dangers to those posed by PSEUDO’s call for mobilization. Besides the co-presence of artists and visitors, the most intimate and effective form of directness is that of interaction and intervention. The spectator’s experience is more intense if she/he is actually part of the production process. Events during DIRECT WEEK included a film montage workshop outside the chapel with screenings afterwards, and Péter Halász, a member of the apartment theatre collective, sitting in front of the chapel’s door polishing the shoes of visitors while singing improvised songs.57 On a different occasion that was not part of DIRECT WEEK, painter and graphic designer Péter Türk invited visitors to Balatonboglár to participate in a mental experiment that exploited the chapel’s spatial potential. In Question Mark Experiments (Kérdőjeles kísérletek, 15  August 1972), Türk made white sheets of paper on which he printed/drew red question marks, placing these within and around the chapel. The unexpected presence of these question marks encouraged spectators to speculate on their meaning. Galántai took photographs documenting the action and helped Türk to find ideal spots to place the sheets of paper with the signs. The two artists placed the question marks in a straight row following a path, then placed the flyers off the path. Finally, the question marks wandered to Türk’s body, as he was lying on the ground. The question marks also popped up on a stone cross outside the chapel, where the artists had decorated the chapel’s arching from left to right before the signs were finally hidden in the bushes.58 This piece formed part of a body of work inspired by conceptual art. In the 1970s, Türk dealt with visual analysis on a semantic and logical level.59 The interrogation mark was a clear reference to existential questions, but could simultaneously refer to the questions asked by individuals about what they experienced in their day-to-day lives.60 Similar to Pauer’s flyers glued to the ground, Türk’s question marks filled the space and motivated passers-by to pause for a moment and to wonder. They challenged them to try to figure out what the intervention was about, and then to think more deeply about their own situation. The question mark, in Türk’s view, had the potential to open up a debate

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Figure 3.8  Péter Türk, Question Mark Experiments, Balatonboglár, 15 August 1972. Photograph by György Galántai. Courtesy of the Artpool Art Research Center – Museum of Fine Arts.

going beyond the sign printed/drawn on the sheet of paper. Instead of providing explanations, Question Mark Experiments allowed many interpretations of its motivation and meaning(s). To both Türk and Galántai, the production process was an essential part of the action. Along with the process, Türk’s body was just as much a part of his artwork. When assembling his flyers, Türk identified with the signs and became a carrier of them. Question marks ‘occupied’ the space and the surroundings of the chapel. Within and outside the building, they formed different paths. Getting spectators to follow a route consisting of question marks was a risky

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undertaking, particularly as the authorities might have concluded that Türk was encouraging questions about living in a hegemonic culture, or about how people could resist their ordered environment. Indeed, the question mark could be seen as a tool of subtle criticism in a controlled society.

Conclusion The chapel studio of Balatonboglár hosted encounters between art producers, art theoreticians and art enthusiasts, and thus operated as a place of physical and  intellectual contact. Simultaneously acting as a necessary space and as a felesleges tér, it created an active place of process that, despite continuous visits from, and insults by, the (secret) police, secured its own temporary independence. The event-based artworks discussed above can be said to have represented a counter-universe, a rupture, within Kádárian Hungary, created through moments of pause, playful manipulation, spontaneity and active participation. In a community that embodied processual art as a way of life, ephemerality was both a creative approach and a survival strategy. The fleeting nature of actions was interrupted by both poses and the photographic gaze. Through action and reaction, these process-based pieces maximized the chapel studio’s spatial potential. In the predominantly experimental, minimalistic actions that occurred there, an atmosphere was created which both made the imagination of Galántai’s networked, communicative attitude a reality, and met the ‘requirements’ of the second public sphere. The second public sphere’s spatial constellation also included places of creation that were closely tied to the personalities and creative intentions of the artists who inhabited and designed them. In his Fillér Street studio, for instance, György Jovánovics built a site of intellectual refuge that doubled as his own micro-universe; Galántai, by contrast, shared his creative vision with others in an attempt to live as part of a collaborative community in an ‘eternal network’. Yet these two spaces had in common that they were both reactions to the ordered, prescribed vision that the state persistently tried to impose on artists. In their own ways, the two spaces were each designed as rebellions against the established order. Because the most important component of an artist’s studio is the artist, it is impossible to separate the physical space from the personae and lifestyle of its occupant. Indeed, the art of the second public sphere not only resided in artworks but also in artists’ ways of living and attitudes. To Galántai, the second

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generation of the Hungarian avant-garde practised and lived forms of behaviour art (magatartás-művészet) ‘that resisted the “socialist” aesthetic norms’.61 Galántai preferred the term behaviour art over that of neo-avant-garde because he saw the former as more inclusive. Galántai regarded not only non-figurative art as avant-gardist but also event-based tendencies, Fluxus and conceptual art. What is important about the term ‘behaviour art’ is that it describes art as a ‘matter of attitude’,62 a position that neo-avant-gardists adopted to distance themselves from the state’s Kádárian socialist doctrine. Opposing the aesthetic regime imposed by authorities made those who did so appear heroic and exceptional, as Beáta Hock has correctly observed.63 A look into the structure of artists’ creative environments, without overestimating the extent and effect of criticism in neoavant-garde art practices, helps to reveal how they ignored or provoked specific behaviours in Kádárian Hungary. To avoid obedience, neo-avant-gardists continually reinvented themselves and the spaces in which they acted, which is why their (life)styles, career paths and projects changed frequently throughout the Kádár era. They often wandered from space to space in search of sites where they could stage exhibitions and other kinds of art events, as well as be inspired creatively. Although the ideal, or simply just the available spaces, were almost always run by the party, neoavant-gardists did not shy away from reinventing those official sites for their own purposes, as the following chapter explains.

­Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

7

László Beke, ‘Liza Wiathruck Berlinben,’ in László Földényi F. (ed.), Jovánovics, Budapest: Corvina, 1994, pp. 62–64, here p. 62. György Galántai, ‘Resistance as “Behavior-Art”: The Dissident Hungarian AvantGarde,’ 1999, paper circulated by the Artpool Art Research Center. Márta Kovalovszky, ‘Jovánovics György,’ in Zoltán Hafner (ed.), Jovánovics, Budapest: Corvina, 2004, pp. 26–41, here pp. 30–33. Péter Sinkovits, ‘Fénnyel rajzolt szobrok. Jovánovics György kiállítása Székesfehérvárott,’ Művészet, Issue 8, 1985, pp. 37–40, here p. 37. Hegyi, ‘Neue Identität in der neuen Situation,’ p. 281. György Jovánovics, ‘Mennyezetreszorító szerkezet, 1971,’ Labor C3, Budapest, October 2007. Available online: http://labor.c3.hu/jovanovics-gyorgymennyezetreszorito-szerkezet-1971/ (accessed 28 September 2017). Klaus Groh (ed.), Aktuelle Kunst in Osteuropa. CSSR, Jugoslawien, Polen, Rumänien, UDSSR, Ungarn, Cologne: Verlag M. Dumont Schauberg, 1972; Klaus Groh-

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Collection, Material related to the preparations of Aktuelle Kunst in Osteuropa, Forschungsstelle Osteuropa, University of Bremen. 8 Inke Arns and Sylvia Sasse, ‘Subversive Affirmation: On Mimesis as a Strategy of Resistance,’ in IRWIN (ed.), East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; London Afterall, 2006, pp. 444–455, here p. 445. 9 The Fényes Adolf Hall in Budapest was an exhibition venue where, from 1954 onwards, alongside the important official shows of the Kunsthalle (Műcsarnok), so-called self-financed (önköltséges) exhibitions could take place that did not (exactly) follow the aesthetic requirements set out by socialist rule. That said, the self-financed exhibitions also had to go through the administrative procedure of applying for a permit. After the jury’s approval, artists could legally print their own promotional materials, such as catalogues. This context was provided by Júlia Klaniczay upon reading the first version of the present manuscript in 2018. 10 Dávid Fehér, ‘Bábú és illúzió. Bátortalan közelítések Jovánovics Lizájához,’ Enigma, Issue 68, 2011, pp. 5–41, here p. 6, emphasis in the original. 11 Ibid., pp. 7–8. 12 Kovalovszky, ‘Jovánovics György,’ p. 31; Katalin Cseh-Varga, Interview with György Jovánovics, 16 September 2014, Budapest. 13 Cseh-Varga, Interview with György Jovánovics. 14 Kovalovszky, ‘Jovánovics György,’ p. 33. 15 Sándor András, ‘A láthatatlan exsztázis szobrásza egy új kőkorszak hajnalán. Jovánovics György műveiről,’ in László Földényi F. (ed.), Jovánovics, Budapest: Corvina, 1994, pp. 21–29, here pp. 24–25. ­16 György Jovánovics, ‘Relief – rajzolás árnyékkal,’ in László Földényi F. (ed.), Jovánovics, Budapest: Corvina, 1994, p. 87. 17 Dávid Fehér, ‘Az értelmezés terei 2. Jovánovics György és Sassetta a Szépművészeti Múzeumban,’ Enigma, Vol. 18, Issue 66, 2011, pp. 63–83, here p. 74. 18 Beke, ‘Liza Wiathruck Berlinben,’ p. 64. 19 László Beke, ‘Jovánovics – az első évtized,’ in László Földényi F. (ed.), Jovánovics, Budapest: Corvina, 1994, pp. 29–32, here p. 32. 20 Gábor Andrási, ‘Turner fagylaltja. Jovánovics György színes reliefjeiről,’ in László Földényi F. (ed.), Jovánovics, Budapest: Corvina, 1994, pp. 128–129, here p. 129. 21 Beke, ‘Liza Wiathruck Berlinben,’ p. 62. 22 Ibid. 23 László Beke, ‘Liza Wiathruck in Berlin,’ György Jovánovics. Ausstellung im Künstlerhaus Bethanien April-Mai 1983, Berlin: Künstlerhaus Bethanien, 1983, pp. 5–7, here p. 7. 24 Barbara Büscher, cited in Angelika Richter, ‘Artistic Collaborations of Performing Women in the GDR,’ in Katalin Cseh-Varga and Adam Czirak (eds.), Performance Art in the Second Public Sphere: Reflections on Event-Based in East, Central and

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26 27 28

29

30

­31

32 33

34

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Southeast Europe under Late Socialism, London and New York: Routledge, 2018, pp. 219–235, here p. 221. IPUT (Tamás St.Auby), ‘Fluxus – Kunst – Leben – Politik/Fluxus – Art – Life – Politics,’ in Petra Stegmann (ed.), Fluxus East. Fluxusnetzwerke in Mittelosteuropa [Fluxus Networks in Central Eastern Europe], Berlin: Künstlerhaus Bethanien, 2007, pp. 95–110, here p. 104. ‘Oral History Kürti Emesének’. György Galántai and Júlia Klaniczay (eds.), ARTPOOL: The Experimental Art Archive of East-Central Europe, Budapest: Artpool, 2013, p. 23. Edit Sasvári, ‘A balatonboglári kápolnatárlatok kultúrpolitikai háttere,’ in Júlia Klaniczay and Edit Sasvári (eds.), Törvénytelen avantgárd. Galántai György balatonboglári kápolna műterme 1970–1973, Budapest: Artpool-Balassi, 2003, pp. 9–38, here p. 37. Gábor Pap, who at the beginning of the 1970s was an art historian at Hungarian Television (Magyar Televízió, MTV), brought TV staff from West Germany to Balatonboglár to shoot documentary scenes from the chapel studio. According to Galántai’s recollections, West German television broadcasts were quite often watched by audiences in the GDR. As a consequence, the number of East German tourists visiting the studio grew. György Galántai, email to the author, 17 November 2017. ‘Darabok, dokumentumok tomaj,’ DOCPLAYER. Available online: http://docplayer. hu/8508537-Darabok-dokumentumok-1971-tomaj.html (accessed 22 November 2017). József Havasréti, ‘Széteső dichotómiák. Klaniczay Júlia – Sasvári Edit (szerk.): Törvénytelen avantgárd. Galántai György balatonboglári kápolnaműterme 1970–1973, Artpool-Balassi, 2003. 459 oldal, 4500,- Ft,’ Holmi. A folyóirat online kiadása, October 2004. Available online: http://www.holmi.org/2004/10/ havasreti-jozsef-szeteso-dichotomiak-klaniczay-julia%E2%80%93sasvari-editszerk-torvenytelen-avantgard-galantai-gyorgy-balatonboglari-kapolnamuterme1970%E2%80%931973 (accessed 22 November 2017). Jasmina Tumbas, ‘“International Hungary!” György Galántai’s Networking Strategies,’ ARTMargins, Vol. 1, Issue 2–3, 2013, pp. 87–115, here p. 102. Galántai, ‘Hogyan tudott a művészet az életben elkezdődni?’, p. 54; the English translation: György Galántai, ‘How Art Could Begin as Life? Supplement to the Boglár story,’ Artpool. Available online: http://www.artpool.hu/boglar/project/ (accessed 10 July 2018). Roddy Hunter, ‘Beyond “East” and “West” through “The Eternal Network”: Networked Artists’ Communities as Counter-publics of Cold War Europe,’ in Katalin Cseh-Varga and Adam Czirak (eds.), Performance Art in the Second Public Sphere Reflections on Event-Basedin East, Central and Southeast Europe under Late Socialism, London and New York: Routledge, 2018, pp. 19–31, here p. 22.

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35 Szabó, ‘Happening a kriptában,’ p. 1. 36 Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetic, London: Routledge, 2008. 37 Matynia, Performative Democracy, pp. 8–19. 38 Janelle Reinelt, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere for a Global Age,’ Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, Vol. 16, Issue 2, 2011, pp. 16–27, here p. 18. 39 Christopher Balme, cited in Khalid Amine, ‘Re-enacting Revolution and the New Public Sphere in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco,’ Theatre Research International, Vol. 38, Issue 2, July 2013, pp. 87–103, here p. 87. 40 Christopher Balme, The Theatrical Public Sphere, p. 201. 41 Cseh-Varga, Interview with György Galántai. 42 The term was coined by polyartist Miklós Erdély, originally educated as an architect. Zoltán Sebők, ‘Erdély Miklós-anekdoták,’ Presentation at the Magyar Képzőművészeti Egyetem, Budapest, 5 June 2008. Available online: http://catalog. c3.hu/index.php?page=work&id=4&lang=EN (accessed 27 May 2015). Here, the Hungarian version of ‘superfluous space’ is preferred over the English expression, since the English expression would be misleading. ‘Superfluous space’ was in Galántai’s understanding full of meaning and purpose. 43 Cseh-Varga, Interview with György Galántai. 44 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,’ Architecture/ Mouvement/Continuité, October 1984 (‘Des Espace Autres,’ March 1967, translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec), http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1. pdf (accessed 24 November 2017). 45 See more: Katalin Cseh-Varga, ‘Documentary Traces of Hungarian Event-Based Art,’ in Promote, Tolerate, Ban: Culture in Cold War Hungary, Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2018, pp. 83–94. 46 The artist has more recently referred to the action as ‘meditation and selfsacrifice’ and ‘sacred signs in desacralized space’. Júlia Klaniczay (ed.), A Muhina Projekt. Létértelmezések Galántaqi György életművében [The Mukhina Project: Interpretations of Being in György Galántai’s Oeuvre], Budapest: Vintage Galéria, 2018, p. 31. 47 Ibid. 48 Gyula Pauer, cited in Balatonboglári kápolnaműterem. Available online: http://www. artpool.hu/boglar/1971/710702_p.html (accessed 27 November 2017). 49 Gyula Pauer, ‘Első Pszeudo Manifesztum,’ October 1970. Available online: http:// www.pauergyula.hu/kepzomuveszeti/pszeudomunkak/manifesztum.html (accessed 27 November 2017). 50 Gyula Pauer, ‘Második Pszeudo Manifesztum,’ May 1972. Available online: http:// www.pauergyula.hu/kepzomuveszeti/pszeudomunkak/manifesztum.html (accessed 27 November 2017).

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51 Gyula Pauer, cited in Balatonboglári kápolnaműterem. 52 Information on the number of images differs. In a catalogue on Dóra Maurer (Dóra Maurer: Traces 1970–1980 published on the occasion of the project Context of Space: The Contemporary Hungarian Scene, 14 November–23 December 2011, Bunkier Sztuki, Krakow) there is information on twenty-five photographs, while the Artpool Art Research Center Maurer file has twenty-nine images. 53 Interview with Dóra Maurer by Edit Sasvári, recorded on video tape, Source: Artpool Art Research Center, 1998. 54 Ibid. 55 Tamás Szentjóby, cited in ‘“DIREKT HÉT” kiállítás,’ Balatonboglári kápolnaműterem. Available online: http://www.artpool.hu/boglar/1972/720706. html (accessed 27 November 2017). 56 Gyula Pauer cited in ibid. 57 György Galántai, ‘“DIREKT HÉT”,’ Balatonboglári Kápolnaműterem. Available online: http://www.artpool.hu/boglar/1972/720708_ggy.html(accessed 28 November 2017). 58 Péter Türk, ‘Kérdőjeles kísérletek, Elévülési akció,’ Balatonboglári Kápolnaműterem. Available online: http://www.artpool.hu/boglar/1972/720815_tk.html (accessed 29 November 2017). 59 ‘Bio / CV. TÜRK Péter (1943–2015),’ VINTAGE. Available online: https://vintage. hu/artists/contemporary/turk_peter/turk-peter-2 (accessed 30 December 2020). ­60 Július Koller, cited in Kathrin Rhomberg and Roman Ondák (eds.), Július Koller: Univerzálne Futurologické Operácie, Cologne: Buchhandlung Walther König, 2003, pp. 136–137. 61 Galántai, ‘Resistance as “Behavior-Art”’. 62 Ibid. 63 Hock, Gendered Artistic Positions and Social Voices, p. 183.

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Official Venues, Semi-Official Art: Party-Run Locations

The Kassák Club (Kassák Klub), a Budapest-based, government-sponsored club mainly comprising students and artists, was home between 1969 and 1990 to a folk-dance group, contemporary music performances, fine art exhibitions, children’s programmes, film screenings and event-based art.1 Between 1969 and 1972, it also hosted a theatre collective that was later forced to move into an apartment on Dohány Street, which staged avant-garde theatre and performance productions.2 This collective, initially known as Kassák House Studio (Kassák Ház Stúdió), and later as Kassák Theatre (Kassák Színház) or the apartment theatre (lakásszínház), broke with the representative mode of presentation, which was common at the time. More specifically, the group rejected rational narration and linear storylines by creating situations in which, for instance, the same role was played by different performers and multiple actions happened simultaneously, and its performances included surrealist scenes and pop effects. Further, its communication emphasized performativity and radical corporeality over simple symbols, metaphors and the coded language of conceptual art.3 In their performances, the members of the Kassák House Studio did not follow the performance styles of most other groups, which tended to be orderly and predictable. Rather, each action by an undisciplined body constituted a performance involving bodies communicating with each other. The performances staged by the Kassák House Studio are examples of the innovative work of artists who expressed individual opinions (and often engaged in political dissent) while simultaneously using state facilities to help produce their art. This chapter explores the ways in which neo-avant-gardists assigned new functions to state-run locations, which differed from and were often opposed to the sites’ original purposes. By focusing on a selection of performative and intermedia artworks at artist clubs, university clubs and exhibition spaces, all of which were controlled and supported by government machinery, the chapter

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will investigate the role of creative exchange and interaction as important constituents of the second public sphere. The discussion will also demonstrate how those who reinvented state-run sites also succeeded in introducing modes of communication that helped to circumvent and undermine the state’s censorship of culture. Alternative communication, as a core component of behaviour art, was praised by, among others, the author, stage designer, artist, performer and film director László Najmányi. Najmányi believed that the arts are important in and of themselves, but also because they spark intellectual exchange: ‘Conversations following these events [Tamás Szentjóby’s performances – K. Cs.-V.] were actually our university.’4 Indeed, throughout the second public sphere, intellectual exchange fuelled art production and was inextricably linked with the radical, negating the lifestyle that he and artists such as Tamás Szentjóby practised. The ‘art of conversation’ and the ‘art of correspondence’,5 terms borrowed from Najmányi, laid down the foundations of a non-obedient public sphere based on creative exchange and the accumulation of information. This chapter begins with a discussion of the term ‘neo-avant-garde’, which  contextualizes the movement within the artistic environment of East and Central Europe during the communist era. Earlier, I described the Hungarian neo-avant-garde as representing a crossing of art into life, and also as an art that challenged form and was genuinely critical of hierarchies: social, political and cultural alike. In this chapter, the focus turns to how the neo-avant-garde struck a balance between official and non-official structures of culture, arguing that the activities and products of the movement are best understood as ‘semi-official’. To demonstrate this, I will focus on the two IPARTERV exhibitions, which were organized at a state-run architecture bureau in 1968 and 1969. This case study explores the performative encounters between artist, artwork and spectator as offering an alternative mode of communication to the state-sanctioned communication of the time. Because both of these shows were ultimately shut down by the authorities, the artists had to develop new strategies with which to communicate and share their works afterwards. Due to the more or less direct appeal of the IPARTERV exhibitions in creating a (semi-)public space for showing neo-avant-garde art, nonconformists had no choice but to adapt to political realities by adopting nuanced strategies. After the failed attempt of the IPARTERV artists to secure public acceptance for the autonomy of experimental art, Hungarian neo-avant-gardists by necessity became more tactical and inventive in re-functionalizing official venues.

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After investigating the story of IPARTERV and its aftermath, I will examine the institutional framework of university and artist clubs as temporary meeting places for cultural dissenters. The Kádárian government, in order to prevent direct challenges to socialism, partly opened up its state-run venues for closely observed artistic experiments. A number of examples from the programmes offered by the Budapest-based Bercsényi Club and the Young Artists’ Club illustrate the existence of alternative communication through multiple media, oral/sound transfer and physical contact. These events and artworks that were staged and shown at the clubs demonstrate how another type of public sphere inscribed itself into a regulated yet more tolerant environment, subverting the intended ideological purposes of official spaces as it did so.

Situating the Hungarian neo-avant-garde Edit Sasvári has described the most fruitful years of the Hungarian neo-avantgarde, the period between the second half of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, as having three key characteristics: a new generation of artists, she argued, became engaged with improvisation, interaction and the aestheticization  of social life.6 All three criteria appear to have been vital in creating alternative sites for the presentation of art. Improvisation reflected the spontaneous nature of pop-up exhibition sites; interactions occurred through breaking down the traditional barrier between artists and art ‘consumers’;7 and the aestheticization of social life was visible in subversive practices, commentaries and the refunctionalization of everyday environments and circumstances, thus furthering the ‘de-bourgeoization’ of art. Based on these criteria, neo-avant-garde art can be understood as an artistic attitude that was experimental and radical in both form and content. The neo-avant-garde was typically critical of traditional society and culture, and approached its critique of both with a desire to innovate and provoke change. Because of this critical attitude and radicalism of form and content, the neoavant-garde mostly existed on the peripheries of official culture. The attribute ‘avant-garde’ refers to a creativity that is genre-comprehensive. It does not accept that art needs to be a privilege; instead, it argues that art should be an integral part of everyday life. Artistic creation is capable of bringing social and political change because of its potential entanglement with people’s lives. Indeed, the dual political and social awareness of avant-garde art was one of its two most important features; the second was its openness to experiment in both aesthetics

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and form. While the historical avant-garde brought image-poems and kinetic sculptures in the 1920s and 1930s, in the 1960s and 1970s conceptual art, happenings, performance art, Fluxus and mail art emerged.8 Being an avantgarde artist meant being critical – of traditional art genres and their mode of presentation, but also of the social and political constellations that hindered free art-making. The ways in which political and social awareness manifested and the modes of experiment and critique employed differed from case to case. Scholars have debated which umbrella term best describes the nonconformist art of the 1960s and 1970s in East, Central and Southeast Europe. In addition to neo-avant-garde, the art of the second public sphere has been referred to by many other terms since its appearance, ranging from lawless avant-garde9 to non-censored culture,10 sudden culture,11 the art of the Grey Zone,12 to unofficial art.13 In most scholarship the term ‘neo-avant-garde’ is preferred, though the term tends to be employed in one of two distinct ways. The first use of the term has more condemnatory overtones, as it characterizes the neo-avant-garde as an imitation and instrumentalization of the avant-garde. Meanwhile, the other understanding of the neo-avant-garde praises its (political) courage in artistic experimentation. A famous representative of the first direction is Peter Bürger, according to whom the historical avant-garde emerged in the aftermath of the First World War; it challenged the autonomy of art in the bourgeois society, and critically addressed art as an institution. The neo-avant-garde, by contrast, institutionalized the avant-garde and, Bürger argues, thereby negated the genuinely reflexive and revolutionary intentions of the original avant-gardists.14 Indeed, for Bürger, the term ‘neo-avant-garde’ represents the ‘betrayal of the utopian project’. He proposed that the artists of the 1960s degraded ‘strategies and gestures of the historical avant-garde’, and implemented them ‘within the institution of art’.15 The discussion around terminology was intense even at the time of the emergence of the term ‘neo-avant-garde’. In Hungary, traditional art historical scholarship has generally followed the line of the first use of the term mentioned above, as it has tended to discredit new avant-garde tendencies. The book Sign and Scream: On the Questions of Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde (Jel és kiáltás. Az avantgárd és a neoavantgárd kérdéseihez, 1971) by literary historian and critique Miklós Szabolcsi was influential when experimental art emerged in Hungary. In it, Szabolcsi, like Bürger, described the neo-avant-garde as an imitation of the historical avant-garde – without the latter’s original qualities.16 Although Szabolcsi, along with art historian, networker and curator László Beke, worried about the adequacy of the term ‘neo-avant-garde’,17 Bürger’s

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condemnation of the term has only limited validity in relation to Central Europe. Despite sharing strategies and characteristics with those Western artists whose art Bürger’s criticism originally targeted, and others elsewhere, neo-avant-gardists working in socialist states had their own unique visions, artistic strategies and characteristics. Also, the relationship of East-Central European experimental art to the (state) institutions of art in the Soviet zone of influence differed from the equivalent relationship in Western countries. Most significantly, the production of art under East European socialism was determined by political directives rather than by the art market. What did exist in Eastern Europe, as the case studies in this chapter will demonstrate, was a unique version of ‘the institution’s provocation with its approval’.18 While Bürger criticized the Western neo-avantgardists’ institutionalized critique of art infrastructure, experimental artists in state-socialist contexts subverted the original purpose of the state institutions in their countries. Approval in the latter case more closely resembled a temporary toleration. In cases where the provocation went too far, Hungarian neo-avantgardists often had their proposals for artistic productions dismissed by the communist bureaucracy, at which point they were forced into the unofficial, but mostly semi-official, realm. Among area studies scholars focusing on the post-war avant-garde in the Eastern bloc, there are more supporters of the view that the neo-avant-garde’s dissenting was actually (heroically) disobedient. According to art historian Piotr Piotrowski, the Central European neo-avant-garde dissociated itself from partydictated socialist realism and argued for artistic autonomy.19 The characteristics of the critical yet modern art they championed differed from country to country, and the movement’s approach towards politics was similarly varied.20 Miško Šuvaković shares this view; according to Šuvaković, neo-avant-gardist art had a critical view of modernist industrial culture, as the latter had established hierarchic and hegemonic structures that affected the identity, function and position of artistic practice. These norms and parameters were not conducive to autonomous art-making. Šuvaković further describes neo-avant-gardists as being just as excessive, experimental, emancipatory and utopian as their ‘predecessors’ from the 1920s and 1930s. Constructivism or surrealism, like many other -isms from historical avant-gardes, reappeared in different iterations in the art of the 1960s and 1970s throughout the Eastern bloc. Šuvaković argues that the distance between progressive artists in the 1920 to 1930s and those in the 1960s to 1970s was not significant, and that connections were occasionally made.21 Hungarian neo-avant-gardists, for instance, developed a reflexive relationship towards the historical avant-garde. Experiments with form, a political purpose, a utopian

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attitude and the entry of art into life were all features of the historical avantgarde’s mission that later re-emerged in the neo-avant-garde across Central and Eastern Europe with techniques of re-appropriation which could not be described as imitative.22 Neo-avant-garde art in Hungary first appeared around the mid-1960s, and continued through the 1970s. Beáta Hock thought of it as ‘non-representational, abstract modes of expression’ with little or no ‘social orientation’.23 In responding to Hock, it is quite understandable why many artists in socialist states might not regard the prospect of social and political engagement as appealing. Many neoavant-gardists simply did not want to conform to the socialist vision of the artist, whose officially sanctioned aim was to shape proletarian culture. Also, the neoavant-garde in Hungary was limited to a small group of fellow artists who were familiar with each other’s work, and had access to a well-established network that often reached beyond state borders. Because of the restricted reception and presentation of artworks, many neo-avant-gardists were forced to form intellectual circles of trust, and to act as art scholars or appointed theoreticians.24 These communities were discursive in a complex way, as their language was accessible only to the privileged few who knew how to decode it – which is one of the reasons why the authorities identified avant-gardist behaviour and art as a political threat.

Unofficial and semi-official art Because it was politically misunderstandable, and its form and content were socially sensitive, often provocative, or even simply genuinely critical, the Hungarian neo-avant-garde and its conditions of production and distribution were located in the grey area between a complete rejection of the artistic conventions and dictates of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (thus, as unofficial art) and efforts by the artists to exert more creative freedom within the system (as semi-official art). This ‘categorization’ of whether neo-avant-garde belonged to the unofficial or the semi-official sphere was basically determined by its distance from the core gatekeepers of cultural politics in the country at that time, and the flexibility of neo-avant-garde art’s adaptation to the rules of art regulation. In most cases, the neo-avant-garde art in Hungary could either be completely unofficial or semi-official, and the extent of the presence of compromise or balancing acts determined which form it took.

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Unofficial art, in the strict sense of the term, was art produced and distributed beyond party control, independent of the infrastructure and the aesthetic patterns of communism. Creating this kind of art was the ideal of the artistic underground because doing so did not involve a reliance on statesponsored facilities, or a need to follow the requirements of a rational, positive and pro-state artistic model. This defiant artistic attitude was rare in the Kádár era. Besides shows and events in private homes, the land art activity of the collective Pécs Workshop (Pécsi Műhely) was a significant example of the practice of unofficial art. The Pécs Workshop was defined by erecting artificial and geometric materials in a natural context that already showed traces of human intrusion. More specifically, the group chose abandoned industrial sites or rural regions shaped by forestry, to create a contrast with the abstract forms the artists placed in these environments, in order to highlight the tension between neo-avant-gardist creation and socialist destruction.25 Because most of the collective’s artwork in the early 1970s was created in nature, outside the infrastructure of the state, the work of the Pécs Workshop fulfilled the criteria of ‘unofficialism’. In Hungary during the Kádár era, almost all artists were members of the Artist’s Union, or of artists’ studios or clubs. Not only was it a party requirement for artists to belong to such bodies but also membership provided a modest degree of financial stability and, in the case of the studios, a forum where the artist could socialize and present their works to a limited public. Given the importance of these formal networks and venues, in Kádárian Hungary there were only rare instances of unofficial art. Meanwhile, semi-official art referred to neo-avant-gardist art-making that did not refuse some financial, infrastructural and institutional backing from the state. Those who produced it might have been critical of censorship, and of the state’s bureaucratic measures against experiments in art, but they also recognized that survival as an artist required some degree of interaction with the state: for example, by accepting jobs directly from the party. A similar logic was at play when artists came to choose where to present their artworks. Instead of an outright rejection of official artistic institutions and spaces, most artists who sought to undermine the state did so by producing works that challenged the aesthetic code of socialism, but which were simultaneously exhibited within the state’s official art infrastructure. The two IPARTERV shows together represented a wellknown example of this kind of semi-official art, situated between the first and the second public sphere.

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The exhibitions IPARTERV I. and II. The Budapest-based neo-avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s was rarely able to present its creations at completely unofficial sites, such as in rural locations, on the streets, or in private housing. This meant that its art usually appeared in state-run venues because those were the most accessible spaces for neo-avantgarde artists. This access varied based on the recent tendencies in censorship and also on the geographical location of the show within the country; for example, museums and galleries outside the Hungarian capital, in places such as Székesfehérvár or Pécs, had much greater leeway in decision-making.26 Budapest remained the lively centre of exhibitions – featuring venues at which to encounter and discuss up-to-date art currents – but at the same time, it was the scene that was always hit first by government censorship. Contemporary non-realist artists experienced twofold frictions. On the one hand, they felt an impulse to explore innovative tendencies from within and beyond the Iron Curtain; for instance, Hungarian neo-avant-gardists were attracted by the Western event-based artworld’s announcement of the death of institutions standing for a conservative understanding of culture.27 On the other hand, they also had to accommodate the fluctuating waves of prohibition and tolerance in Hungary. The triumphal procession of conceptual art, performance, intermedia, Fluxus and abstract art was not unconditionally accepted by 1966–1968.28 Overall, the exhibition strategies of neo-avant-gardists were undoubtedly affected by these two factors. In order to bypass censorship as much as possible, artists facing the struggle on two fronts described above applied sophisticated methods of organization to put their work on show. They chose sites and exhibition formats that either did not require permission, such as those lasting no longer than three days,29 or that were not officially regarded as exhibitions at all. The list of venues and show formats was impressively long, consisting of exhibitions financed individually/partly by an artist or a group of artists, as well as shows taking place in locations such as factories, firms, canteens, libraries and even hospital basements.30 Hungarian neo-avant-gardists did their utmost to turn their backs on the classically dictated parameters of art display; if they had the chance to influence the place of exhibition, then they favoured experimental, uninhibited and (semi-)autonomous sites. An additional reason to prefer a certain location was that the art objects arranged there could shake up the clear division of roles between artwork–spectator–artist.

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The organization of the two IPARTERV (INDUSTRYPLAN)31 group exhibitions in 1968 and 1969 was partly a consequence of the state of play at a time when political directives about ideologically correct progressive art had not yet been clearly defined. This was the main reason why neo-avant-garde experiments could flourish. Beyond the political/politicized context, indirect institutional criticism and experiments with challenging space structures for exhibition purposes were equally important. The IPARTERV shows’ lineup, performances, action art, sculpture, painting and installation all met international standards of contemporary art, even though they were taking place at a state-run facility. IPARTERV I. and IPARTERV II. were both organized (without prior permission) in the events hall of the Enterprise for Industrial Architecture Design, the acronym of which was IPARTERV. The curator of both exhibitions was art historian Péter Sinkovits, who at the time was a fresh graduate (1967) of Lóránd Eötvös University (Eötvös Lóránd Tudományegyetem). He came up with the idea of using this particular exhibition venue because at the time, he was employed at the architecture bureau of IPARTERV in Budapest’s inner city. The event venue was located in the basement.32 To György Jovánovics, who participated in both shows, the extent and arrangement of the site was impressive: it featured walls of black paraben, no windows and a dominance of wooden material. Four wooden stairs connected the entrance area with the main area, which was covered with parquet flooring. The most important features of the event hall were that it was a huge, single, undivided space and that it was ideally lit, with numerous lamps.33 Combined with the art objects, the spatial structure increased the dramatic atmosphere of the exhibition.34 The drama of the shows continued when both of them were closed by the authorities after only a couple of days because of the aesthetically provocative artworks on display. IPARTERV I. was shut down after three days following an inspection by the Lectorate of the Fine and Applied Arts. As the curator remembered, the director of the IPARTERV bureau was irritated by the ‘occupation’ of the space by artists and wanted it to be cleared for trade union meetings.35 The realization of IPARTERV II. was partly hindered by the popularity of the first show and by the involvement of a suspicious jury appointed by the Lectorate.36 Suspicion of the artists involved in the IPARTERV exhibitions grew with the illegal publication of the catalogue dokumentum 69–70 (document 69– 70) in 1970. The works of artist János Major and Miklós Erdély, printed in the catalogue, were ‘politically mistaken [by the police]. Major’s graphics contained anti-Semitic allusions, while Erdély’s piece was understood as a reference to the

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politically taboo topic of Transylvania, where Hungarian minorities lived.’37 Alongside Major and Erdély, painter Tamás Hencze was also punished with a three-year travel ban. Art historian Dániel Véri argues that as in Major’s case, the police could not, or would not, decode the sharp and subversive satire as it had been intended by the artist.38 The goal of the IPARTERV shows was to highlight the most up-to-date, internationally recognizable art tendencies in Hungary at the time. These progressive representations of figurative and non-figurative art39 did not belong to the officially approved artforms. Since Sinkovits suspected from the beginning that a show containing works inspired by pop art or happenings would not easily get past the censors,40 he found ways to avoid as much of the admission procedure as possible. Part of this avoidance tactic was Sinkovits’s selection of the venue itself. The architecture bureau’s events hall was an unconventional choice because it was not among the state-operated exhibition sites. IPARTERV I. and II. represented one of the first significant attempts to co-opt official space, and significant bravery and risk was involved in doing so, as the premature closure of the shows and the retaliatory steps by the authorities following the publication of the catalogue prove. Having taken place in 1968 and 1969, the IPARTERV illustrate why neo-avant-gardists needed to develop and refine their semi-official artistic communication in order to ‘survive’ in the politically sanctioned environment of the time. Simultaneously, the shows may have taught the communist authorities a lesson: that a limited toleration of experimental art should be established in order to prevent aesthetic radicalism from becoming too extreme and from overtly challenging communist rule (i.e. spilling from the artistic into the social/political realm). IPARTERV I. and II. gained iconic status not only because they met the three neo-avant-garde ‘criteria’ – improvisation, interaction and the aestheticization of social life – but also because they included art from all the important contemporary movements, including abstract expressionism, pop art, new figuration and informal and folk art, alongside conceptual art, action art, happenings and Fluxus. In this sense, they reflected a range of achievements in the form of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde’s responses to these artistic tendencies, and laid out a path for further developments in each of these forms of expression. All the artworks presented at both shows were simultaneously linked to internationally recognized, trending art forms, as well as to the conditions under which they had been produced. Not everyone saw the exhibitions in a positive way, however. For example, Lajos Németh, one of the most influential art historians and art critics in Hungary of the 1960s and 1970s, did not

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recognize in IPARTERV a uniquely Hungarian, but internationally relevant art. To him, the neo-avant-gardists exhibiting at the shows were at first glance ‘uncritical imitators and cliché-makers of the fashionable international trends’.41 The ephemeral and live pieces that formed part of the programmes of the two IPARTERV shows also belonged to these ‘fashionable international trends’, and created suggestive (spatial) situations of interaction between the artist, the artwork and the spectator. The IPARTERV I. and II. shows featured interactions in which the artist, spectators and the artwork continuously changed roles. Harald Szeemann’s landmark exhibition Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (1969, Kunsthalle Bern) is likely to have had an important influence on how interactivity and event found their way into the exhibition space at the time.42 At the core of When Attitudes Become Form was the principle that it was not the product of art itself which became the artwork, but the attitude of the artist.43 Each element of the Bern show thus went beyond the object, as artists attempted to create situations rather than just artefacts. This denudation of the art production process, along with the presence of bodies and human movement, turned the exhibition from being purely a static, intellectual experience into a transitory and sometimes physical one.44 The spirit of this concept, which was already in the air in 1968, possibly served both as an inspiration and as confirmation to some IPARTERV artists that they should use the space as a site of presence and exchange. As György Galántai had called neo-avant-garde behaviour art, it was the interactive attitude that made these particular exhibitions a live experience. The artworks’ compositions suggested a new, unconventional perception of space that turned the IPARTERV event hall into a gigantic installation: ‘Alone the glossy colour surfaces of the painting, the gypsum fragments cutting into space with the self-consciousness of a marble statue, the strange view of mysterious and aggressive objects pending below the ceiling shocked the general conception of an exhibition.’45 Many artworks exhibited at the IPARTERV shows questioned the function and structure of the (politically instrumentalized) traditional exhibition space. Gyula Konkoly’s Bleeding Memorial (Vérző emlékmű), for example, was a part of IPARTERV II. that challenged the concept of space itself as a fixed, static structure. Further, Bleeding Memorial, which was a human-sized block of ice sprinkled with permanganate crystals and covered in gauze and cotton wool, redefined simple three-dimensional artworks and broke with materiality. While in the process of melting, the ice block dripped a red fluid onto the floor. While it slowly disappeared and transformed, Konkoly’s sculpture expressed two

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Figure 4.1  Page 33 of the catalogue Iparterv 68–80, Iparterv, Budapest, 1980.

melancholic fundamentals of life: transitoriness (the melting) and pain (the red fluid, an obvious reference to blood). In its resemblance to an ‘open wound’, the statue reportedly disgusted and surprised attendants at the 1969 show.46 The sculpture quite explicitly commemorated the revolution of 1956. As art historian Géza Boros argued, the red-coloured liquid referenced the bloody strike-down of the reform movement and the date of the exhibition opening (24 October 1969) overlapped with the anniversary of the 1956 events. To Boros Bleeding Memorial represented one of the rare instances of the neo-avant-garde’s straightforward political statements.47 But beyond the uninvited comment on a suppressed history, and maybe the suppressed status of the art of the second public sphere, Bleeding Memorial certainly represented a turn towards process and de-materialization. A disappearing sculpture required a different reception to a permanent statue. When observing the passing of time and the constant

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change of the material up close, Bleeding Memorial was perhaps an initial step towards converting viewing into doing. The intellectual challenge that guided much of the content of the IPARTERV shows – to cross the boundaries of space and time – was also evident in György Jovánovics’s monumental sculpture Lying Figure (Misery) (Fekvő figura [Baj]), which was a central part of IPARTERV II. The statue had prime positioning in the show and, according to Jovánovics, caused a scandal that contributed to the prohibition of the exhibition. Lying Figure, a giant gypsum man, lay on a bier draped in red with a suit that reminded the authorities of the Maoist uniform.48 Few knew that the choice of clothing and the red bed cover had no deliberate political connotations at all; instead, Jovánovics had chosen those colours because they had helped him to process the personal tragedy of the death of his wife in a car accident in Johannesburg, South Africa. He captured and interpreted the moment when someone received the annihilating news of the loss of a loved one. Jovánovics was aware of the possibility of the misinterpretation of his artistic intentions; indeed, he expected even greater trouble because of the bier’s red colour, which obviously could easily have been read as sheer political provocation, in the form of the misuse of communist symbols and the deep depression of a generation of censored artists.49 Lying Figure exemplifies the politicization of neo-avant-garde artworks in a highly politicized environment. Further, the potentiality of provocation was fully realized in László Végh’s performative intervention with the sculpture. Végh covered the ‘dead’ body with a map of Hungary and sat down next to the figure with a thermometer in his hand. With a theatrical gesture, he measured the statue’s temperature. To Emese Kürti, this minor intervention drew an analogy between the motionless object and Hungarian submission.50 This act was a small gesture of insubordination, in a manner typical to the non-obedient public sphere. Végh’s performative commentary undertook the transformation of a solid artwork into an ephemeral one. Additionally, as a catalyst of actionist art, Végh’s interaction represented the encounters between members of different avant-gardist generations who were all committed to event-based art. The act Végh performed with Jovánovics’s sculpture recontextualized and politicized the original piece, turning the show into an ‘active environment’.51 The intensity of interaction between the art object and its observer had already been pushed further than Végh’s action, as Tamás Szentjóby had engaged in more intense acts at an accompanying event for IPARTERV I. the year before. Together with Miklós Erdély and László Méhes, Szentjóby had participated in a series of events called Do You See What I See? (Látod amit én látok?) on

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Figure 4.2  László Végh, intervention at György Jovánovics’s Lying Figure, IPARTERV II., 1969.

29  November 1968.52 Although these actions took place a couple of weeks before the exhibition officially opened, they are regarded as part of IPARTERV’s overall history because they used the same space and were designed to draw attention to the upcoming event. Specifically, Szentjóby organized two actions: Distance. Action with Tape-Recorder (Táv. Akció Magnetofonra) and Reading. Action-Reading (Olvasni. Akció-Felolvasás).53 In Action with Tape-Recorder, Szentjóby marked a spot on the floor, then walked at a normal pace in a straight line while reciting the first sentence of a previously prepared text (from Verdi’s Aida54). When he finished this sentence, he stopped and made another mark on the floor with chalk. Following the course of his path, Szentjóby connected the two spots with each other. He then recorded the first sentence with a taperecorder and stepped to the end of sentence one. When beginning sentence two, he moved in another direction and connected the ends of sentences one and two with a straight line. Then, the second sentence was recorded. This pattern of reading, walking, marking and recording continued for six or seven more sentences, with the directions and tempi varying from sentence to sentence. The last sentence, ‘SO BE CAREFUL’, was exclaimed quickly, confidently and in a frightening way towards the audience. According to Szentjóby, the action ended

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Figure 4.3  Tamás Szentjóby, Distance. Action with Tape-Recorder (Do You See What I See? – evening), Budapest, 1968. Courtesy of the artist.

with him walking back to the starting point, where he put the tape-recorder on a table with wheels. He then pressed play to start playback of the recorded text and pushed the carriage while continuously moving from dot to dot in line with his previous tempo.55 During the action that followed Action with Tape-Recorder, a 6–8-metrelong rope was tied to Szentjóby’s waist, the other end held by five to six members of the audience. ‘The poet and writer Nicolaus Urban held a book (in this case, the German physicist Werner Heisenberg’s Selected Writings) at a certain distance, making it possible or impossible for Szentjóby to read from the

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Figure 4.4  Tamás Szentjóby, Reading. Action-Reading, (Do You See What I See? – evening), Budapest, 1968. Courtesy of the artist.

pages, depending on how much rope the audience released.’56 Action-Reading ended after three or four minutes of struggle, when Szentjóby knocked the book from Urban’s hands.57 In contrast to Action-Reading, Action with Tape-Recorder was an intermedia interaction involving the amplification of body, voice, movement and sound recording into spatial dimensions.58 It transformed one medium into another, and did so with a focus on space. Szentjóby effectively turned the spoken word and movement into drawing; by doing so, he inscribed orality and materiality into space. Action with Tape-Recorder was a constant and alternating reaction to the impulses coming from the medium, oscillating between language/ voice, body, movement and writing. The medium of the tape-recorder was the ‘engine’ behind this oscillation. To a certain extent, the tape-recorder observed and controlled the actions of the performer, as it became a force engaged in overwriting the human voice, eventually silencing it completely at the close of the action. The final spoken, yet still recited, words of Szentjóby warned his audience that caution should be a person’s general attitude in times of surveillance and requirements. The message of this statement was clear in ‘communist’ Budapest. Action-Reading simulated participation and exchange between the parties involved. It also abstracted social conditions, such as the individual’s attempt to cope with the cultural-political triangle of ban, toleration and support. In

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this piece, Szentjóby confronted the issues of admission and prohibition. The participants represented the restrictions on artistic freedom. The book, on the other hand, stood for unforeseen potentials. In combination they recreated the kind of stop-go Szentjóby experienced when control by the outside force of the attendees mirrored the experience of the second public sphere’s art as a whole. The ultimate result of being subject to the regime’s temper and command was a feeling of helplessness opposed by individual will. In Action-Reading’s feedback loop, all the participants likely understood the unsaid references. The event thus became a dialogue, and a collective product of ‘non-art-art’.59 All actions by Szentjóby at the Do You See What I See? event series were suggestive pieces with phenomenological and ontological provocations typical to Szentjóby’s Fluxusinspired and happening-like operations. That these actions belonged to the kickoff events of the IPARTERV shows helped to situate the exhibitions in a culturalpoliticized setting that converted an official site into a terrain where a new generation of avant-gardists could test aesthetic (and even political) possibilities. Because of their break with traditional exhibitions’ clear-cut division between artwork and spectator, IPARTERV I. and II. should be considered as venues of interaction. In Bleeding Memorial, the ephemerality of the sculpture had the power to change perceptions, with Végh transforming an exhibition object into a live action. Action-Reading, on the other hand, succeeded in inviting spectators to participate in a collective process of creation. What these actions had in common was a constant renegotiation of who the artist and spectator are, and of the role of an artwork. The real significance of these alternative modes of communication lay in the fact that they subverted the original purpose of a state-run facility devoted to Kádárian industry. On this unlikely site, IPARTERV artists manifested an essential institutional critique by pointing to the inelasticity and lack of ambition of official modes of artistic presentation. One of the first steps in challenging the lack of experimental spirit was to turn an official space into a fruitful ground for neo-avant-garde art.

The ‘Club Movement’ Most art clubs in Kádárian Hungary were state-financed, but they often did not follow the aesthetic demands of the regime. They drifted through experiments to reach forms of creativity that were both aesthetically and intellectually rebellious. Similarly to the IPARTERV exhibitions that, as has just been discussed, subverted an official site into a forum of semi-official art, the clubs offered

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themselves as ‘empty’ state-run spaces to be filled with creative content. After the closure of IPARTERV, which was, besides its innovation, an indication of the limits of artistic provocation within the official framework, neo-avant-gardists had to tread more carefully when testing their boundaries. Simultaneously the Kádárian government recognized that under closely observed conditions, a certain degree of experimentation could be approved. The entry of a parallel culture into the clubs thus made them islands of free, yet observed, action. Most likely, neo-avant-garde artists strategically chose state-owned locations as the sites for their contemporary non-realist artworks because the sites offered proper infrastructure and the necessary physical spaces, and promised a certain degree of creative freedom. Both the Young Artists’ Club and the Bercsényi Club are good examples of how after experiencing the IPARTERV shows’ excesses, the government tried to keep the second public sphere in check. In aiming to limit the neo-avant-garde’s zone of influence, the communist authorities facilitated the clubs in order to isolate experimental tendencies and keep them under observation. Miško Šuvaković offered a similar view of the Student Cultural Centre in Belgrade, which was a site used by the Yugoslav authorities to monitor neo-avant-garde artists while also demonstrating how up-to-date and advanced officially sanctioned Yugoslav contemporary art was.60 In Hungary, cultural ‘reservations’61 like the Student Cultural Centre were kept hermetically isolated from the rest of society, and provided a fixed forum in which artists could meet. This social and cultural de-coupling of non-realist contemporary art from the ‘masses’ meant that neoavant-gardists, with certain exceptions, became a sort of cultural ‘ghetto’ on the periphery of the Hungarian art scene. Meanwhile, party control was often strengthened through making membership for club-goers compulsory. Despite state efforts to control and monitor club activity, the detached neoavant-gardists still attended club events to gather and distribute information on the latest directions in both foreign and domestic art. Club members met at regular intervals to retain a continuity of exchange. Direct contact and face-toface reunions were valued by the artists, and were one of the reasons for hosting events. The club was a place where the intimacy of the studio or the apartment were temporarily left behind in order to reach out to a broader group of likeminded artists, or to have the chance to meet artists invited from abroad. The spaces provided by clubs based in and around Budapest offered important venues for art-related gatherings; for example, the club of the Central Research Institute for Physics at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (A Magyar Tudományos Akadémia Központi Fizikai Kutatóintézete), the Kossuth

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Club (Kossuth Klub), the Kassák Club, or Lajos Kassák Culture House (Kassák Lajos Művelődési Ház), the Artist Cellar (Művészpince),62 the club spaces of the University of Technology (Műszaki Egyetem), the Ganz-MÁVAG Culture House (Ganz-MÁVAG Művelődési Ház),63 and the two clubs that are considered in detail in this chapter, the Young Artists’ Club and the Bercsényi Club. These clubs offered a home to emerging artists and gave them opportunities to present their work. Yet simultaneously, they also gave the state somewhere to ensure that young people and art students did not go astray.64 At its heart, the system of artist clubs was part of the Kádár regime’s plan to extend observation and control into the realm of personal activities. However, no matter how carefully planned the surveillance efforts of the party-state became, the clubs remained sites for music lovers, meeting points for hippies, and inaugural venues of performance art. To many club-goers, regular visits meant they could maintain an alternative lifestyle, ‘away’ from the eyes of the state.65 By the 1960s, various individuals and groups saw the possibility of introducing an alternative public sphere via the clubs. Indeed, the club movement helped to contribute, step by step, to the liberation of civic society from the ordered public sphere, a goal that was finally achieved in the 1980s. By the end of that decade, artistic creativity was able to leave the Harasztian samizdat existence (szamizdat lét), that is, its reliance on often underground production and distribution.66 In the 1980s, unofficial periodicals started to report on the ‘club movement’ par excellence that had been established.67 The clubs were still ultimately financed by the socialist government, yet paradoxically they simultaneously affirmed the existence of a civil society that was founded on the democratic idea of selforganization by the rising numbers of autonomous individuals.68 The profiles of student artistic clubs in particular were comprehensive. They offered programmes and activities ranging from exhibitions of modern art to performances, literary discussions and film screenings.69 Communication in clubs manifested not only in oral debates but also in spatial arrangements, displacement, movement, action and the erasure of the audience’s passive observer status. Because the spatial arrangements of the clubs were often poorly equipped for certain artistic purposes, it was the primary task of the second public sphere to repurpose the environment to fit the artwork in question. Events in the Bercsényi Club and the Young Artists’ Club, similar to the Kassák House Studio’s performances at the Kassák Club, built bridges of contact between the artist, the artwork and its addressees.70 The question of how these opportunities were used to their fullest possible capacity is the subject of the case studies of the Bercsényi Club and the Young Artists’ Club presented here.

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The Bercsényi Club The Bercsényi Club welcomed neo-avant-garde exhibitions and festivals, shows on architecture and mail art, concerts, happenings, performances, environments and conferences, among many other events.71 The club was located in the dormitory of the University of Technology in Budapest, and served as an event venue for over two decades between 1963 and 1987. Its scope of communication was widened by the publication of the journal Bercsényi 28–30,72 which not only announced upcoming Club activities but also reflected on past events via articles by art historians and artists. Bercsényi 28–30 also provided its readers with primary materials, such as the performance texts of poet and performance artist Tibor Hajas. In addition to the journal, the Bercsényi Club distributed information via posters around Budapest. The events’ organizers hoped that openly placing advertisements about exhibitions and performances in the urban environment might prevent the authorities from prohibiting them, since the posters could be regarded as proof that the club had nothing to hide.73 The promotion of the Bercsényi Club beyond the university dorm also attracted more people to its events, making it harder for the authorities to limit the Bercsényi’s influence to the second public sphere alone. According to art historian Csilla Bényi’s reconstruction of the club’s history, (post-)avant-gardist tendencies notably flourished between 1978 and 1980, by which time the club had transformed into an influential site of art activities that did not neatly conform to the state’s official art doctrine. Bényi suspected that an arrangement between the club’s leadership, the Ministry of Interior and other party organs in charge of directing cultural politics and youth affairs may have enabled the Bercsényi’s more dissenting activities to continue without too much censorship, as it seemed that provided that the boundaries of this arrangement were not broken, free (but limited) artistic activities were possible.74 To demonstrate how the Bercsényi Club served as a place of alternative communication, two examples are briefly sketched here: art critic and teacher András Bán’s exhibition concept, the Museum of Hungarian Avant-Garde Art (Magyar Avantgard Művészet Múzeuma, 1979), and Tibor Hajas’s performance Vigil (Virrasztás, 1980). András Bán’s project Museum of Hungarian Avant-Garde Art was the result of collecting inspired by conceptual art, where Bán aimed to gather documents relating to Hungarian experimental art. In order to do so, he reached out to artists to send him dedicated documentation of work they had done, which was either

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already finished or soon would be. Instead of original artworks, he requested that the artists submit an attached museum card index with a 116 millimetre × 80 millimetre empty panel. This field was reserved for the artwork’s reproduction.75 Many of the fifty-five participants sent either artworks or conceptual ideas in response to Bán’s call. Painter, graphic designer and stage designer Péter Donáth, for example, submitted a list of names of important professional colleagues who were no longer living in Hungary, while film director, textile artist and stage and costume designer Judit Kele contributed a small piece of nylon and a plain handwritten apology: Dear András, I am sorry, but I could not make the artwork’s reproduction. If this format of the card index is not suitable for saving on a computer, please be so kind and do take a photograph. Thank you in advance, Judit Kele.76

Bán’s collection of neo-avant-garde artworks was exhibited at the Bercsényi between 13 and 19  February 1979, in a relatively small showcase.77 Through the items he had assembled, Bán tried to reconceptualize the museum’s role in shaping the art historical canon. The card indexes he put on display were pocket-sized, and together formed a collage of texts, drawings, photographs and small objects. The format of the submitted card indexes and their presentation method were equally unconventional, as Bán’s project essentially created a miniature museum based on the correspondence between himself as curator and the participating artists. It offered a documentation of exchanges that were presented as anti-/counter-institutional, and those who visited the exhibition are likely to have understood it in this way. In the underlying correspondence through which Bán obtained his material for the Museum of Hungarian AvantGarde Art, he managed to find a way around the state censorship system. By organizing and arranging material himself, Bán’s undertaking was a self-made show that may have been overlooked by the jury appointed by the Lectorate for Applied and Fine Arts. The foundation of such a ‘showcase museum’ rested on engaging the different parties involved in making semi-official art. While Bán’s curatorial concept was based on direct communication, Hajas’s performance of Vigil at the Bercsényi Club aimed for a poetic conversation reaching beyond the world of living people and objects. On a stage partly covered

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in shallow water and only a few props – a German Shepherd puppy, a quartz iodine lamp, a string and a bulb – Hajas performed Vigil blindfolded. Turning his body into a vehicle of action, he executed different movements, actions and poses. At a certain point, he smashed a lightbulb on the floor, triggering a dramatic change in the lighting of the stage: the sudden flare of a quartz-lamp. He walked, uncovered his eyes, crawled, lay down and moved closer to the water-covered floor ‘now charged with electricity’.78 Hajas then interacted with the dog: ‘He pets the dog, whispers to it, fondles it, slaps it, calls it affectionate names.’79 Hajas lay down at the centre of the stage again. His two assistants, János Vető and István Csömöri, then injected him with a sleep-inducing drug. While Hajas was lying on the floor, the lights came on – ‘the Horus-like shadow of the dog vanishes in the brightness’, at which point the animal was released in the performance space.80 The assistants then carried Hajas’s inanimate body repeatedly to and fro across the stage while his pre-recorded voice echoed out from loudspeakers.81 The performance ended with silence, Hajas’s motionless body resting alone on the stage.82 To art historian and critic Lóránd Hegyi, one of the first reviewers of the performance, Vigil powerfully expressed a sense of ‘existential loneliness’.83

Figure 4.5  Tibor Hajas, Vigil, Bercsényi Collegium, Budapest, 18 May 1980. Photograph courtesy of the Estate of Tibor Hajas.

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A closer look into Hajas’s intellectual interests at the time and his private relationship with performance artist János Szirtes reveal the organic connectedness of Vigil to the blurred line between those who are alive and those who are dead. In 1944, philosopher Béla Hamvas translated and edited Tibetan Mysteries (Tibeti misztériumok), a book that introduced the whole belief and dogma system of the Tibetan Buddhist Lamaism. Tamás Szentjóby, a close friend of Hajas who retyped and distributed Hamvas’s manuscripts, regularly read the performance artist passages from the text. In turn, Hajas became deeply involved with the Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book of Death.84 Vigil has to be understood in this Buddhist context of the separation of body and soul, the first intense experience of which Hajas underwent while in prison: ‘I can imagine that a person’s final moment in life may be longer than his entire life. I have come close to this myself. For this reason, I am interested in this, and in its preparation, much more.’85 The performance invited its audience to observe and perhaps join in the metaphysical journey of Hajas’s tightrope walk between life and death.86 János Vető, one of Hajas’s important collaborators, also mentioned that the German Shepherd puppy belonged to János Szirtes, who at that time in 1980 was suffering from cancer and was about to undergo surgery.87 This detail similarly highlights the existential symbolism of Vigil, centred around questions going beyond the everyday struggles and politics of Kádárian socialism.

The Young Artists’ Club Like the Bercsényi Club, the Young Artists’ Club was involved in supporting alternative forms of communication. There, the club-goers were not only artists but also intellectuals, musicians, authors, sociologists, doctors and art lovers.88 A report by the state’s Youth Union’s Central Committee (Magyar Kommunista Ifjúsági Szövetségének Központi Bizottsága) from 1961 outlined the tasks of the club as follows: ‘The primary goal of the club is to ideologically, philosophically educate young artists, to broaden their philosophical perspective, to awaken their interest in the questions of international and domestic life.’89 Young artists’ access to conversations with important political figures at the club and the organization of summer camps, for instance, should have helped to achieve these goals. But, by 1961, some distractions had already emerged that drew young artists’ attention away from the group’s mission, causing feelings of unsettledness and ambiguity among other members of the group. Their concerns were expressed in 1973 when the committee discussed the achievements of the past few years.

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The social mandate of young artists to shape awareness and taste had, despite all the club’s best efforts, been unsuccessful in terms of disseminating an ideology or using art to politically educate target groups in Hungary. The Youth Union’s Central Committee reported that the reason for these failures was the young people’s attraction to neo-avant-garde art, rather than developing a commitment to political education. Many forms of this art were officially regarded as ‘aesthetic aberration’90 – a term that summarized the perceived negative effects of contemporary experimental tendencies. Upon examining the programme of the Young Artists’ Club, it seems that although it was founded in October 1960 by the Communist Youth Union (Magyar Kommunista Ifjúsági Szövetség, KISZ) in active cooperation with artists, building a socialist culture may not have been among the club’s highest priorities. The club presented a broad line-up of activities: film screenings on Mondays; literature and theory on Thursdays; exhibitions on Fridays; and on Saturdays, visitors could expect either concerts, a discotheque, or action art.91 This schedule, which has been reconstructed here based on the recollections of a frequent visitor, was adapted to the core audience’s tastes. In the 1970s, according to József Havasréti, the regular club-goers represented a ‘self-destructive, eccentric and closed’92 community. As an island of the second public sphere, the Young Artists’ Club did not reflect the general taste of socialist cultural life; instead, it resembled a group counterculture. The authorities took care to ensure that these different levels of culture did not interfere with each other. Indeed, because the requirements formulated in the 1961 committee report had not been met, the party cut off the group of young artists from the rest of society.93 For example, it dictated that only members of the institution could attend and organize events at the Young Artists’ Club. This ‘elite’ thus remained mostly isolated from their fellow artists and did not produce programming that reached broader Hungarian society. The political leadership thus observed the artists in laboratory-like conditions of isolation. Meanwhile, within their laboratory setting, the Young Artists’ Club developed and practised a variety of forms of communication. On 27 January 1984, the Young Artists’ Club housed Hungary can be yours! International Hungary (Magyarország a tiéd lehet! Nemzetközi Magyarország), an exhibition exploring the self-image of Hungary from a contemporary, international point of view. The show, which was closed by authorities immediately after its opening,94 grew out of materials sent by mail from all over the world. The initiator and curator of the show was György Galántai, who at the time had already established a broad contact art (kapcsolatművészet) network.95

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Hungary can be yours! was originally prepared for the Hungarian special issue of the Commonpress mail art magazine, but because the Young Artists’ Club issued an unexpected invitation to him to produce a show, Galántai decided to turn the material into an exhibition.96 In his own contribution to the exhibition, Galántai focused on one essential medium of human communication: the voice. Three different types of sound recordings and montages appeared at Hungary can be yours! that were voice-focused. One of these was Galántai’s Radio Artpool Edition 6 (Artpool Rádió 6), a work that premiered at the exhibition’s opening. The other two sound pieces were presented in two different spaces. In the black room, a Finnish radio broadcast about Hungary in the Finnish language was played, while in the white room visitors could listen to songs of the communist movement, which were subversively applied.97 Sound therefore dominated each corner of Hungary can be yours!. This aural addressing of visitors supported the existence of the disobedient public sphere because using voice was an uncomplicated, challenging and necessary way to communicate a political message. Radio Artpool’s tape consisted of numerous sound clippings from avantgardist films, underground music, talks, (interrupted) recitations, radio

Figure 4.6  The White Room at the exhibition Hungary can be yours! International Hungary, Young Artists’ Club, Budapest, 1984, curator: György Galántai. Photograph by György Galántai. Courtesy of the Artpool Art Research Center – Museum of Fine Arts.

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performances, sound poetry and sound (art)works.98 The audio sections were short, with none lasting longer than a couple of minutes. Some contained distinct voices calmly reciting a literary text or a dog barking, while others included punk-like music with poor sound quality. This was a ‘finest’ selection drawn from the Hungarian nonconformist sound world. While sound poetry allowed the voice of the neo- and post-avant-garde to be heard, the presence of punk music directed attention to the existence of a musical underground. Key figures of the neo-avant-garde, punk music and the democratic opposition called out for about an hour from the darkened space’s stereo loudspeakers during the exhibition’s opening.99 Most of the artists, authors and musicians who featured on the montage tape were actors in the second public sphere, whose ‘voices’ were distinct from those of the authorities. The recording of Miklós Erdély’s ironic lecture performance, for example, used humour to criticize the humiliations and absurdities caused by the all-embracing bureaucratism. Erdély described scenes from everyday Kádárian life, in the form of an ordinary person’s visit to the district council with all of the associated frustrations and apathies.100 The musical excerpts of the work of the punk-rock-jazz band URH (Ultra Rock News Agency/Ultra Rock Hírügynökség) were much more radical because their vocals promoted a punkish, anarchic lifestyle.101 Songs such as ‘Take me away’ (Vigyetek el) and ‘Is there life on Earth’ (Van-e élet a földön) openly criticized the Kádár regime’s stifling atmosphere. The voice of subversion in Erdély’s piece was just as irritating to the organs and leadership behind Kádárian culture politics, as was the radical criticism that the underground sound attack of URH represented. Because the black room of Hungary can be yours! was devoted to international artists’ interpretations of Hungary, Galántai’s decision to play a Finnish radio broadcast providing general information on Hungary in the Finnish language had an obvious curatorial logic, since Finnish is assumed to be the linguistically closest language to Hungarian among the major European languages.102 Galántai’s choice of Finnish was therefore likely to have been made to demonstrate the international connections of Hungarian culture. Even more interesting than Galántai’s use of the black room, however, was his filling of the white room with works about Hungary made by Hungarians, decorated with a pro-Socialist soundscape backdrop.103 A secret agent who was instructed to observe the exhibition opening, and whose insights are highly likely to have contributed to the premature closure of Hungary can be yours!, sent the following report to the Ministry of the Interior:

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The material played in the small room on the mezzanine . . . was made up of movement and mass songs. Galántai did not select the best known [sic] mass songs of the 1950s and 60s but the newer compositions of the 1970s, among them songs of the KISZ and the of the workers’ militia. (In most recordings there were choirs, soloists and the orchestra). The total of the recordings was longer than the montage in the main room, movement songs coming one after the other for over one hour and a half. Galántai’s selection of the newest musical pieces was presumably a conscious choice. Older ones would strike this audience as outmoded, which had been mocked, disparaged by earlier performances, and sharply criticized even by official publications. The newest movement songs, however, contain a good many elements of pop music and seem to be closer to the taste of the young. For viewers at the Young Artists’ Club, deeply sympathizing with the opposition, these songs seemed to be more suitable to provide a ‘counterpoint’, to create the contrast with the works exhibited. Several of the songs caused great amusement.104

As the report makes clear, the secret service agent recognized the obviously subversive intention behind Galántai’s curatorial decisions. Neither the curator nor the visitors took the political motivation of the communist movement songs at face value. The choice of marching music as the aural backdrop to an exhibition that reflected on the artistic diversity of contemporary Hungarian culture and society was intended as (and came across as) both ironic and critical. Specifically, Galántai used music to highlight the contrast between the Kádár regime’s international recognition as one of the most successful implementations of communism in the Second World, and the heterogeneous artistic positions presented at Hungary can be yours!.105 Galántai’s decision to show two sides of the same coin: the positive image of socialist Hungary, and the critical voices within the Kádárian system, prompted laughter among those who understood the distorted realization of socialism. The simple fact that Galántai was in regular contact with foreign artists beyond the Iron Curtain must also have infuriated the authorities. That the product of Galántai’s contact art was being presented at a semi-official site, where a wider public could also have potentially joined in the conversation, was an obvious reason to close down the show as quickly as possible. The artworks presented in both rooms were the responses that had been received to Galántai’s call to fellow artists to participate in the exhibition, which he had distributed through his mail art network. Galántai interlinked his system of connections at the Young Artists’ Club with a variety of media, such as collage, montage, written word, drawing, print, Xerox, photography, graphic, stamps and other variations of images.106 All these information carriers were typical media

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of mail art as they were easy to produce and reproduce and, due to their small size, also extremely easy to transport. For his Hungary can be yours! project, the pieces were mostly variations on stereotypical images of Hungary. The scope of artistic positions included ironic and subversive appropriations of some of the symbols or historic events that encapsulated foreign and domestic perceptions of Hungary. The artworks recalled, for instance, the red pepper, an important ingredient in many typical Hungarian dishes; the red, white and green tricolour of the national flag; the contours of the Hungarian map; and even references to the Ottoman Empire’s long occupation of the country between 1541 and 1699. Each emblematic object, symbol, or memorable event in history was transformed into an artistic statement. Most of the statements were intended as ironic and critical, especially when they were placed next to each other in the show. The party considered the message of the domestic artworks, first and foremost, to be politically offensive.107 This was the case with the two pieces that the INCONNU Group (INCONNU Csoport) contributed to Hungary can be yours!. This Szolnok-based artistic collective had been under secret police surveillance since 1979. Partly due to the frequent house searches of members and the prohibitions of their proposed shows and performances, the collective had become increasingly politically radicalized over the years.108 One of the artworks it contributed to Hungary can be yours! was set up as a provocation to the authorities – it was a map of Hungary at the bottom of which reads, cited nearly word for word: ‘This map has been created to help the state security organs to better meet their task of tailing INCONNU. The creators wish them good luck!’109 In this work, INCONNU transformed the map of Hungary by naming cities after artists such as Guglielmo Achille Cavellini and Robert Rauschenberg, both of whom were representatives of the international neo-avant-garde: Cavellini was famous for his broad mail art network, his neo-Dada artworks and his performances, while Rauschenberg was one of the initiators of pop art. Similar to Galántai’s references to the international connections of Hungarian culture, INCONNU emphasized that its radical aesthetics was part of the Cavellinian and Rauschenbergian directive. Further, another part of the map was covered by the announcement that ‘HUNGARY IS ART’.110 A question on the map asked the viewer where to find the group, indicating three cities marked with green circles, which were connected with straight lines.111 This cynical appeal to the authorities – sarcastically challenging them to catch the provocateurs – explicitly addressed, and mocked, the regime’s ongoing surveillance practices. While communication via mail art overcame boundaries of space and time between artists, it was only able to address a wider audience when displayed at a site of alternative culture. The Young Artists’ Club provided just such a

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Figure 4.7  INCONNU Group, Où est l’inconnu?, collage, 1984 (work in the collection of Artpool Art Research Center, contribution to the exhibition Hungary can be yours!, 1984). Courtesy of the artists.

venue for personal exchange and for blending different media, including visual, ephemeral and oral modes of presentation. Galántai simulated the transition of information, known from mail art, in the exhibition spaces of the club. He also transmitted a live video feed of the white room to a monitor placed in the black room. Another layer of communication related to the ‘internationalization’ of Hungary’s perceptions and its connectedness to the global art world, in contrast to the limited and censored information flows regulated by the state. The exhibition was thus an explicit call for a diversity of opinion instead of the passive acceptance of an Orwellian system of one-way communication, where the state dictates what artists should produce and how citizens should live.

Alternative communication and the Young Artists’ Club Besides exhibitions such as Hungary can be yours!, during the thirty-eight years of its existence112 the Young Artists’ Club organized readings, talks, screenings, round-table discussions, music concerts, concert performances, various forms of event-based art and symposia. Most of these ‘genres’ were not deployed in a pure form, but as a mixture of forms. Conventional modes of delivering a talk

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or of reading poems coexisted with events that challenged ways of accumulating information through interactions with audiences and space. Collectively, these genre-mixing examples reflected the trend in experimental art to transcend the frontiers between artforms, the underlying message of which was that the art of the second public sphere should be a forum of open-mindedness. To the artists and organizers of these conscious genre experiments, the existing state infrastructure had an untapped creative potential. Alternative forms of communication and information were used to shed light on how intermedia and event-based art could subvert ideologically purposed and bureaucratized space. In the early 1970s, for example, author and musician Gergely Molnár, the frontman of the punk band Spions, gave a series of lecture performances at the Young Artists’ Club that foreshadowed his later performances.113 The topics of his presentations included David Bowie, Viennese Actionism (Wiener Aktionismus) and Hermann Nitsch’s orgy-mystery-theatre (Orgien-Mysterien-Theater). In these presentations, Molnár combined his active presence, his carefully staged entry, the costume he wore and multimedia instruments with elements of happening and music. Molnár even imitated and adapted the eccentric, artificial environment created by New York’s Velvet Underground.114 Recreating the New York art scene in socialist Budapest included reproducing its glamorous, legendary figures, thus generating an almost schizophrenic atmosphere both for the artist and the participants. The absurdity of a temporary experience of overcoming inhibitions had the power to create an inspiring, loose atmosphere of communication that broke down barriers. While Molnár’s lecture performance offered a potential means of communication without borders, other types of event-based communication forms highlighted the barriers to free and open communication. In one of her actions/exhibitions at the Young Artists’ Club, the multifaceted artist Orsolya (Orshi) Drozdik thematized the distance between art’s creation, display and reception. The scenery of the 1977 NudeModel (AktModell) was more than unconventional, as Beáta Hock notes: In a room separated from visitors by a rope Drozdik was drawing a live nude model. In this scene the artist undertook both the roles of the viewer-creator and the viewed: the predominantly male audience was watching her draw a female nude. Since Drozdik clearly dissociated herself from the audience spatially, and seated her female model with her back to them, the event signalled an act of defiance towards the customary role of distribution and posed a number of related questions . . . The theatricality of the whole arrangement . . . also commented on the performative nature of gender role fulfilment.115

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Here, Hock highlights Drozdik’s criticism of the male dominance not only of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde scene but also of its customary practices of exhibiting. Drozdik’s provocative gesture relocated the artwork’s production process into a place usually designated for its presentation. The action was staged as though to mirror a glimpse behind the scenes, as Drozdik ‘talked’ to her audience through her art-making, but did so from a distance because viewers were not allowed to enter the space of creation. The exhibition room of the Young Artists’ Club was converted into a peep-show-like studio where visitors took on the roles of observers. Without interactions between spectators, the artist and the artwork, NudeModel featured no audience engagement, instead treating space as a sanctuary of art only accessible to the privileged. Communication seemed impossible, an approach that had at least a twofold meaning. First, the rope separating the visitors from the artist and the artwork symbolized the detachment of the experimental from the wider public, as was the case with many art events at the Young Artists’ Club. Second, the artwork served as an analogy for how some Hungarian nonconformists felt about the restrictions placed by the state on their ability to create and communicate. While NudeModel drew attention to the limits of artistic communication in Kádár’s Hungary, other events, performances and exhibitions at the Young Artsits’ Club were characterized by their directness of communication. These included the INCONNU Group’s performance Metamorphosis of Bodies (Testek metamorfózisa) in early 1980. This suggestive piece featured the brutality of wounded flesh with its inclusion of animal corpses and naked human bodies. The performers were partly naked: the torso of one was cut, leaving bloody stripes on their upper body, while another male ‘actor’s’ body was partly covered with white paint and ‘decorated’ with clothespins.116 According to Péter Bokros, one of the founders of INCONNU, the monumental work was an homage to László Najmányi’s and Tibor Hajas’s early performances in the 1970s.117 More specifically, INCONNU inherited absurdity and bizarre costumes from Najmányi, and the pain and injuries shown during Metamorphosis of Bodies from Hajas. The commitment to the vulnerable body in combination with irrational behaviour shocked observers even more than the event-based art of the Kassák House Studio, because an ‘alive’, open wound clearly disturbed conventional understandings and expectations of a theatre performance. This staging no longer offered a comfort zone of convenient entertainment for the audience. While the previous three artistic events had primarily used the body to communicate messages to the audience, the two final cases of art exchange in

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a semi-official setting examined here centred around the alternative forms of communication that could be offered through the media of sound and voice. In the first case, the mode of information transmission was more innovative; in the second case, the format was more traditional, but the content was ‘provocative’. The first case consists of the literary events associated with the ‘live magazine’ Breath Taking (Lélegzet, published between 1980 and 1985), which broke with traditional modes of lecturing and reading. The circle behind this journal, consisting of Ádám Tábor, poet and translator Eszter Tábor, poet and translator Péter Rácz, poet and author Balázs Györe and author Endre Miklóssy,118 invented a new type of literary text that was spatial and performed, and was also physically bound to the body and to the medium of the human voice. The idea behind Breath Taking was to create a periodical which existed through the live word – that is, through voice and orality. Because Breath Taking could not be separated from its medium of presentation, the journal issues comprised eight oral performances. Two presentations took place at the Young Artists’ Club; one in March 1982, and the other almost two years later in January 1984. The latter event included a reading of poems and essays, and the screening of an animation film. Its main characteristics were live performances and intersections between a variety of media.119 Performing words through a symbiosis of the body and the voice represented a rebellion of form that stood up against the rigid communication patterns approved by the Kádárian authorities. The second example of a subverted use of state-run institutions through voice was the round-table discussion, another popular format that allowed club-goers direct access to information, and through which ideas about art, politics and other matters could be communicated. In the case of the Young Artists’ Club throughout the decades of its existence, a panel mostly consisting of experts provided first-hand information on art- and culture-related topics to club members who were interested in contemporary art debates. Although this mode of communication was not as interactive and immediate as lecture performances, it still allowed audience participation via Q&As held at the end of the expert debate. One particularly noteworthy round-table took place in February 1983, when a discussion on art criticism created a discursive framework for (self-)reflexivity. The participants in this discussion on art criticism’s role and functions were critic and art writer Attila Tasnádi, art historian Gábor Pataki, art and culture historian András Székely, painter and graphic designer Péter Kovács, art historian Gyula Rózsa, art historian Éva Körner, art historian and art writer József Vadas, art historian Éva Forgács and

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art historian Julianna P. Szűcs. The discussion was moderated by art historian and critic Lajos Lóska.120 Many positions on thoughtful art-making collided in what was a fraught atmosphere, as the discussion took place during a period where Kádárian ideas of conformity increasingly clashed with opinions supportive of experimental art. The round-table in February 1983 attempted to create a discourse about how to talk/write about art. It was important in two respects: on the one hand, the participants provided and engaged with diverse, colliding point of views. On the other hand, all the participants spoke about the need for (and indeed requested) a public forum for art in Kádárian Hungary. In her contribution, Éva Körner demanded the allowance of an autonomous art criticism; one that was not influenced by ideology or politics, and which focused solely on the analysis of the art object. This requested freedom of art criticism would have left the formation of opinion to the readers of art journals.121 Instead of following given parameters and schemes of ideologically ‘correct’ art interpretation, she argued that the floor should finally be open to unconstrained reception and judgement. Körner’s remarks suggest that by 1983, the political climate had shifted sufficiently to allow artists to openly abandon state-directed intellectual perspectives and instead to seek to make contact with ‘art consumers’ without censorship. As venues of information circulation, the Bercsényi Club and the Young Artists’ Club helped to disseminate knowledge to a new generation of experimental artists who favoured alternative forms of communication over the controlled flow of information. The examples discussed here illustrate how creative non-obedience aimed to bring about the most important facet of a (utopian) public sphere: an (almost) unregulated exchange of ideas. Immersive corporeal co-presence, subversion, immateriality, orality, transgressive media, redefined exhibition practices and participatory debates all contributed to multiplying access to information to bring diversification to the ordered public sphere. The development of alternative communication and information accumulation at youth, university and art clubs on the one hand demonstrates the inventiveness of the neo-avant-garde’s repurposing strategies, and on the other hand reveals the complex relationship of the state’s formative role in the flourishing alternative culture in Hungary of the 1970s and 1980s. From the mid-1970s on, Kádárian cultural policymakers were increasingly willing to rethink their relationship with artistic experiment. In turn, artists and art networkers recognized an ‘invitation’ to satisfy their intellectual thirst through exchange.

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Conclusion The official venues that were home to semi-official art reflect the paradoxes of the permissive-repressive Kádárian regime. Experimental artists and groups either found their separate peace with the cultural politics of the day, for example in the form of arrangements between club leaderships and policymakers, or they used various tactics to bypass censorship, such as not keeping an exhibition format, or self-financing and organizing exhibitions, outside official structures. As long as the neo-avant-gardists did not address the masses or show open and clear hostility to the regime, which they generally did not do, the authorities did not apply the harshest repressive measures. The relationship between the party and artists remained mostly one of distrust and careful surveillance, with the latter subtly testing the former’s limits on creativity and expression. This uneasy relationship also undermined the structure of the public sphere. Because the public sphere, in its Habermasian understanding, is an ideal forum for communication across society’s layers, a heavily regulated society and culture suffers from its absence. If an unlimited information flow between individuals and groups is not present and/or is hindered by hierarchies, exchange needs to take on alternative formats. In Kádárian Hungary, the art of the second public sphere ultimately turned its back on the state’s control of society, by pursuing a multifaceted exchange of ideas between people of different social backgrounds. Artists either invented their own informal channels and methods of exchange, or altered existing communication formats. The Bercsényi Club, Young Artists’ Club and the IPARTERV shows each assigned new functions to official spaces, implementing avant-gardist exchange modes such as oral transfer and physical contact. In doing so, experimental artists not only altered the functions of the state’s communication format and spaces; they also transformed the intimacy of private homes to open them up to more activities in the second public sphere.

Notes 1

2 3 4

‘A cserepesház – Zuglói művelődési ház és tagintézményeinek története,’ Budapesti Művelődési Központ. Available online: http://www.bmknet.hu/kozmuv-cdk/6/html/ pages/20_50.html (accessed 12 December 2019). ‘A Kassák színház kronológiája,’ Aktuális Levél, Spring 1985, Issue 11, pp. 41–44. Magdolna Jákfalvi, Avantgárd – színház – politika, Budapest: Balassi, 2006, p. 199. ‘Oral History Kürti Emesének’.

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5 Ibid. 6 Sasvári, ‘A balatonboglári kápolnatárlatok kultúrpolitikai háttere,’ p. 32. 7 Beke indicated that countless exhibitions opened either with a performative speech (act), or with an action/performance which had been specifically created for the actual show. He cited the example of Orsolya Drozdik’s NudeModel, which was opened by a different person each day. Beke, ‘The Hungarian Performance,’ p. 105. 8 As I will suggest in Chapter 7, using the expression ‘neo-avant-garde’ is no longer valid in relation to the art of the 1980s. For this decade, the terms ‘post-avant-garde’ and ‘trans-avant-garde’ are more accurate, as they mark an transition of generations and different aesthetics. 9 In Hungarian törvénytelen avantgárd following the title of the book of that title by Klaniczay and Sasvári, Törvénytelen avantgárd. 10 Coined by artist János Sugár. Juliane Debeusscher, ‘Information Crossings: On the Case of Inconnu’s “The Fighting City”,’ Afterall, Issue 31, Autumn/Winter 2012, pp. 72–83, here p. 79. 11 In Hungarian váratlan kultúra following the title of the book by Tábor, A váratlan kultúra. 12 Libora Oates-Indruchová reaches back to concepts of Jiřina Šiklová and James C. Scott. Excerpts from the current book project: Libora Oates-Indruchová, Censorship in Czech and Hungarian Academic Publishing, 1969–89: Snakes and Ladders, London and Oxford: Bloomsbury, 2020. 13 Péter Apor, Lóránt Bódi, Sándor Horváth, Heléna Huhák and Tamás Scheibner (eds.), Kulturális ellenállás a Kádár-korszakban. Gyűjtemények története, Budapest: MTA Bölcsészettudományi Kutatóközpont. Történettudományi Intézet, Budapest 2018. 14 Peter Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde, Berlin: suhrkamp, 1974. ­15 Peter Bürger, Nach der Avantgarde, Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2014. Available online: https://www.velbrueck.de/out/media/978-3-942393-65-2Info.pdf (accessed 13 December 2019). 16 Katalin Cseh-Varga, Interview with László Beke, 16 September 2014, Budapest. 17 Ibid. 18 Bürger, Nach der Avantgarde. 19 Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta, p. 322. 20 Piotr Piotrowski, ‘Mapping the Legacy of the Political Change of the 1956 in East European Art,’ Europe: The Fifties Legacy, Special Issue: Third Text, Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art & Culture, Nancy Jachec and Reuben Fowkes (eds.), Vol. 20, Issue 76, March 2006, pp. 211–221, here p. 216; Dietmar Unterkofler expressed a similar opinion about how the context determined the neo-avant-garde in Central and Southeast Europe. Dietmar Unterkofler, ‘Randphänomene: Die Bosch Bosch-Gruppe als Brücke zwischen der jugoslawischen und der ungarischen

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Neoavantgarde,’ in Heinz Fassmann, Wolfgang Müller-Funk and Heidemarie Uhl (eds.), Kulturen der Differenz – Transformationsprozesse in Zentraleuropa nach 1989. Transdisziplinäre Perspektiven, Vienna: VR unipress, 2009, pp. 383–396, here p. 385. 21 Miško Šuvaković, ‘Eine handfeste Geschichte aus dem Kalten Krieg – Internationale Referenzen der Konzeptkunst im sozialistischen Jugoslawien,’ in Heinz Fassmann, Wolfgang Müller-Funk and Heidemarie Uhl (eds.), Kulturen der Differenz – Transformationsprozesse in Zentraleuropa nach 1989, pp. 375–384, here p. 376. 22 Katalin Cseh-Varga, ‘The Revival of Marcel Duchamp’s Spirit. Performative Moments in the Hungarian Neo-Avant-Garde of the 1960s and 1970s,’ Annual convention of the International Federation of Theatre Studies, Stockholm, 15 June 2016. 23 Hock, Gendered Artistic Positions and Social Voices, p. 183. 24 József Havasréti, Széteső dichotómiák. Színterek és diskurzusok a magyar neoavantgárdban, Budapest and Pécs: Gondolat, Artpool and PTE Kommunikációés Médiatudományi Tanszék, 2009, p. 12. 25 Maja Fowkes, The Green Bloc: Neo-avant-garde Art and Ecology under Socialism, Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2015, pp. 23–64. 26 Katalin Néray, ‘A magyar neoavantgárd nagy évtizede: 1968 . . . 1979,’ in Lóránd Hegyi (ed.), Nézőpontok/Pozíciók. Művészet Közép-Európában 1949–1999, Budapest: Kortárs Művészeti Múzeum – Ludwig Múzeum Budapest, 2000, pp. 279–283, here p. 283. 27 Christian Kravagna, ‘Einleitung,’ in Christian Kravagna (ed.), Das Museum als Arena. Institutionskritische Texte von KünstlerInnen, Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2001, pp. 7–9, here p. 8. ­28 Gábor Andrási, ‘A Zuglói Kör (1958–1968). Egy művészcsoport a hatvanas években,’ Ars Hungarica, Vol. 19, Issue 1, 1991, pp. 47–64, here p. 56. 29 Cseh-Varga, Interview with László Beke; Beke, ‘The Hungarian Performance,’ p. 105. 30 Péter Bokros cited in Csizmadia, A magyar demokratikus ellenzék (1968–1988), p. 361. 31 Since they are well-known exhibitions of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde, I use the Hungarian term for them rather than the English. 32 Cseh-Varga, Interview with György Jovánovics. 33 Ibid. 34 Géza Perneczky, ‘Útkereső fiatalok. 1968. december 28,’ in László Beke, Lóránd Hegyi and Péter Sinkovits (eds.), IPARTERV 68–70. Kiállítás az IPARTERV dísztermében. Budapest V. Deák Ferenc u. 10. 1980 január 30–február 14, produced by IPARTERV in 500 copies, p. 42. 35 Flóra Mészáros, ‘Berobbant az Iparterv-csoport. Beszélgetés Sinkovits Péter művészettörténésszek, az 1960-as évek végén rendezett Iparterv-tárlatok kurátorával,’ Új Művészet, Issue 4, April 2019, pp. 9–10, here p. 10.

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36 Ibid. 37 Dániel Véri, ‘Major János (1934–2008). Monográfia és oeuvre katalógus,’ Volume 1, PhD dissertation, Eötvös Lóránd Tudományegyetem, Budapest, 2016, p. 158. 38 Ibid., p. 159. 39 Painter Imre Bak, Miklós Erdély, painter and graphic designer Krisztián Frey, Tamás Hencze, György Jovánovics, painter Ilona Keserü, painter and university teacher Gyula Konkoly, László Lakner, painter István Nádler, painter and conceptual artist Attila Pálfalusi, Ludmill Siskov and Endre Tót all exhibited at both shows. The audience could only meet graphic designer and photographer András Baranyay, János Major, painter and graphic designer László Méhes and Tamás Szentjóby at the second edition of IPARTERV. Márta Kovalovszky, ‘Sanfte Jahreszeiten zwischen Eis und Dürre. Die 60er Jahre,’ in Hans Knoll (ed.), Die zweite Öffentlichkeit. Kunst in Ungarn im 20. Jahrhundert, Dresden: Fine Arts, 1999, pp. 182–211, here pp. 207–208. 40 Mészáros, ‘Berobbant az Iparterv-csoport,’ p. 10. 41 Lajos Németh, cited in Éva Forgács, Hungarian Art: Confrontation and Revival in the Modern Movement, Los Angeles: DoppelHouse Press, 2016, p. 166. 42 ‘As the Hungarian artist Gábor Attalai later explained, his generation “treated Harald Szeemann as a god at the time, because he revealed a world in which limits ceased and art could turn toward a domain in which there was no longer any need for material”’. Kemp-Welch, Networking the Bloc, p. 58; Emese Kürti, ‘Ezoterikus avantgárd. A koncept/konceptuális paradigma,’ exindex, 4 August 2014. Available online: http://exindex.hu/index.php?l=hu&page=3&id=934 (accessed 30 January 2020). 43 Harald Szeemann, ‘Zur Ausstellung,’ When Attitudes Become Form, 22. März – 23. April 1969. Available online: https://kunsthalle-bern.ch/ausstellungen/1969/whenattitudes-become-form/#&gid=1&pid=8 (accessed 16 October 2017). 44 Ibid. 45 Kovalovszky, ‘Sanfte Jahreszeiten zwischen Eis und Dürre,’ pp. 207–208. 46 László Beke, ‘12 years IPARTERV,’ in László Beke, Lóránd Hegyi and Péter Sinkovits (eds.), IPARTERV 68–70. Kiállítás az IPARTERV dísztermében. Budapest V. Deák Ferenc u. 10. 1980 január 30-február 14, produced by IPARTERV in 500 copies, pp. VII–XIV, here p. X. 47 Géza Boros, ‘Tabu és trauma: 1956,’ in Edit Sasvári, Hedvig Turai and Sándor Hornyik (eds.), Art in Hungary 1956–1980: Doublespeak and Beyond, New York: Thames & Hudson, 2018, pp. 193–207, here pp. 198–202. 48 Cseh-Varga, Interview with György Jovánovics. 49 Szilvia Takács, ‘AZ ÁGY. Megjelenítések a XX. századi és kortárs művészetben,’ DLA thesis, Magyar Képzőművészeti Egyetem Doktori Iskola, 2011, pp. 101–102, 107.

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50 Kürti, ‘Intuitive Actions,’ p. 199. 51 Cseh-Varga, ‘The Troubled Public Sphere’. 52 ‘Do You See What I See?’ iparterv, Párhuzamos Kronológiák/Parallel Chronologies. Available online: http://exhibition-history.blog.hu/tags/h%3Aiparterv (accessed 13 October 2017). 53 According to Tamás Szentjóby there were two more actions that took place during the Do You See What I See? event series: VILÁNG and Bloody Film (Véres Film). In Bloody Film the artist projected a film the material of which was rubbed in with blood. In VILÁNG (which as a meaningless word cannot be translated into English) Szentjóby gave two large, printed sewing patterns to those members of the audience who were sitting in the first row. The performer asks them to glue these on his cloths. Szentjóby takes of his belt and wraps it around his left forearm and his fingers. The artist gouges a whole into a loaf of bread, he pours oil into it and lights it on fire. Szentjóby takes another prop, namely a sponge, which he plunges into red colour. Then he quickly writes the word ‘VILÁNG’ on a blackboard set up in the action space. After this, the artist exits the space promptly. Information provided by the artists, 8 August 2021. 54 Kemp-Welch, Antipolitics in Central European Art, p. 119. 55 Tamás Szntjóby, táv. akció magnetofonra, DONOR-est, 1968, IPARTERV. Documentation provided by the artist. 56 Kemp-Welch, Antipolitics in Central European Art, p. 119. ­57 Tamás Szentjóby, Olvasni. Akció-Felolvasás, DONOR-est, 1968, IPARTERV. Documentation provided by the artist. 58 Gábor Altorjay mentions the importance of his, Miklós Erdély’s and Tamás Szentjóby’s first action poetry event in May 1967 at the Young Writers’ House (Fiatal Írók Háza). Gábor Altorjay, email to the author, 11 September 2021. 59 A term used by Alan Kaprow. Tamás Szentjóby’s addition to the manuscript from 8 August 2021. 60 Šuvaković, cited in Dietmar Unterkofler, ‘Connection to the World,’ pp. 46–47. 61 Ibid.; remark: the term ‘reservations’ has other connotations, but it is used here because it is the most commonly used expression in English-language scholarship to describe this environment. 62 The club of the Union of Applied Arts (Iparművészeti Szövetség). Ferenc Kőszeg, cited in Csizmadia, A magyar demokratikus ellenzék, p. 131. 63 Ganz-MÁVAG was a central factory of railroad engine, wagon and machine production. 64 Stark, ‘A szocializmus “aranykora”,’ p. 213. 65 Ibid. 66 Cseh-Varga, Interview with György Jovánovics. 67 ‘A klubmozgalomról,’ Hiány. Független politikai és kultúrális lap, Vol. 1, Issue 1, 25 April 1988. pp. 12–14, here p. 12.

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68 Ibid. 69 ‘Simultaneously to the appearance of independent film making with preliminarily S8-mm and later on with video technology, a production and presentation network bound to university clubs and culture houses developed.’ Miklós Peternák, ‘Interdisziplinarität und neue Medien in der ungarischen Kunst der vergangenen drei Jahrzehnte oder: Auf wen hatte Miklós Erdély Einfluss und auf wen nicht?’ in Hans Knoll (ed.), Die zweite Öffentlichkeit. Kunst in Ungarn im 20. Jahrhundert, Dresden: Fine Arts, 1999, pp. 234–255, here p. 247. 70 Tábor, A váratlan kultúra, p. 206. 71 Katalin Cseh-Varga, Interview with János Vető, 31 March 2021, online. 72 Csilla Bényi, ‘Művészeti események a Bercsényi Klubban 1963-1987,’ Ars Hungarica, Issue 1, 2002. Available online: http://www.artpool.hu/BercsenyiKlub/ html (accessed 12 May 2015). 73 Csilla Bényi, ‘A Bercsényi 28-30 című kiadvány repertóriuma,’ Ars Hungarica, special issue, Issue 2, 2002, pp. 387–410, here p. 387. 74 Bényi, ‘Művészeti események a Bercsényi Klubban 1963–1987’. 75 András Bán, ‘Magyar Avantgard Művészet Múzeuma,’ 2001 – The Year of Impossible – At Artpool – A lehetetlen éve. Available online: http://www.artpool.hu/ lehetetlen/real-kiall/mamuzeum/ban.html (accessed 3 November 2017). ­76 ‘KELE Judit. Magyar Avantgard Művészet Múzeuma,’ 2001 – The Year of Impossible – At Artpool – A lehetetlen éve. Available online: http://www.artpool.hu/ lehetetlen/real-kiall/mamuzeum/kele.html (accessed 3 November 2017). 77 Bán, ‘Magyar Avantgard Művészet Múzeuma’. 78 Tibor Hajas, Vigil, Bercsényi Residence Hall, 18 May 1980, translated into English by János Gát. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid. 81 Lóránd Hegyi, ‘Erdély-Hajas-Legéndy-Pauer. Alternatív művészet és a művészet státusza,’ Bercsényi 28–30. A 70-es évek, Issue 2, 1980, p. 9. 82 Hajas, Vigil. 83 Hegyi, ‘Erdély-Hajas-Legéndy-Pauer,’ p. 9. 84 Béla Kelényi, ‘A lélek tüzében égve. Hamvas Béla és a tibeti misztériumok,’ in Béla Kelényi and József Végh (eds.), A köztes lét túloldalán. Hajas Tibor művészete és a tibeti misztériumok, Budapest: Szépművészeti Múzeum and Hopp Ferenc Ázsiai Művészeti Múzeum, 2019, pp. 33–46, here pp. 45–46; with additions and corrections from János Gát from 31 July 2021. 85 Tibor Hajas cited in ibid., p. 33. 86 Katalin Cseh-Varga, Interview with János Gát, 16 March 2021, phone. 87 Cseh-Varga, Interview with János Vető. 88 ‘Harmincöt éves a FIKA,’ newspaper clipping, Source: Artpool Art Research Center.

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89 Róbert Barna, ‘Fiatal Művészek Klubja: Távol a Fikától,’ Magyar Narancs Online, Issue 16, 17 April 1997. Available online: http://magyarnarancs.hu/konyv/ fiatal_muveszek_klubja_tavol_a_fikatol-59536 (accessed 29 October 2017). 90 Ibid. 91 ‘Harmincöt éves a FIKA’. 92 Havasréti, Alternatív regiszterek, p. 166. 93 Barna, ‘Fiatal Művészek Klubja’. 94 ‘Artpool események 1979–1991,’ Artpool. Available online: https://www.artpool.hu/ eventshu79-91.html#Magyar (accessed 14 January 2020). 95 György Galántai, ‘Kapcsolatművészet és küldeményművészet,’ Artpool. Available online: https://www.artpool.hu/MailArt/Galantai.html (accessed 16 December 2019). 96 ‘Magyarország a tiéd lehet! Nemzetközi Magyarország / Hungary can be yours! International Hungary – a kiállítás a budapesti Fiatal Művészek Klubjában,’ Artpool. Available online: http://artpool.hu/Commonpress51/default.html (accessed 27 October 2017). 97 Ibid. 98 ‘Artpool Rádió 6 / Radio Artpool No. 6,’ Artpool. Available online: http://artpool. hu/sound/radio/6.html (accessed 27 October 2017). ­99 ‘Report by “Zoltán Pécsi”, a codenamed secret agent. Ministry of Interior. III/III4-b-Sub-department. TOP SECRET! Received from: “Zoltán Pécsi” code named secret agent. Received by: Tibor Horváth, Police captain. Place of reception: Public place. Time: January 30, 1984. Subject: Exhibition of György Galántai,’ Artpool. Available online: http://artpool.hu/Commonpress51/report.html (accessed 27 October 2017). 100 Miklós Erdély, ‘Ásványgyapot’, Aktuális Levél, Issue 7, January 1984, p. 24. 101 ‘Artpool Rádió 6 / Radio Artpool No. 6’. 102 ‘Magyarország a tiéd lehet!’ 103 Ibid. 104 ‘Report by “Zoltán Pécsi” codenamed secret agent,’ underlining in original material. 105 Artists from Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Canada, Poland, Mexico, Great Britain, the German Democratic Republic, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Panama, Spain, Switzerland, Uruguay and the United States participated with works in the exhibition. ‘Magyarország a tiéd lehet! Nemzetközi Magyarország– a kiállítás a budapesti Fiatal Művészek Klubjában (1984. január 27.). Résztvevők,’ Artpool. Available online: http://artpool.hu/Commonpress51/resztvevok.html (accessed 28 October 2017). 106 ‘Magyarország a tiéd lehet! Nemzetközi Magyarország / Hungary can be yours!’

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107 Not to mention the presence of members of the democratic opposition. The agent reported visits by, amongst others, Miklós Haraszti, attorney, sociologist and politician Gábor Demszky, György Krassó, philosopher, politician and public author Gáspár Miklós Tamás, János Kenedi, members of the Foundation for Supporting the Poor (Szegényeket Támogató Alapítvány, SZETA) and philosopher János Tamás Katona at the opening. ‘Report by “Zoltán Pécsi” code named secret agent’. 108 Balra át, jobbra át. Művészeti és politikai radikalizmus a Kádá-korban. Az Orfeo és az Inconnu csoport, exhibition at the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives Budapest, curated by Kristóf Nagy and Márton Szarvas, 3 October–24 November 2019. 109 ‘Inconnu Group (H),’ ‘Magyarország a tiéd lehet!’ Artpool. Available online: https:// www.artpool.hu/Commonpress51/inconnu5.html (accessed 7 April 2020). 110 Ibid. 111 Balra át, jobbra át. 112 Programme flyers by the Young Artists’ Club, Source: Artpool Art Research Center, Budapest. 113 Gergely Molnár, cited in Havasréti, Alternatív regiszterek, p. 175. 114 Ibid. 115 Hock, Gendered Artistic Positions and Social Voices, p. 190. ­116 Kristóf Nagy, ‘Az ismeretlen radikális. Bokros Péter emlékére,’ Új Művészet, Issue 2, February 2018, pp. 39–41, here p. 40. 117 Péter Bokros, cited in Csizmadia, A magyar demokratikus ellenzék (1968–1988), p. 363; ‘Belügyminisztérium. Szigorúan titkos! Különösen fontos! Jelentés,’ ‘Festő’ fn. dosszié, Artpool. Available online: http://www.galantai.hu/festo/1980/800300.html (accessed 1 November 2017). 118 Havasréti, Alternatív regiszterek, pp. 159–164, 250. 119 Cseh-Varga, ‘Innovative Practices of the Hungarian Samizdat,’ pp. 101–102. 120 Havasréti, Széteső dichotómiák, p. 65–66. 121 Ibid.

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Turning Private into Public: Apartment Culture

Apartments in Kádárian Hungary assumed the role of embryonic public spheres from around the mid-1950s through until the early 1980s. Because many artists who dissented from the artistic mandates of the socialist state equated their art with life projects,1 it is impossible to separate the (originally) private sphere from the realms of art production and intellectual debate. Indeed, the avant-garde project itself sought to remove the traditional boundary between art and life.2 Galántai’s expression of behaviour art also highlights that the production of art was both a lifestyle and a statement of one’s own worldview, including the artist’s attitude towards publicity. The public sphere that instigated this movement was very much as Elzbieta Matynia has imagined it: a publicized private sphere, ‘in which it was possible to bring some pieces of the public realm back and to reassemble them into a publicized private, a nascent public sphere. The publicized private meant here an objectified, embryonic, discursive sphere open to a limited public’.3 By the 1950s in communist Hungary, a tiny, narrow sphere of open discourse about art had already emerged. The venue for this small but innovative forum was the apartment. When discussing the transformations of the public sphere in late socialist Poland, Matynia makes an important observation: that because the first public sphere was no longer a forum for participation and dialogue, the private sphere took on new functions. Rather than, say, the streets, the home – which is usually a place of intimacy and refuge – assumed the role of the (ideal) public sphere in communist societies. What was considered private in these societies was not actually private, Matynia proposes, because the state’s reach extended deep into so many areas of society. To her, the private sphere in late socialist Poland coexisted with the official public sphere, and included a number of activities that

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were happening inside the living spaces of citizens and outside bureaucratized society. Small theatres across Central Europe, Matynia argues, succeeded in turning the private sphere into ‘centers of critical thinking, imbued with a spirit of civic responsibility, practicing self-governance, and committed to engagement with the public’.4 In most cases, the apartment as a site for the production and discussion of experimental art under socialist regimes was not the first venue preferred by neo-avant-gardists. Because of the exclusion of certain artistic activities from the ordered public sphere, private spaces that were originally intended to be personal and intimate were re-functionalized. Matynia’s notion of the publicized private in part refers to this process of repurposing through which private spaces lost a significant part of their intimacy and instead became home to activities that in more open societies would have taken place in the first public sphere. Further, the apartment became a drop-in centre for alternative communication and artistic experimentation. Like Matynia, art historian Luiza Nader has also noted that in communist Poland, the private sphere tended to compensate for the absence of a genuine public realm. She cites the activity of the Polish apartment gallery Battery Gallery 2 (Galeria Akumulatory 2), which was run by Jarosław Kozłowski in Poznań between 1972 and 1989 and is an example of how private space served public purposes under a totalitarian political regime: ‘A central point . . . is the private and public space’s set of problems and the extension of the space’s limitations in the framework of which the artist has a right to “private” opinions . . . [Battery Gallery 2] became a venue in which the private sphere represented a stage on the road towards pure public discourse.’5 Nader’s assessment of the function and significance of Battery Gallery 2 could also be applied to many other East-Central European locations that were formerly private. The use of the apartment as a creative site in Kádárian Hungary has a long history. For example, László Végh regularly organized a series of musical evenings, readings, parties and ad hoc actions in his apartment for a circle of close friends from the 1950s until the early 1960s. Végh’s ‘audience’ comprised poets in the early stages of their careers, artists in search of a new literary language, and enemies of professionalism and supporters of improvisation who presented their newest works in this intimate community.6 Gábor Altorjay and Tamás Szentjóby were frequent visitors at Végh’s apartment, and were inspired by his ‘actionist’ lifestyle to organize the first Hungarian happening in 1966. In the period of suspense and repressive state restrictions following the defeat of the 1956 uprising, Végh’s gatherings, with their atmosphere of collective exchange,

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opposed the pressures of consolidation that were increasingly characterizing Kádárian politics in its early years. Decades later, in the relatively more relaxed political climate of the time, two galleries operated under the name Artery Gallery (Artéria Galéria). One of them was established in 1984 in the apartment of the politically and aesthetically radical Inconnu Group,7 while the other was the first privately owned art trade gallery, founded in a flat in 1986. This latter gallery featured artwork from all the artist galleries in the city of Szentendre near Budapest. While aiming to integrate Hungarian contemporary art into the international art market, it also functioned as an art workshop and exhibition venue.8 Like László Végh’s apartment, both Artery Galleries were examples of how apartment culture influenced the contemporary art scene. The apartment culture of the second public sphere acted both as a constraint on artists and simultaneously as a way to get around the restrictions on presenting and discussing art imposed on artists and intellectuals by the authorities. However, at the same time, the apartment was an unconventional testing ground for inventive practices that sometimes consciously challenged socialist ideas of ‘privacy’. This redefined private sphere in Hungary thus became a forum for exchange and discussions: Ádám Tábor called the apartments of artists and art theorists ‘intellectual workshops’ (szellemi műhelyek).9 In his book on Hungarian alternative culture, The Unexpected Culture (A váratlan kultúra, 1997), Tábor identified a number of ‘culture apartments’ in Budapest at which artists diversified and undermined the homogenizing approach of the Kádárian public sphere in the late 1960s and 1970s. The poets Amy Károlyi and Sándor Weöres, for instance, welcomed to their flat individuals who were interested in increasing their personal contacts in the literary scene. A collective also formed around art historian Katalin S. Nagy, which met in the apartment of the painter Albert Kováts and Péter Donáth.10 Tábor himself had a circle of friends, the EMKE circle (EMKE kör), who regularly discussed philosophical and historical matters, and he was also involved in the establishment of one of the first (home) literary workshops in 1970–1971. The participants in this workshop included the director, actor, poet and writer István Bálint; the writer, dramatic adviser, screenwriter and social psychologist Árpád Ajtony; and the writer and film director Géza Bereményi. This particular culture apartment was located in Budapest’s Rottenbiller Street, and was owned by sculptor József Jakovits, and the painters Júlia Vajda and Endre Bálint.11 The main roles that these intellectual workshops played were to fill information gaps, to bring together opposition figures and deepen dissent against the Kádárian regime, to mobilize creative and intellectual potential, and to promote greater freedom of expression.

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This chapter discusses three examples of the Budapest apartment culture that together highlight the significance of apartments to the creation of a second public sphere in a society that did not officially allow the free exchange of opinion. The first apartment culture I explore is that of the Zugló circle (Zuglói Kör, 1958–1968), which functioned like a self-education group. The second is the salon run by Pál Petrigalla, which served as a miniature cultural forum (1956/7–1970/2). The third, the apartment theatre in Dohány Street (1972–1975), was where a new form of performance/theatre was introduced. As these examples will show, apartment culture was multifaceted, and functioned in different ways according to the needs of the artistic and intellectual circles that came together in each of them. While the Budapest-based Zugló circle mostly consisted of painters, for example, the salon of Pál Petrigalla brought together music lovers and became what is best described as one of the earliest intellectual workshops in Kádár’s Hungary. At both these sites, expertise was fostered and developed through intensive discussions and the collective sharing of information. Sometimes, these discussions were based on data and material from abroad that had been smuggled by attendees into these trusted circles, and often, the material from abroad – and the ideas and debates it sparked – was applied and adapted to the Hungarian context, and was used to fuel discussions reaching beyond boundaries of the ordered public sphere. In the case of the Dohány Street apartment theatre, the immediacy of the actions there played a central role in redefining the flat as a place of refuge and intimacy. Key aesthetic elements of non-representational performance such as improvisation and shock directly confronted the existence of an obedient public sphere.

The Zugló circle In Hungarian art historiography, the Budapest-based Zugló circle is regarded as a circle of self-education because the group was mostly focused on knowledge acquisition and the discussion of ideas. The artists belonging to the circle initially sympathized with the artist group of the European School (Európai Iskola, 1945–1948), which had aimed to cultivate surrealist and modern styles with transnational implications by refusing to recognize any distinction between the West and East-Central European art scenes. The historical avantgarde was similarly important to them.12 Raised intellectually on the ‘study of Kandinsky’s, Mondrian’s, Malevich’s and Jean Bazain’s texts’, the Zugló circle’s

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artists also collected and debated ‘information from books and catalogues about contemporary art’.13 The apartment of painter Sándor Molnár was located in Queen Elizabeth Street (Erzsébet királyné útja) 89, in the Budapest district of Zugló. From 1962 onwards, this apartment was a meeting point for Imre Bak, conservator Klára Deák, Sándor Molnár, sculptor István Pikler and István Nádler. The apartment had an ambience that promoted lively discussion – it was described as an ‘autodidactic spot of further education as well as a stomping ground of the art scene’.14 It also provided a substitute path of learning for the incomplete academic education that the members of the collective had hitherto received. In an environment similar to that of an academic seminar, the participants talked about the origins, traditions, and possible future directions of non-figurative painting. Their information sources were mostly art magazines and books brought across the Iron Curtain from the West.15 According to Gábor Attalai, the Zugló circle was an expression of its members’ shared inner need to find an outlet through which they could escape the era’s ‘darkness’. The group formed as early as 1958–1959, and met once or twice a week for around a decade, up until about 1968.16 The analytical methods used by the Zugló circle to investigate foreign ideas stemmed from the work of contemporary Hungarian intellectuals, including Béla Hamvas.17 Hamvas is an important figure here because his philosophy aligned with the ideals of the second public sphere. His concepts of universal orientation and transparent existence, for instance, represented approaches towards life and culture that ran contrary to dictatorial hierarchies. His universal orientation meant a need for intellectual freedom in approaching ideas, theories and ideologies without any limitations. The concept of transparent existence represented the simplification, accessibility, and above all the openness of human reality. Another important argument made by Hamvas was that these two principles must be applied to reality to overcome monolithic thinking and acting. In other words, open-mindedness needed to be implemented in real life to transcend the hierarchic social and cultural structures of the time.18 Because Hamvas was also a regular visitor at Pál Petrigalla’s salon, he played an important role in Budapest apartment culture not only by inspiring groups such as the Zugló circle but also through direct active participation.19 During socialist rule, the implementation of Hamvasian principles was only welcome at venues promoting the spirit and agenda of the second public sphere.20 Gábor Andrási, who has published a thorough reconstruction of the group’s activities, has noted that the main activity of the Zugló circle’s members was

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collecting and sharing information on contemporary art. Data accumulation was a strategic challenge, as obtaining material from the closed sections of libraries required finding ways around the rules. The same applied to travelling to Western Europe. At times when members were particularly thirsty for knowledge and inspiration (caused largely by the limited programmes of official institutions, such as the Hungarian Art Academy), neo-avant-gardists needed to be inventive, strategic and well organized to gain access to unfiltered knowledge.21 The Zugló circle therefore kept a close eye on texts, reproductions, magazines and catalogues, which they reproduced and distributed. If materials were only accessible in a foreign language, capable group members took the initiative and made their own translations. Similar to the process of self-publishing (samizdat) in the 1980s in communist countries, where the underground editing, printing and distribution of illegal magazines and books involved a careful division of labour, the members of the Zugló circle shared the tasks involved in manually collecting and circulating readings and images. Through this process, the circle essentially self-published texts running to hundreds of pages. This extensive ‘samizdat’ operation gained a readership beyond the apartment’s intimate circle, as the Zugló circle’s reader network was far wider than just the few people meeting at Molnár’s twice a week.22 The discussions that led to the precise analytical methodology of the group were self-reflexive and transparent. Because most of the Zugló circle’s members were practising artists, their theoretical considerations shaped the art they produced. Learning by doing was the highest level of transforming, communicating and sustaining knowledge, as it captured ideas in physical forms that could then be further discussed. The debates were at their most intense when the members attached to the circle had a chance to put their (mostly) abstract art on display.23 A frequently used (and for a while, the only) venue where members of the Zugló circle could display their works was Pál Petrigalla’s salon. Across 1963 and 1964, Bak, painter Endre Hortobágyi, Csiky, Nádler, Molnár, Csutoros and sculptor, graphic designer and painter Miklós Halmy all exhibited there. As Gábor Andrási states, ‘[r]egardless of what kind of “selected” and subcultural audience saw the events, it was still an audience; at the exhibition openings, there was a possibility for conversations and discussions. In the records of the guest books [at Petrigalla’s], besides older colleagues, one can find the names of writers, poets and actors’.24 Indeed, the semi-public spheres of the Zugló circle, the Petrigalla salon, and even László Végh’s creative workshop were intertwined, with members and supporters of one group frequently interacting and overlapping with those of other alternative art and culture groups.

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These networks and interactions enabled the flow of information between the different groups, thus strengthening and broadening the second public sphere. The intellectual workshops, as sites of encounters, therefore functioned as semi-autonomous forums enabling knowledge acquisition, discussion and communication. They were established in the context of an information embargo imposed by the state and, as the Zugló circle illustrates, attracted participants who had all reached the conclusion that their creativity could only be restored through self-made knowledge and exchange. As the story of the salon of Pál Petrigalla illustrates, another defining characteristic of apartment culture was that it was basically a vanguard of the flourishing club movement, with its multifaceted programme which overcame the boundaries of different artforms.

The salon of Pál Petrigalla From the aftermath of the 1956 revolution until the early 1970s, Pál Petrigalla’s large apartment in Budapest’s Vécsey Street was a legendary venue of encounters: it functioned as a ‘cultural centre’25 for music and literature, as an exhibition site,26 and as a venue hosting art discussions and readings. Some lectures introduced contemporary musical compositions not only in words but also through actual audio recordings of the pieces themselves. For example, the programme series Musica et Literatura Nova, which began in August 1961, combined the media of literature and music within the framework of readings. Although music was the main focus, the host at this culture apartment did not exclude other experimental tendencies from the programme spectrum.27 Ádám Tábor remembered that ‘Károly Tamkó Sirató, painter and poet Géza Büki as well as [Rudolf] Ungváry had read their works aloud, the group of young actionists from the circle of dr. László Végh . . . performed, and [poet, author, and music teacher] Jenő Balaskó appeared together with [poet, performer, and actress] Katalin Ladik on the scene even on two nights’.28 As this description by Tábor indicates, the salon was home to performative, multimedia and intermedia events. Creativity flourished at Petrigalla’s despite the state’s obsession with social control that was particularly pronounced in the early years of the Kádár regime. In an oppressive atmosphere following the defeat of the 1956 revolution and the failed reforms, the apartment culture islands had a rehabilitating and curative effect. Artists found that connecting and exchanging information and opinions with like-minded individuals was a necessity for contemporary non-realist art’s survival.

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Figure 5.1  László Végh’s and Géza Büky’s improvisation night at Pál Petrigalla’s salon, 1964.

The programming and schedule of Petrigalla’s salon did not follow the mandate given to mainstream cultural organizations by the authorities that their work had to support communism. By not controlling those who entered and paying no heed to the notion of state control over the events on the programme, Petrigalla’s apartment contrasted with the directives of Kádárian cultural politics. Anyone from within the circle of regular attendees could participate in shaping the schedule. The outcome of the energetic discussions was, according to Gábor Attalai, worth ‘much more than any culture event in an official state institution’.29 The programmes of the salon attracted different generations of intellectuals, writers, fine artists and musicians. In-depth research by sociologist Lóránt Bódi has shown that the salon’s most dominant means of communication was oral, complemented by visual, intermedia presentations and interactive exchange. Exhibitions, readings and music events were popular among cultural players in the non-realist contemporary art scene who received information about the happenings on invitation cards and typed-out programme sheets. The schedules were put together either collectively, or by various individuals; the apartment was, however, assigned to Petrigalla.30 In the spirit of the improvised actions that were part of his performative lifestyle, László Végh once organized a spontaneous and somewhat bizarre

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procession to Petrigalla’s apartment through the Freedom Square (Szabadság tér), which went right past the Hungarian parliament building. Végh wore a Moroccan teacher’s costume with a long cape decorated with a cross. Painter, graphic designer and film director Elek Lisziák followed Végh wearing a red tailcoat. After a while, Lisziák recognized that they were being followed by a Soviet soldier. Being pursued disturbed neither Végh nor Lisziák; they continued on their way, shouting and singing Petrigalla’s name. In Végh’s recollections of this event, Petrigalla did not want to attract attention and therefore tried to hide in his apartment, but he was unable in the end to prevent his costumed guests from entering the flat, even though a Beethoven evening was in full swing at the time of their arrival. Végh and Lisziák then ‘occupied’ the site. They began to play variations of jazz and exotic music. After that, Végh switched back to classical music and played Bach on the piano. Petrigalla appeared worried that the arrivals might cause a sensation. To this concern, Végh’s reaction was surprisingly provocative: he turned to the only radio in Petrigalla’s living room and greeted it with the following words: ‘Strength and health Companion Lieutenant! We have just arrived, you can begin with the recording!’ Petrigalla expressed distress, but Végh tried to reassure him: there was no need to worry, because they were being taped anyway. According to Végh, this absurd situation ended in a cheerful ball.31 Végh’s ad hoc idea to cause a bit of disturbance in the daily routine of Petrigalla’s salon highlights important historical and theoretical constellations of encounters at ‘private’ sites. On the one hand, communication in the apartment cultural venues had performative elements and applied intermedia tools, and, like Végh’s action, often challenged the customs and norms of disciplined behaviour. Indeed, the mimetic exaggeration and costumed appearance of Végh and Lisziák shook the community of peaceful music listeners in the Vécsey street apartment. Through their chosen action, the costumed figures neglected the customary forms of communication. That said, Petrigalla had immediately recognized that Végh’s action would call attention to his alternative venue and draw the interest of the authorities – especially given that his apartment was surrounded by government buildings. Végh and Lisziák’s provocation contained a paradox. Végh himself had worked as an agent trying to infiltrate alternative cultural groups between 1951 and 1962. But, beginning in around August 1961, following one of his lectures and musical demonstrations, Végh slowly turned from being an agent into becoming a target. Although his diary entries provide a detailed record of his daily activities between 1961 and 1970, it is not known precisely

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when the comical (yet from Petrigalla’s perspective terrifying) procession took place. But, it remains an important detail that at the time of the action and afterwards, Végh remained a figure of trust straddling both the second and the first public spheres.32 His ability to be part of both the official world of the socialist government and Budapest’s artistic underground points to the existence of ongoing controversies around culture and art in Kádárian Hungary, as well as to the interdependency of the public spheres. Végh’s provocation of having a ‘conversation’ with the radio was a subversive act of self-representation. Without the knowledge of those present at Petrigalla’s apartment, Végh essentially performed his own co-presence in both the non-obedient and the ordered public realm. It did not matter whether or not Petrigalla was under surveillance; Végh’s gesture called attention to the fact that there was no ‘outside’ of the regime’s control. Apartment culture, as read through Végh’s action, had never been independent. The salon of the ‘culture manager’ Petrigalla was a passage between the desired and the real public sphere. This is also the case because Petrigalla was kept under observation by the secret police after 1956, yet was also regularly approached by the staterun Hungarian Radio (Magyar Rádió), seeking to borrow items from his huge musical collection.33 Like Végh, Petrigalla personified two distinct but overlapping spheres of Hungarian cultural life. The atmosphere of the salon was dominated by the character of Petrigalla himself. As with Végh, some uncertainty still exists as to which public sphere, the first or the second, the host truly belonged to. He took every possible chance to sabotage the regulated cultural scene while simultaneously keeping his visitors in the dark as to whether he was a double-agent. Almost no one who knew him personally could identify his real position.34 As an individual, Petrigalla went beyond the dichotomies established by the existence of both the underground and dictatorship. Because of this uncertain position, he could get away with subverting aspects of official culture in subtle ways. These were mostly limited to subliminal critiques; for instance, when reading articles from the socialist press aloud and without adding any additional commentary, Petrigalla simply expressed his disfavour with a distorted facial expression or by changing his accent.35 Instead of overtly criticizing the Kádárian regime or its policies, as a host he provided stimuli for discussions that tended to be anti-government in tone and nature. An agent report from a government spy revealed Petrigalla’s derisive undertone when the latter welcomed a visitor to the apartment exhibition by Imre Bak on 5  April 1964 with the words: ‘We are currently opening an abstract show in honour of Comrade Khrushchev.’36

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According to other reports, Petrigalla also obtained news and information from illegal sources, such as the US government’s official external broadcaster, Voice of America, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) radio and the US government-funded Radio Free Europe, which broadcast information from the West into Eastern Europe.37 The spatial arrangements and facilities of Petrigalla’s flat could also be described as subverting the Kádárian regime, through mocking expressions of loyalty towards it. The interior of the salon included a Russian icon painting, a János Vaszary tableau, reproductions of Renaissance and Baroque art, and porcelain sculptures of Rákosi, Lenin and Mao Zedong.38 This mixture of epochs, styles and ideologies could equally easily be interpreted as an ironic commentary on political conformity, as nonconformist decorations, or as an expression of Petrigalla’s broad interests through carrying the message that each and every intellectual current was welcome, without limits. Due to his subversive personality, though, Petrigalla belonged more to the second public sphere than the first. As was mentioned above, the main medium of communication during gatherings at the apartment was sound and voice. Due to Petrigalla’s reputation as a well-known record collector, the most important collective activity in the apartment was listening to music. The repertoire included many classical and jazz works, including recordings by Duke Ellington, Oscar Peterson, the Coltrane Modern Jazz Quartet and Jacques Loussier.39 The frequent presence of László Végh also introduced modern and electronic music. The collective music listening often went hand in hand with lectures and discussions. From 1959 onwards, the programme included readings, fine art, photography exhibitions and film screenings. In the main activities area, a relatively small living room of about 30 square metres that could host up to sixty-five people,40 exhibitions of works by Imre Bak, sculptor and coin artist Tibor Csiky, István Nádler, painter Béla Veszelszky and Gábor Attalai, among others, were held. Csiky put on an exhibition featuring different types of spoons, while mathematician Tihamér Vujicsics held a concert after returning from a mathematics congress in the West. The musical presentation was followed by a report on achievements in his field of expertise.41 Events such as these, along with the conversations that took place at exhibitions, for instance about modern painting and the history of modern art,42 indicate that in the early to mid-1960s, the salon was one of the few venues of encounter where neo-avant-gardist art could achieve a publicized privacy. The activities within, and even the very existence of, Petrigalla’s site of gatherings

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challenged the cultural cartography of the ordered public sphere. It is hard to grasp the entirety of the many and varied programmes43 that shaped alternative communication, but there is no doubt that the salon, like the Zugló circle, was simultaneously both an essential forum for self-education and an intellectual workshop.

Performing the private: The apartment theatre in Dohány Street Klaus Groh, the editor of Contemporary Art in Eastern Europe (Aktuelle Kunst in Osteuropa, 1972), an anthology of contemporary artists from East, Central and Southeast Europe, visited the apartment theatre in Dohány Street in 1973 and summarized his impressions in a brief article published in the German journal diascope. Groh reported on the representation of everyday acts of banality and the abolition of borders between artworks and reality. He also detected a sort of cheerfulness and criticism in a piece performed in the apartment on Dohány Street. The spontaneous nature of the performance and these surprising elements reminded Groh of the avant-garde tradition.44 The performance Groh witnessed took place in the two-room flat of two of the apartment theatre’s founders, Péter Halász and Anna Koós, who were also a couple at the time.45 The space that the audience entered was unmistakeably equipped for everyday living, yet stories were being performed there. With or without costumes, the stories were ‘staged’ as fiction, as myths, as playful get-togethers, or as entanglements of fictional and real experiences. Although the apartment theatre activities took place between early 1972 and the autumn of 1975, the history of the group that performed at Dohány Street reaches back into the 1960s. As Marianne Kollár Bongolan, a former member of the Dohány Street collective, has explained, the group began in one apartment then found another. To her, the origins of the apartment theatre lie in the famous Rottenbiller Street flat where she lived for many years with her first husband, István Bálint. Kollár Bongolan remembers this ‘private’ intellectual workshop as ‘a unique spiritual meeting space frequented by many artists through several decades’.46 She explains that: The shared interests and ongoing exchange of ideas which flowed indirectly influenced and supported each other. Our [Marianne Kollár Bongolan and István Bálint’s – K. Cs.-V.] living space served as a public forum to present events such as

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experimental concerts by composers Gyorgy Kurtag [sic] and Peter Eotvos [sic], puppet shows, lectures, underground exhibits, readings by young poets and established authors alike, and later on, theatre performances.47

This spirit transferred to the first theatre and club experiences in the 1960s and early 1970s, before moving on to another creative apartment setting. The core members of the group belonged to the circle that formed around the university theatre Universitas in Budapest. Many group members were connected to this exceptional institution that was, especially under director József Ruszt, experimental in nature, and whose personnel were allowed to travel abroad to present new productions. Through their travels and the intellectual milieu to which members were exposed, the founding collective of the apartment theatre became acquainted with, amongst others, Jerzy Grotowski, Antonin Artaud and the Living Theatre. Due to a conflict with the Universitas leadership, Péter Halász, Anna Koós and Péter Breznyik left the company in 1969. Others, such as István Bálint, Marianne Kollár and Éva Buchmüller joined them later to establish the Kassák House Studio.48 After performing regularly at clubs such as the Lajos Kassák Culture House (also known as Kassák Club) until January 1972, an unconventional performance entitled The Skanzen Killers (A Skanzen gyilkosai) prompted the core group to seek new spaces where they could collaborate and stage plays. The performance adopted a critical approach towards traditional upbringing and father/son relationships. It also contained simultaneous actions that did not follow any linear narrative, and had nudity at the core of its performance. This was the moment at which the authorities decided to crack down on the performance collective. From the point of view of the communist regime, the play was both politically problematic and obscene49 – features that the state also saw in other productions at the time. Because performances at the Kassák Club did not meet the aesthetic or political requirements of socialist cultural politics, the collective was compelled to leave semi-official venues. The Kassák House Studio was also targeted by a large-scale official clampdown on experimental artforms. Around the turn of the 1970s, the authorities carried out a final, extensive crackdown on dissent in politics, philosophy and the arts.50 Against this background, the former Kassák House Studio members were forced to try to find a new site at which to perform before ultimately leaving the country in January 1976 – this site was the Dohány Street apartment.51 The intimacy and self-determination of the Dohány Street apartment was turned upside down by transferring the ‘stage’ into a living space. The tension

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between daily routine and the aesthetics of nonconformity has been recognized by many scholars who have engaged with the history of the group, including Gabriella Schuller, author of a set of works on the apartment theatre, some of which have dealt with the frontier between everyday life and theatre as explored at Dohány Street. The relationship between life and art was relevant from a performance theory point of view because, as Schuller points out, the apartment theatre was a model of alternative and collective lifestyles.52 At the apartment, this way of life constantly crossed into performative processes. To Anna Koós, who was an important organizer and member of the ‘ensemble’, theatre represented the artistic way of living together.53 This connection between alternative art and alternative lifestyles is perhaps one of the reasons why the communist authorities sought to control art in order to safeguard their preferred form of social order. In 1986, István Bálint, who had largely been in charge of creating texts and scripts out of the collective’s ideas, recalled his time in Dohány Street in the following way: The rules of the theatre were formed and changed by the taste, fantasy and personal relationships of the performers, and by the social and antisocial position of the group itself. Drama was born there from everyday dramas, and private lives were changed by art. In that place, theatre aesthetics was not an illusion of something else, but equal to life.54

Life was indeed the inspiration for most of the actions and performances that occurred at the theatre, which were in turn interacting with reality. Péter Halász, the best known of the apartment theatre’s members, was not as utopian in outlook as Bálint or Koós. To him, rather than abolishing the boundaries between art and life, the performance collective was about provoking, overcoming, questioning and playing off against the borders between everyday life and art. According to Halász, the borders themselves were always in the foreground: ‘theatre was never equal to life. It is inspired by life, but it has a self-reliant existence.’55 He did not deny the connections and interplay between art and life, but no matter how much living and ‘acting’ in the same space were interlinked, for him this did not automatically mean that life and art were merged. Those who entered Koós and Halász’ apartment expected to see a performance; Halász argued that that expectation alone could make the difference between reality and fiction. The earliest apartment performances by the collective took place in the famous Rottenbiller Street intellectual workshop; the flat in Dohány Street 20 was only ‘occupied’ after Koós and Halász inherited it in 1972.56 To some members of the collective, such as those who had been accustomed to sharing their work in

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public in the period at the Universitas, the retreat into privacy is likely to have felt constraining. But, to others it was a conscious decision to expand the creative possibilities, since performing on regular theatre stages and at festivals meant a need to conform to certain expectations.57 For the next four years, between 1972 and 1976, the apartment provided a non-censored atmosphere for neo-avantgarde experiments. According to Gabriella Schuller, this characteristic of the non-obedient public sphere can be explained through philosopher Hakim Bey’s concept of temporary autonomous zones.58 Bey defines these fields of experience and influence as physical and mental areas of intense involvement, featuring the participation of actors pursuing similar interests. They only flourish for a limited time before they collapse and reassemble somewhere else, with different participants and guiding principles.59 However, while Bey’s concept accurately captures the transience of much of the activity that took place in the apartment theatre, it should also be stressed that the Dohány Street theatre group was not an island, and that its performers did not enjoy absolute autonomy. For example, members of the apartment theatre were secretly observed by government agents. Because performing was a part of life, or was closely related to it, and because the living environment was a source of inspiration, the experience of performing in the apartment had a significant impact on the group’s performance style and method, as well as on members’ overall thinking – and even their way of life.60 Although Halász once claimed that the group proclaimed that any place they performed was a stage,61 the apartment theatre on the whole opposed the structures of a ‘consolidated middle-class theatre’, characterized by rows of seating in front of an elevated platform for performance.62 For example, it ignored the traditional, clear-cut division between spectators and performers: the separation of those consuming art from their seats and those presenting a story at a distance. To many, this made the apartment theatre much more real, authentic and direct.63 The lifestyles of the members who performed in the studio, as well as the plays themselves, further critiqued official disciplinary measures through their radicality of form.64 A woman wearing a cabbage head, a man embodying a giant gorilla’s penis, or a large blanket stretched across the apartment dotted with holes through which heads could pass all fell far outside the bounds of socialist expectations of art. The performances in the apartment theatre were non-realist, non-naturalist and non-impressionist, and they usually lacked any kind of structured chronological narration. Each production deconstructed pieces of reality and used them to construct an antagonistic anti-system. The apartment theatre in Dohány Street thus distanced itself from the hierarchies and structures

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of the bureaucratic state while simultaneously creating a model of how the second public sphere could function and thrive. Furthermore, the apartment theatre not only highlighted the restrictions and limitations of behavioural patterns forced on Hungarian citizens; it also subverted other values of a communist society, the most significant of these being collectivism and brotherhood. The group lived and worked in a commune-like setting,65 as although the apartment was owned by Halász and Koós, other members and their families occasionally stayed there for various lengths of time. The apartment theatre did not pursue equality as a goal, but there was a democratic element to the performances staged there, where, for example, the same person could embody different characters during productions. In this sense, the socialist ideals of brotherhood and equality did not manifest themselves in the apartment theatre in ways that would have met with the Communist Party’s approval. The radicalism of form, and to a lesser extent the content of the performances at the Dohány Street theatre, were ways to provoke and criticize the Kádárian regime. One of the most radical critical positions that the members of the apartment theatre adopted was to entirely disregard the very existence of the regime.66 Acting and living as though no dictatorship even existed is often cited today as having been the guiding principle of the group and its members. In an interview with Péter Halász from 1991, he recalled that: ‘We told ourselves, that if we freely did what we did, simply without asking for permission, we basically denied the existence of the regime.’67 This denial of living under a repressive system underlined how clandestine art could be simultaneously confrontational, but also ambiguous in refusing to allow the labelling of visual, performative and intermedia art as unambiguously political. In his interview, Halász also reported the insertion of scandal into the group’s performances. He highlighted the strength of the theatre members’ desire to cause a disturbance, and how ignorance of the conditions of socialism could be a fruitful ground for aesthetic dissent: ‘Freedom is much bigger, if one is not constantly worried about how overwhelming being trapped is. One should use exclamation marks. This strategy was, by the way, in line with our exhibitionist existence.’68 The apartment theatre members’ dissenting attitudes were most reflected in their performative tools and ways of expression. The theatre group’s emphasis on bodily presence, including nudity and improvisation, rejected classical, representative role-play, and was more about the direct transmission of content and interactions with visitors.69 The directness of their performances made each apartment piece all the more effective, and sometimes even disturbing. The idiosyncratic physical technique of the apartment theatre70 was, according to

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theatre studies scholar Magdolna Jákfalvi, an alternative to the classical use of language71 – both in theatre, and in everyday life under the communist regime. This rejection of disciplinary mechanisms was also evident in the spontaneity of the actions and performances that Péter Donáth described as more or less amounting to ‘fooling around’.72 During these performances, ideas popped into the heads of members of the group, who would improvise accordingly while following the rough structure they had established beforehand. The apartment theatre thus built an aesthetic anti-system within the all-encompassing Kádárian system with its prioritization of order and predictability.

The apartment theatre facing the ordered public sphere The coexistence of these two systems – the Kádárian regime’s social rules and the apartment theatre’s violation of those rules – was a complex situation. Much of the confusion and conflict stemmed from the fact that the state’s control of art either did not fully understand or outright misunderstood the neo-avant-garde productions taking place in the second public sphere.73 The often exaggerated, subversive gestures and the body language used at Dohány Street 20, for example, were seen as provocations to the conformist behaviour and aesthetic norms propagated by the ordered public sphere.74 Ideological warfare against the Kassák House Studio, and later against the Dohány Street apartment theatre, was carried out on numerous fronts in the press and through secret service surveillance. It amounted to a step-by-step ‘stage ban’ of the group, first from culture houses, then even from the apartment, culminating in the forced emigration of a number of the group members, including István Bálint and Péter Halász. In order to understand why the authorities ultimately found the presence of the group to be intolerable, we can consider a 1971 article by editor and film critic György Báron, for instance, who associated the early work of the group with the international phenomenon of the ‘happening’.75 To Báron, the liberated, untamed performance style and the spatial convergence of stage and auditorium were both immediate signs of the happening’s influence. Báron was, however, sceptical about the happening due to its hostility towards socialist culture, expressing serious concerns about how happening-like productions could fit into Hungarian art and culture. As has been discussed, the Kassák House Studio’s ‘acting style’ violated the antiquated rules governing the dramatic unity of space, time and action. According to Báron, each of its performances ended up in a pointless play without a climax.76

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Báron’s pejorative rhetoric about the linguistic and aesthetic deconstruction that was a hallmark of the Kassák House Studio, and his classification of it as a form of the condemned happening, was an example of counterpropaganda. In other words, the description of the Kassák House Studio’s performances as antisocialist and happening-like77 represented an attempt to demonize experimental theatre. Secret agents also participated in the crucible. In a 1973 essay, avantgarde film-maker Gábor Bódy wrote that the performances at the apartment theatre were ‘politically objectionable’. The productions were, he claimed, a ‘transgression against moral issues’.78 Other accusations made against the Kassák House Studio across diverse official media outlets ranged from blaspheming the dead to promoting the corruption of the morality of children, sexual violation, criminality,79 and obscenity.80 The official publications and secret agent reports focusing on the Kassák House Studio’s formation and the Dohány Street theatre interpreted their activities as explicitly anti-ideological, or as directed against the constitution of a communist society. Nevertheless, art historian, critic and curator Kata Krasznahorkai, who has researched many reports about the apartment theatre, also identified a different opinion that was formulated by an agent with the alias ‘Zoltán Pécsi’: ‘[T]he agent rather moderated . . . accusations and interpreted obscenity as “special effects” which was only applied on the “outside”, with the aim to attract attention’.81 With this view, Pécsi was most likely attempting to minimize the ideological harmfulness of the theatre by portraying its performances as pure aesthetic experiments, with no political intent.

­Performing the apartment Like most Hungarian neo-avant-gardists, the members of the Dohány Street apartment theatre belonged to a generation that sought improvisation, interaction and the aestheticization of social life. This generation wanted to be progressive, and had a major intellectual thirst for theatre-related texts and resources.82 Even in its early years when founding members belonged to the Universitas theatre, the later apartment theatre had already become connected to international trends in theatre and performance. In particular, by combining realist, neo-naturalist and avant-gardist paradigms at the apartment, this performance collective reflected ideals such as those espoused by Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski and the Living Theater. Although the

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performance collective only had access to photographs of the Living Theater’s performances, these nevertheless had a major effect on Péter Halász.83 The ideas of emancipation and non-violence, the promise of free love relationships, the anarchic structure of amorphousness, and the activist, provocative theatre which the Living Theater stood for all strongly appealed to members of the apartment collective.84 The connection with Artaud and Grotowski was even more organic, as the theoretical texts and performances by these two theatre makers were processed and adapted at the apartment theatre. Antonin Artaud’s concept of theatre opposed the socially dictated performance based on linear language, and the logic of narration and action. It instead advocated a theatre based on the variables of light, sound, space and gesture. From this perspective, the performing arts aimed to link the viewer and the viewed. Artaud imagined the stage as a void, and equated it with the reality of events.85 When investigating the history of the apartment theatre, Magdolna Jákfalvi focused on its physicality, a feature that could elude symbolic processes, power relations and monolithic structures of interpretation. Based on this focus, she uncovered a theoretical historical bridge between Artaud’s goals and the work of the Kassák/Dohány Street theatre groups. Jákfalvi argues that Artaud turned performance into a real production process which rejected theatrical representation.86 Discussions about the confrontation with, and condemnation of, theatrical representation intensified in around 1968, when Artaud’s theoretical writings once again gained importance: increasingly, theatre makers were dismantling the classic blockades imposed by the traditional black box theatre space, in line with Aurtaudian cruelty and brutality.87 The Dohány Street performance collective joined this international movement of theatre reform. Because Anna Koós read and spoke French, she translated many of Artaud’s texts into Hungarian, including The Theatre and Its Double (Le Théâtre et son double), for the use of the group.88 In an interview in 1997, Koós spoke about the views of, and relevance to, Artaud for the apartment theatre both pre- and post-1972: Antonin Artaud, in his trauma, poetics, in his disappointment in the Christian world, in his drawings and film acting left behind achievements that are still effective after fifty years. This though does not mean that one should materialize the theatre of cruelty . . . To me his anger and outrage against Christianity targeting conditions of middle-class society was important . . . It is interesting that he talks about the theatre and the people of the street that actually applied to our situation at that time. Because we were also outsiders . . . there are

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mechanisms  in people’s physiognomy and brains that are equally present in society and are uncontrollable. That are non-conscious and –rational . . .89

Artaud offered a channel through which the apartment theatre could express criticisms of social, political and cultural norms. It did so through being inspired by Artaud into forming its own understanding of where to draw the boundary between aesthetics and life, rather than a direct implementation of his ideas. In addition to the Living Theatre and Antonin Artaud, a third important reference point for the ensemble was Jerzy Grotowski’s theatre aesthetics. By 1968, Péter Halász, Anna Koós and István Bálint had already adapted the techniques of the ‘poor theatre’ to productions on the university stage.90 Unlike with Artaud and the Living Theater, however, they encountered Grotowski in person, when members of the future Dohány Street theatre travelled to Wrocław in spring 1967 and autumn 1969 to visit Grotowski’s Theatre Laboratory (Teatr Laboratorium), known for reducing performance to its essentials: the body of the actor, and his/her actions in space. During their visits Halász and Koós were able to briefly talk to Grotowski himself, and managed to build good relationships with his colleagues. They also organized additional private trips to Poland. After gaining this first-hand experience of Grotowski’s work, they concluded that their performances on the university stage back home fell far short of the Theatre Laboratory’s originality, energy, precision and exoticism.91 At the core of Grotowski’s concept was the autonomy of the actors, and the conviction that they should be free to interpret the scene and act however they felt was appropriate, without following a script. This total unfolding of the actor’s capacities could, according to Grotowski, only be achieved in dialogue with the spectator.92 Based on this vision, the accentuation of a neat corporeality and the abolition of the division between viewing and the actors/objects being viewed evolved into core principles of the apartment theatre. Indeed, Grotowski’s impact on the Dohány Street apartment/Kassák theatre was substantial in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, and left a distinctive mark on its performances.93 It therefore took some time for the performers of the Kassák House Studio/ Dohány Street to shed Grotowski’s influence in order to move on and develop their own individual performance style. It was not until the mid-1970s, for example, that Péter Halász could speak enthusiastically about leaving the ‘prison of Grotowski’ behind.94

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The aesthetics of the Dohány Street theatre From the Living Theater, the Kassák/Dohány Street performance collective inherited a sense of community, along with the interconnectedness of communestyle living and event-based art, and an emphasis on the nude body. Antonin Artaud was important to the collective because his theatre concept transferred the idea of non-representational aesthetics and a deconstructive approach towards any form of convention and regulation. Artaud’s focus lay in uncovering the cruelty of reality without sanitization. Grotowski’s reductionist project of theatre and performance was transferable to a performance collective seeking a more immediate form of theatre, without having to adhere to ideological guidelines. Overall, although the influences of the Living Theater, Artaud and Grotowski were all significant, the apartment theatre also developed an aesthetics independent of external inspirations. In particular, Dohány Street 20 was home to collectively invented and realized experimental theatre pieces. From a total of more than a dozen of these pieces, four are discussed here in detail: Preparation for Being Together for a Time Unspecified (Felkészülés határozatlan idejű együttlétre, September 1972), King Kong in Dohány Street (Dohány utcai King Kong, September 1973), The House (Ház, October– December 1975) and the Three Sisters (Három nővér, March 1976). These pieces were chosen for analysis because each of them approached the reinvention of private space in a distinctive way. Collectively, the four pieces show how playing around with immediacy and distance, and an experimental attitude towards both performing a narrative and the space, can turn privacy into a forum of public discourse. The apartment performances were designed in clear opposition to conventional theatre. In the improvisatory piece Preparation for Being Together for a Time Unspecified, for instance, the spatial capacities of the flat were fully exploited, as the distance between the actors and spectators was virtually abolished. Both the idea for the piece and its realization were simple: the members of the theatre group hung a huge bed sheet in the middle of the flat at chest-height with twentyfive circular holes in it. Participants and performers alike sat on chairs and stuck their heads through the holes.95 This created the illusion that disembodied heads were swimming on the surface of a white textile sea. During this ‘head theatre’96 one person (a member of the apartment theatre) asked questions and another (a visitor) responded. According to the initiators, the purpose of Preparation for Being Together for a Time Unspecified was to bring people together to talk to one another and to erode mental barriers to communication.97

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Figure 5.2  Apartment theatre in Dohány Street, Preparation for Being Together for a Time Unspecified, Budapest, 1972. Photograph by Gábor Dobos. Courtesy of the photographer.

In this unique piece, the stage disappeared and only the auditorium remained. All the action was transferred to the seating area, which in a conventional theatre setting would have been dim and silent. In the standard environment, a mid-performance whisper by a bored audience member would be amplified in volume and merge with the foreground of the production. In the interactive space created for Preparation for Being Together for a Time Unspecified, however, the bodies of the participants were present, albeit also invisible and almost captive. The feeling of being trapped and forced to actively respond led to considerable discomfort because the participants were forced to leave their traditional comfortable positions as silent listeners behind. László Beke, who attended the action, reported the feelings of inconvenience and discomfort that the audience experienced: The play only had two rules: the person who was asked needed to reply to the questions honestly, and other participants could not intervene in the dialogue.

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At that time, I was extremely frightened that the someone you [Péter Halász] were questioning would be humiliated in front of the public.98

Being at the mercy of unpredictable questions reflected the conditions faced by Hungarians who sought limited freedom within the non-obedient public sphere. At the apartment theatre, performers challenged their audience to rid themselves of their innermost inhibitions. This was the motive behind many theatre pieces that defied hierarchical conventions and restrictions. Anna Koós remembers that Preparation for Being Together for a Time Unspecified also included a moment of shocking surprise. At an agreed point in the production, a member of the ensemble set the highly flammable sheets on fire. This dangerous intervention caused panic among the participants, who did not know what to do next.99 This artificially produced panic and shock intensified the audience members’ sense of immersion and deepened the initial ‘improvisatory’ impression. Dialogue might not have been enough by itself to shake up the audience; the participants therefore had to feel a threat to their own skin in order to leave the comfortable observer position of representational theatre behind. In contrast to Preparation for Being Together for a Time Unspecified, the weeks-long piece The House was one of the apartment theatre’s most famous spatial experiments, upon which the storefront theatre they established in New York was later founded.100 From cardboard, shelves and windows, the ensemble erected a house within the apartment. This furnished ‘home’ was completely separated from the rest of the space, standing on its own with a number of windows through which the audience could peer in. This voyeuristic set-up enabled spectators to observe stories about love and hatred that often ended in loud arguments, with objects being thrown around inside the room. One actor always stood outside the house and commented on events inside. Their comments highlighted selected gestures and facial expressions, and sought to build an improvised narrative structure that linked the unscripted actions taking place.101 The performers made ‘real life situations as important and as interesting as art’, and believed that ‘there is no real difference between a “private life” and a “public life”’.102 The House allowed a great many interpretations. It was possible to read the performance as a metaphor for the apartment theatre’s status as a spectacle that attracted people like a peep show. Or, Dohány Street performers may have felt a sense of being trapped in a kind of zoo where rare animals are shown to amazed spectators. As an example of publicized privacy, the performance collective turned

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its private life into a live show, which was open to a limited public. No matter how artificial this constellation was, it was intended to appear as real as possible, and aimed to provide audiences with the opportunity to observe the behaviour of those watching. The collective opened up their private space even more than they did in the case of simple apartment performances. In doing so, they blurred the border between private and public. Many Hungarians at the time regarded their homes as hermetic places of exile; it must therefore have been all the more astounding to visit a place that operated according to a completely different logic. While The House intensified the connection between public and private, the next performance discussed here completely opened up the private space in physical terms. When the group adapted their famous King Kong performance to the flat, the space was extended to the courtyard, the corridors, the street front of Dohány Street 20 and to the wider urban surroundings of Budapest. The first version of this piece was performed not at the Dohány Street studio, but in August 1973 in three parts over three consecutive days at the chapel studio of Balatonboglár. The length of King Kong, with its emblematic, giant gorilla installation, was then cut down to two days and adjusted to fit the Budapest context: When we performed King Kong in the apartment, it would change with the seasons. Once there was a feast of flowers in the autumn, with flowers covering all the walls. It was very beautiful. At Christmas the party and feast became a big Christmas celebration. These versions had similar actions to the earlier one, but we used the street instead of the forest, corridors of the building instead of paths, and so on. Some people in the building mistook the play for a real wedding, asking us, ‘Who is the bride?’.103

King Kong in Dohány Street was an attempt by the apartment theatre to break away from its previously closed space in order to explore new possibilities of spatial experience and performative encounter. In the earlier apartment performances, each object, each corner and each active/non-active person was a core contributor to the spatial atmosphere.104 King Kong elevated this incorporation to a more advanced level. While The House project had established an ‘apartment within the apartment’,105 King Kong more ambitiously presented the ‘city within the city’.106 In the heart of the Hungarian capital, in contrast to the chapel and the rural area in Balatonboglár, the overlaps between ephemeral performativity, ritual and everyday life redefined privacy. The point of departure for this performance was the original version of the King Kong performance, which took place at and around the Chapel Studio

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in 1973. On the first day of that performance, the spectators gathered around the chapel with a sound backdrop coming from the bell tower. From the path leading straight to the chapel, a ball rolled towards the audience. Then, a man came and threw sweets onto the narrow road. Men and women in festive clothes slowly approached the chapel. This procession was followed by a dwarf wearing a backpack running from tree to tree trailing a red ribbon. The audience and performers then entered the chapel. Inside, a huge gorilla (almost reaching the ceiling) awaited them. Opposite the oversized animal was a long table laid with cups and jars of cocoa and milk rolls. Some of the spectators took a seat in the chapel’s pews while others remained standing as the performers served everyone present. After a while, even the performers sat down and drank. People chatted and snacked. A member of the apartment theatre read the Japanese tale of the Ape King. In the meantime, a bearded man (Péter Breznyik) prepared himself for a ritual. He took off his jacket, rolled up his shirtsleeves and cut his arms with a heated blade inside the chapel, in full view of everyone. His blood dripped into a  wine glass. Assistants dressed Breznyik’s wounds; he then undressed completely and from between his legs pulled out meat and eggs, and squashed the latter – his genitals were hidden, so only his pubic hair was visible. He took a kimono-like negligee, went back to the table, sat down, shaved, and dressed his hair on his head. Breznyik then applied make-up, put on a woman’s dress and decorated himself with jewellery. With this procedure, he transformed his appearance into that of a woman. Breznyik turned to the gorilla and drank his own blood from the glass. At this moment, the gorilla’s gigantic phallus emerged, in the form of a man (Péter Halász) wearing a rubber cap. Breznyik put on gloves and approached the animal step by step. The first day of the performance ended here. The next day, events at the chapel continued. This time, the table was not laid; unwashed dishes lay scattered on it. Unlike the first part of the performance on the first day, men and women were messily eating under the table, where they floundered, sniggered, nibbled peanuts and threw away garbage. Meanwhile, a woman played around with the gorilla, talked and flirted with him, and fondled his penis, which moved in and out of him. Suddenly, the dwarf appeared from under the table and began to insult the gorilla. The penis replied to the bad language with a quotation from a poem by William Blake. But, the woman ignored the interruption and constantly tried to get closer to King Kong and to have sex with him. The mail performers, who until this point had been cowering under the table, crept out from below it and posed with bow and arrows while

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­F igure 5.3  Apartment theatre in Dohány Street, King Kong in Dohány Street, Péter Halász (man lying on the floor) and Péter Breznyik (dressed as woman), Budapest, 1973. Photograph by Gábor Dobos. Courtesy of the photographer.

their women, who had been with them under the table, prayed. The men put the bows and arrows down, dressed up, but left their ties on the floor. All the ties were then collected by the women and bound together by a long rope. Breznyik took this rope and bound it around the gorilla’s phallus. The men pulled the penis out of King Kong’s body: Halász’ naked body was catapulted onto the chapel floor and lay still. The dwarves appeared on the scene and glued the body to the floor with red tape. The performance on the final day began at sunset. Outside the chapel a dwarf sat in a white cage braiding a scarf made from the gorilla’s fur. Many spectators arrived by car, honked their car horns and surrounded the dwarf with their car headlights shining on him. Every action was captured on camera. Breznyik, still dressed as a woman, approached the dwarf and wrenched the scarf from its hands, at which point the dwarf rose up. The woman (Breznyik) rested the scarf on her shoulders and entered the chapel. Two men took the dwarf out of the cage then carried him into the chapel, where pop music was playing. After all the members of the apartment theatre had gathered inside the chapel, the spectators followed. They immediately saw the giant ape and his pulled-out penis. Both the spectators and performers started to dance. Someone in the crowd took

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photographs with flash lighting. The woman posed with different people and objects (this was also photographed). She slowly stopped dancing as the music stopped. Breznyik then knelt down to the dead phallus and took off the rubber cap to put it on his own head. He almost immediately disappeared behind King Kong and re-emerged as the animal’s new penis.107 Unfortunately, no records exist indicating which elements of the Balatonboglár King Kong were later integrated into, or cut from, the production at Dohány Street. Therefore, reconstructing how the King Kong of Budapest differed from the original is difficult, although the photographic records support some reconstruction. The major elements of the story, such as its underlying structural elements, were most probably left untouched. These are likely to have included the central sequence of events, the main characters, and the order of the actions over the three days. Compared to Preparation for Being Together for a Time Unspecified, the spectator interaction was less intense and direct. The initial and closing events of King Kong in Dohány Street, such as the collective eating and dancing, created a temporary community. Like many other experimental theatre pieces by the Dohány Street group, the spectators gradually became the group’s

Figure 5.4  Apartment theatre in Dohány Street, King Kong in Dohány Street, István Bálint (in the door left) and Péter Breznyik (dressed as a woman on the right, at the top of the staircase), Budapest, 1973. Photograph by Péter Donáth. Courtesy of the photographer.

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collaborators108 by opening up their awareness to new impulses109 and taking on the role of active participants. ­King Kong was also noteworthy because rituals, in this case associated with gender, were at its core. A number of these rituals, such as a man styling himself in a female hairstyle and make-up, and dressing up as a woman, had also been present in Breznyik and a Woman (Breznyik meg egy asszony tegnap, February 1972). Indeed, the adoption and use of ritual in the apartment theatre has since generated significant interest among scholars exploring the apartment theatre: The ritual was the intellectual and physical manifestation of spiritualism. The art community took rituals at Squat performances for granted . . . [they] were very unique and rich, rather entertaining and charming, gradually drifting away from the Christian liturgy toward pagan ‘orgy’ or house party.110

Alongside the ritual elements, the physical, bodily transformation of gender was also significant, as it represented a break with social norms and taboos. For example, King Kong focused on direct sexuality and implied sexual intercourse, which went well beyond the publicly accepted conventions of the time. The appearances of dwarfs and other mythical figures, such as King Kong himself, appeared to celebrate abnormality. Throughout the entire three-day performance, only a few poses and symbols were reminiscent of the black box, while the use of time and space ran contrary to traditional theatre. In almost every possible way, King Kong in Dohány Street defied official expectations of what socialist art should be. Further, because King Kong in Dohány Street stretched over three days, it required a different preparation from its spectators and performers than a conventional play at the theatre would. There was also a spatial extension because the apartment, besides the whole building and the streets of Budapest, was simply part of the performance’s location. To paraphrase Péter Halász, incorporating the city itself into the space of production was just as necessary as moving from the university stage to clubs, and from there to the apartment, before ending up in a shopping window in New York.111 Although the conquest of the streets might have been necessary in order to fully explore the limits of privacy and the possibilities of publicity, the government, with its step-by-step ban, soon made it impossible to continue these experiments. The Dohány ensemble’s ‘staging’ of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters in 1976 marked a turning point and was the final of its apartment performances in Hungary before certain members had to emigrate to Western Europe later the same year. Two parallels can be drawn between Chekhov’s drama and the theatre group’s immediate context: the anachronistic world of the Russian provinces has a similar

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sense of social isolation and separation as that which characterized Kádárian Hungary; and the desire of the three sisters to get to Moscow was reflected in the desire of the various ensemble members to find a way out of Hungary.112 For this final Dohány Street performance, the group wanted to create deep emotions to direct attention to the concrete, physical living space. In it, Chekhov’s three sisters were played by three men, who for most of the staging stood still in a set pose. The performance collective reached back though to a traditional drama, but turned it against the black box setting. The ensemble favoured intuition and improvisation; they had no intention of memorizing Chekhov’s drama. For this reason, Anna Koós took on the role of the prompter, though unlike most prompters, she was both visible and audible to the audience. Disorientation was guaranteed through the mechanical repetition of phrases, the static poses and the male actors performing female roles. Indeed, they did not even attempt to appear as women, and as such were not made up to look like them. Chopin’s music dominated the atmosphere113 as the three men posed like motionless sculptures placed in the apartment, no different from museum displays. The spatial closeness between the actors and the audience suggested intimacy, although the separation into viewers and those being viewed built up distance. The apartment theatre ultimately created a completely new composition that in no way resembled a classical staging of Chekhov’s dramas. Because the performers came from Chekhov’s text, not the dramatic components of its production, it has been argued that through the stasis, they ended up closer to Chekhov’s true awareness of life and the world than a classical staging.114 With a style that differed significantly from their previous works, the apartment theatre bid farewell to the non-obedient public sphere.

Conclusion The four performances recounted and analysed here – Preparation for Being Together for a Time Unspecified, King Kong in Dohány Street, The House and Three Sisters – all highlighted different aspects of the publicized private, and each helped to redefine the private sphere. The apartment could no longer simply be a convenient private space where a person could find peace and intimacy. Rather, in the context of Kádárian control, it became a terrain of unexpected encounters and surprises. It also seemed that many people secretly wanted to observe how others were living their private lives; in this context, the apartment theatre offered them a view into an enacted private life that could not have been

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more public. When the performers decided to leave the apartment to explore the urban scenery, they expressed their inner dissatisfaction or boredom with the limitations of the embryonic public sphere they had created indoors. Their desire for more freedom was even more palpable when the Dohány Street 20 theatre staged Chekhov’s Three Sisters. By the time members of the group emigrated, the apartment had become nothing more than a space they wanted to leave behind, with all its emotional baggage. While the performances within the living environment had once been creative, cutting-edge and necessary, the inspiration behind them waned over the course of time and under growing party pressure. For a time, the Dohány Street apartment theatre managed to fulfil the most important criteria of ‘performance in life’ and ‘life in performance’. Furthermore, it managed to attract publicity in an unconventional, theatre-remote place. Each performance at Dohány Street 20 required an audience, and therefore created a new public sphere. Marianne Kollár Bongolan has argued that, more broadly, apartment culture was at the very foundation of a parallel culture full of creative excitement and collective acknowledgement of the creator’s freedom. The apartment culture was far more inclusive than the exclusive and ordered public sphere. Officially banned performers who had worked at the Dohány Street apartment theatre wandered over the course of the years from venue to venue, but playing in an apartment was special to them, for many reasons. Kollár Bongolan wrote that ‘[s]ome performances played around the inherently private yet public aspects of daily lives in a flat, using a twist, others centered on transformations of myths with unique aspects’.115 The style of performance introduced during the apartment theatre years irritated the authorities above all because it unsettled the conventional modes of theatrical representation. Other examples of apartment culture, such as the Zugló circle and the Petrigalla salon, were private spaces repurposed for public events. There, nonconformist art was also performed, produced and discussed, and they significantly shaped the landscape of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde. Paradoxically, while apartment culture stood in opposition to the ordered public sphere, it always remained in dialogue with it. Indeed, apartment culture in Kádárian Hungary was a consequence of the control-obsessed culture of the state at that time: it would not have developed otherwise. Occupying a space of in-betweenness, intellectual workshops and performative events created places of aesthetic potential that were significantly more accessible than their official, bureaucratic counterparts. The fact that this inner need for the freedom to create and discuss has not faded away in post-socialist contexts forms the subject of the final case studies in the next chapter.

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­Notes 1 Július Koller, cited in Andrea Bátorová, Aktionskunst in der Slowakei in den 1960er Jahren. Die Aktionen von Alex Mlynárčik, Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2009, p. 81. 2 Milan Knížák, ‘Die A-Gemeinschaft 1963–1971/A-Community 1963–1971,’ in Petra Stegmann (ed.), Fluxus East. Fluxusnetzwerke in Mittelosteuropa [Fluxus Networks in Central Eastern Europe], Berlin: Künstlerhaus Bethanien, 2007, pp. 77–94, here p. 91; Kristine Stiles, ‘INSIDE/OUTSIDE: “Balancing Between A Dusthole And Eternity,”’ in Igor Zabel, Joseph Backstein, Radislav Matuštík and Jurij V. Krpan (eds.), Body and the East, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999, pp. 19–30, here p. 22 and Petra Stegmann, ‘Fluxus East/Fluxus East,’ in Petra Stegmann (ed.), Fluxus East. Fluxusnetzwerke in Mittelosteuropa [Fluxus Networks in Central Eastern Europe], Berlin: Künstlerhaus Bethanien, 2007, pp. 5–52, here p. 27. 3 Matynia, Performative Democracy, p. 31. 4 Ibid., p. 16. 5 Luiza Nader, ‘Heterotopien. Das NETZ und die Galerie Akumulatory 2/Heterotopy. The NET and Galerie Akumulatory 2,’ in Petra Stegmann (ed.), Fluxus East. Fluxusnetzwerke in Mittelosteuropa [Fluxus Networks in Central Eastern Europe], Berlin: Künstlerhaus Bethanien, 2007, pp. 111–124, here pp. 114–118. 6 Kürti, ‘Experimentalizmus, avantgárd és közösségi hálózatok a hatvanas években,’ p. 133; Brigitta Iványi-Bitter, ‘Kovásznai és dr. Végh felolvasószínháza a 60-as években,’ artmagazin, Vol. 6, Issue 1, 2008, pp. 62–66. 7 Balra át, jobbra át. Művészeti és politikai radikalizmus a Kádá-korban. 8 ‘Emlékest, október 23, 19 óra,’ A Hírmondó, Vol. 4, Issue 5, October–November, p. 55. 9 Tábor, A váratlan kultúra, pp. 23–24. 10 Ibid. 11 Ádám Tábor cited in Havasréti, Alternatív regiszterek, p. 250; Gabi Csutak, Lajos Jánossy, Tibor Keresztury and Gabriella Nagy, ‘A szellem rejtekútjai. Nagyvizitben Tábor Ádámnál,’ litera. Az irodalmi portál, 10 April 2015. Available online: http:// www.litera.hu/hirek/a-szellem-rejtekutjai (accessed 6 November 2017). 12 Sasvári, ‘A balatonboglári kápolnatárlatok kultúrpolitikai háttere,’ p. 18. 13 István Hajdu, ‘Zur Siuation der progressive Kunst Ungarns,’ Künstler aus Ungarn, Wilhelmshaven Art Gallery, 26 August–21 September 1980, pp. 4–7, here p. 4. 14 Éva Forgács, ‘Kultur im Niemandsland. Die Stellung der ungarischen Avantgarde in der ungarischen Kultur,’ in Hans Knoll (ed.), Die zweite Öffentlichkeit. Kunst in Ungarn im 20. Jahrhundert, Dresden: Fine Arts, 1999, pp. 4–57, here p. 45; Kovalovszky, ‘Sanfte Jahreszeiten zwischen Eis und Dürre,’ p. 205.

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­15 Gábor Pataki, ‘A magyar művészet története 1949–1968 között,’ in Lóránd Hegyi (ed.), Nézőpontok/Pozíciók. Művészet Közép-Európában 1949–1999, Budapest: Kortárs Művészeti Múzeum – Ludwig Múzeum Budapest, 2000, pp. 267–277, here pp. 270, 282. 16 Gábor Attalai cited in Dávid Fehér, ‘“Nem hiszek a túl direct dolgokban . . . ” Beszélgetés Attalai Gáborral,’ Ars Hungarica, Issue 3, 2011, pp. 110–122, here p. 111. 17 Forgács, ‘Kultur im Niemandsland,’ p. 45. 18 Katalin Thiel, ‘Teória és praxis Hamvas Béla életművében,’ Acta Academiae Agriensis. Sectio Philosophica, Vol. 41, 2014, pp. 197–202. 19 Andrási, ‘A Zuglói Kör (1958–1968),’ pp. 47–48. 20 Kürti, ‘Ezoterikus avantgárd’. 21 Andrási, ‘A Zuglói Kör (1958–1968),’ pp. 47–48. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., p. 54. 25 Néray, ‘A magyar neoavantgárd nagy évtizede: 1968 . . . 1979,’ p. 282. 26 Sasvári, ‘A balatonboglári kápolnatárlatok kultúrpolitikai háttere,’ p. 18; Éva Forgács, ‘Kultur im Niemandsland,’ p. 45. 27 Tábor, A váratlan kultúra, p. 22. 28 Ibid. 29 Attalai, cited in Fehér, ‘“Nem hiszek a túl direct dolgokban . . . ”,’ p. 114. 30 Lóránt Bódi, ‘Művészeti és közösségi élet Petrigalla Pál szalonjában 1959–1970,’ Új Forrás, Vol. 43, Issue 6, June 2011, pp. 49–65, here pp. 49, 50–53. 31 András Kisfaludy, Törvénytelen muskátli. Képek a hatvanas évekből, Documentary, 1995, DVD, Source: Artpool Art Research Center. 32 Bódi, ‘Művészeti és közösségi élet Petrigalla Pál szalonjában 1959–1970,’ p. 58; Kürti, Experimentalizmus, avantgárd és közösségi hálózatok a hatvanas években, pp. 12, 50, 145; Emese Kürti, Glissando és húrtépés. Kortárs zene és neoavantgárd művészet az underground magánterekben, 1958–1970, series: Határesetek, Eszter Földi and Enikő Róka (eds.), Budapest: L’Harmattan and Kossuth Klub, 2018, pp. 237–255. 33 Bódi, ‘Művészeti és közösségi élet Petrigalla Pál szalonjában 1959–1970,’ p. 55. 34 Kisfaludy, Törvénytelen muskátli. 35 Bódi, ‘Művészeti és közösségi élet Petrigalla Pál szalonjában 1959–1970,’ p. 57. 36 File: ÁBTL-3.1.2.-M.-34608/1, p. 73, Source: Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára. 37 Kisfaludy, Törvénytelen muskátli. 38 Zoltán Bicskei, ‘Petrigalla,’ Jazzkutatás, 1 January 1990. Available online: http:// www.jazzkutatas.eu/article.php?id=172 (accessed 8 November 2017). 39 Ibid.

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­40 Kisfaludy, Törvénytelen muskátli 41 Attalai, cited in Fehér, ‘“Nem hiszek a túl direct dolgokban . . . ”,’ pp. 113–116. 42 ÁBTL-3.1.2.-M.-34608/1, p. 73. 43 A huge part of the puzzle is accessible through the archive of photographer, painter and graphic designer Kálmán Kecskeméti, and the well-catalogued diary entries and sound recordings made by László Végh. 44 Klaus Groh, ‘Budapest 1973, die halasz-gruppe oder konzepte der identifikation,’ diascope. Literatur – Satire, Politik & Kultur, Issue 1, Chr. Gauke Verlag, pp. 40–41, here p. 40f. 45 Nóra Földeáki, ‘Halász Péter,’ Criticai Lapok. Színház. Világ. Művészet, vol. 15, Issue 12, 2006, pp. 1–6, here p. 6. 46 Statement by Marianne Kollár Bongolan, email to the author, 19 March 2018. 47 Ibid. 48 Zsolt K. Horváth, ‘Tagadás és megvesztegethetetlenség könyve. Koós Anna: Színházi történetek – szobában, kirakatban,’ manuscript, pp. 3–4. 49 Jim O’Quinn, ‘Squat Theatre Underground, 1972–1976,’ The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 23, Issue 4, December 1979, pp. 7–26, here p. 7. 50 Horváth, ‘Tagadás és megvesztegethetetlenség könyve,’ p. 10. 51 ‘A Kassák színház kronológiája,’ pp. 41–44. 52 Gabriella Schuller, ‘Bódy Gábor: Hamlet, 1981. A drámaontológia színházi határa a nyolcvanas évek Magyarországán. Esettanulmány,’ in Magdolna Jákfalvi and Árpád Kékesi Kun (eds.), A színháztudomány az akadémiai diszciplínák rendjében. Bécsy Tamás életművéről, Paris, Turin and Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2009, pp. 83–96. 53 Anna Koós, Színházi történetek – szobában, kirakatban, Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2009, p. 18. 54 Stephan Bálint, ‘Squat: Expelled from the Kindergarten,’ in Eva Buchmüller and Stephan Bálint (eds.), Squat Theatre, New York: New Observations 40, 1986, p. 2. 55 ‘Halász Péter. Két séta a gőzfürdő után,’ Színház, Special Issue: Kassák + Dohány u. 20. + Squat + Love, Vol. 24, October–November 1991, pp. 4–12, here p. 10. 56 Katalin Cseh-Varga, Skype conversation with Marianne Kollár Bongolan, 19 March 2018. 57 ‘Halász Péter,’ p. 9. 58 Gabriella Schuller, ‘Szabadság tér 69–85,’ p. 223. 59 Hans Ulrich Obrist, ‘In Conversation with Hakim Bey,’ e-flux, Issue 21, December 2010. Available online: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/21/67669/in-conversationwith-hakim-bey/ (accessed 7 December 2017). 60 István Bálint, cited in László Bérczes, ‘A Squat útja. Hamburgi beszélgetés Bálint Istvánnal,’ Színház, November 1989, pp. 34–37, here p. 37. 61 ‘Halász Péter,’ p. 12. ­62 András Pályi, ‘Stúdió. Mindenki csak ül meg áll,’ Film Színház Muzsika, Issue 10, October 1970, p. 22.

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63 Magdolna Jákfalvi, ‘A Halász Péter Archívum. Halász az emlékezet terében,’ in Magdolna Jákfalvi (ed.), Színészképzés Neoavantgárd Hagyomány, Budapest: Színház- és Filmművészeti Egyetem, pp. 11–23, here p. 18. 64 Kata Krasznahorkai, ‘Erhöhte Alarmbereitschaft – die Kunst des Underground im Visier der Staatssicherheit. Geheimdienstakten als kunsthistorische Quellen zur Erforschung künstlerischer Aktivitäten im Underground der 1960er und 70er Jahre,’ conference Kunst im kommunistischen Europa, lecture, Centre Marc Bloch, 19–21 November 2009, Berlin. 65 Zsuzsa Selyem, ‘Terek, ahol emberek,’ in Pál Deréky and András Müllner (eds.), Né/ ma? Tanulmányok a magyar neoavantgard köréből. Aktuális Avantgárd 3, Budapest: Ráció Kiadó, 2004. Available online: http://www.tankonyvtar.hu/hu/tartalom/tkt/ ne-ma-ne-ma/ch12.html (accessed 22 September 2015). 66 Anna Veress, ‘Halász Péter és dramaturgia,’ in Magdolna Jákfalvi (ed.), Színészképzés: neoavantgárd hagyomány, Budapest: Színház- és Filmművészeti Egyetem, 2013, pp. 24–30, here p. 30. 67 ‘Halász Péter,’ p. 8. 68 Ibid. 69 Jákfalvi, Avantgárd – színház – politika, p. 196. 70 Földeáki, ‘Halász Péter,’ p. 2. 71 Jákfalvi, ‘A Halász Péter Archívum,’ p. 20. 72 Péter Donáth, ‘A másság,’ Színház, Special Issue: Kassák + Dohány u. 20. + Squat + Love, Vol. 24, October–November 1991, pp. 42–45, here p. 42. 73 István Bálint, cited in Ágnes Karácsony, ‘Színház, az utolsó forradalom emlékére,’ Élet és Irodalom, 28 May 1993, p. 5. 74 Jákfalvi, Avantgárd – színház – politika, p. 109; Koós, Színházi történetek, p. 299; Ny. Sz., ‘A Kassák-ház stúdiója az egyetemen. A kegyetlenség színháza és a színház kegyetlensége,’ Déli Hírlap, 6 October 1970; Tamás Ascher, ‘Az önazonosság színháza,’ Színház, Special Issue: Kassák + Dohány u. 20. + Squat + Love, Vol. 24, October–November 1991, pp. 54–56, here p. 56. 75 György Báron, ‘Happening magyar módra,’ Egyetemi Lapok, 20 September 1971, not paginated. 76 Ibid. 77 Krasznahorkai, ‘Erhöhte Alarmbereitschaft’. 78 Gábor Bódy, cited in Koós, Színházi történetek, p. 128. Remark: Gábor Bachman highlighted in a recent interview that Gábor Bódy was not a secret agent of the party, as is usually assumed today. Instead, Bachman suspects the falsification of documents motivated by jealousy among colleagues. Katalin Cseh-Varga, Interview with Gábor Bachman, 4 May 2021, phone. ­79 Schuller, ‘Szabadság tér 69–85,’ pp. 228–229. 80 András Halasz, ‘Introduction by Andras Halasz,’ in Eva Buchmuller and Anna Koós (eds.), Squat Theatre, New York: Artists Space, 1996, pp. viii–xii, here p. x.

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81 Krasznahorkai, ‘Erhöhte Alarmbereitschaft’. 82 Jákfalvi, ‘A Halász Péter Archívum,’ p. 13. 83 ‘Halász Péter,’ p. 7. 84 Koós, Színházi történetek, p. 47. 85 Antonin Artaud, The Theater and its Double, New York: Grove Press, 1966. 86 Jákfalvi, Avantgárd – színház – politika, p. 98ff. 87 Jákfalvi, ‘A Halász Péter Archívum,’ p. 20f. 88 Koós, Színházi történetek, p. 63. 89 ‘“Megpróbáltuk kitalálni, mit jelenthetett az, amit gondolt . . . ” Várnagy Tibor beszélgetése Koós Annával,’ Nappali Ház, Vol. 9, Issue 1, 1997, pp. 16–22, here p. 17ff. 90 Jákfalvi, Avantgárd – színház – politika, p. 192; The poor theatre is a theatre with a clear focus on the actors and spectators in cooperation with each other, without any superfluous spectacle. 91 Koós, Színházi történetek, pp. 30, 31–34. 92 Jerzy Grotowski, ‘Statement of Principles,’ in Owen Daly (ed.), Source Material on Jerzy Grotowski. Statement of Principles. Available online: http://owendaly.com/jeff/ grotows2.htm (accessed 16 December 2017). 93 István Bálint did not like Grotowski. Cseh-Varga, Skype conversation with Marianne Kollár Bongolan. 94 ‘Halász Péter,’ p. 7. 95 O’Quinn, ‘Squat Theatre Underground, 1972–1976,’ p. 14. 96 ‘Kassák Színház,’ p. 41. 97 O’Quinn, ‘Squat Theatre Underground, 1972–1976,’ p. 14. 98 László Beke, ‘Levél Halász Péternek,’ Színház, Special Issue: Kassák + Dohány u. 20. + Squat + Love, Vol. 24, October–November 1991, p. 82, here p. 82. 99 Koós, Színházi történetek, p. 96. 100 Katalin Cseh-Varga, Skype conversation with Klara Palotai, 25 March 2018. 101 ‘Kassák Színház,’ p. 41. 102 O’Quinn, ‘Squat Theatre Underground, 1972–1976,’ p. 22 103 Ibid., p. 21. 104 El Kazovszkij, ‘Éles Élet,’ Színház, Special Issue: Kassák + Dohány u. 20. + Squat + Love, Vol. 24, October–November 1991, pp. 46–49, here p. 46. 105 ‘Kassák Színház,’ p. 41. 106 László Rajk, ‘Breznyik szeme,’ Színház, Special Issue: Kassák + Dohány u. 20. + Squat + Love, Vol. 24, October–November 1991, pp. 46–49, here p. 46. ­107 ‘1973. augusztus 12–18. – Kassák Színház előadásai,’ Balatonboglári Kápolnaműterem. Available online: http://www.artpool.hu/boglar/1973/730812_ kingkong.html (accessed 19 December 2017). 108 Lisa Solomon, ‘Caught in the Act,’ in Eva Buchmuller and Anna Koós (eds.), Squat Theatre, New York: Artists Space, 1996, pp. ii–vii, here p. iii.

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109 Tamás Fodor, ‘Oppozíció vagy autonómia,’ Színház, Special Issue: Kassák + Dohány u. 20. + Squat + Love, Vol. 24, October–November 1991, pp. 22–25, here p. 22. 110 Halasz, ‘Introduction by Andras Halasz,’ p. xi. 111 ‘Halász Péter,’ p. 9. 112 Koós, Színházi történetek, p. 145f. 113 O’Quinn, ‘Squat Theatre Underground, 1972–1976,’ p. 26. 114 Fodor, ‘A Halász,’ p. 19. 115 Statement by Marianne Kollár Bongolan.

­6

Avant-Garde above the Ground

During the 1980s, the status and characteristics of experimental Hungarian art changed in line with the transformation of the public sphere. Looking back on that time in 1999, György Galántai observed that from the early 1980s onwards, contemporary art in Hungary ceased to be motivated by social attitude or behaviour, was instead becoming professional.1 Ákos Birkás believed the same thing, and titled one of his 1982 lectures at the Rabinec Gallery (Rabinec Galéria) The Death of the Avant-Garde (Az avantgárd halála). In that lecture, Birkás listed a number of reasons for the disappearance of the avant-gardist attitude, and highlighted how ‘distributors’ of art, such as galleries, could act as productive partners of artists. Although Hungarian neo-avant-gardists had grounded their works in utopian visions of the future, by the 1980s it had become clear that almost none of their imagined goals would come close to realization. For example, the movement never succeeded in its aspiration to make art an everyday, emancipatory practice, or in catalysing widespread social and political change through its art. These failures were largely due to the fact that the neo-avant-garde was indirect and remained inaccessible to many, partly because of its artistic elitism, and partly because the communist state bureaucracy successfully restricted its reach.2 Looking back in 1982 on the struggle between artists and the state over the previous decades, Birkás argued that: The avant-garde has lost everything [. . .] The powers that be used extremely simple and brutal means to rob this art of its space and time, which has basically rendered this art non-existent, something that has never existed – because it was never given the publicity. It could not exert its effects.3

This title was inspired by an event thematizing the Polyphony art project entitled Underground above the ground, 27 September 2012, Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archive, Budapest.

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Birkás’s critical assessment reviewing what the avant-garde, and specifically the neo-avant-garde, had actually accomplished in late socialist Hungary, along with how it ended, indirectly raised questions about what was to come next. What followed the neo-avant-garde was characterized by art historian Éva Forgács as the post-avant-garde epoch. The post-avant-gardists distanced themselves from their forerunners: the historical and the neo-avant-garde. In examining the Hungarian art scene of the 1980s, Forgács defines a New Sensibility and a New Subjectivism as the main styles of the post-avant-garde epoch. Throughout the decade, political pressure did not entirely suck the optimism out of all alternative artists, many of whom were generally ‘playful’ in their work. Yet, these artists advanced almost no social or political mission, and their works and thinking showed few traces of political idealism or utopianism.4 Art historian and curator Lóránd Hegyi was the spokesman and promoter of New Sensibility and New Subjectivism within Hungary and beyond. He claimed that the highly personal, liberating and often childish and emotional artworks produced in the 1980s were by post-avant-gardists who had a ‘lack of historical experience and [were] devoid of a sense of reality; thus . . . they escaped into subjectivity and self-mythologizing’.5 Because the first and second public spheres still existed in the 1980s, though with a less rigorous state structure of surveillance, the impact of the Hungarian post-avant-garde unfolded equally in both public realms.6 The 1980s saw a weakening of communist bureaucracy and a gradual opening up of Hungarian society. The erosion of state socialism continued for years until Kádár finally fell from power in 1989; the last Soviet troops left the country in the same year. It was in this context that post-avant-garde art flourished; but along with the cheerful, politically distanced art of New Sensibility and New Subjectivism, there were still some artists who cared about both their personal roots and society’s historical roots, and who were both socially and politically aware. These avant-gardists, whose number included trans-avant-gardists László Rajk and Gábor Bachman, also witnessed the transition of both the first and the second public sphere, yet they reacted to these changes differently than their postavant-gardist counterparts. Rajk’s and Bachman’s trans-avant-garde approach did not deny the importance of the historical avant-garde; instead, they critically recirculated its ideological message and stylistic symbols. Rajk’s own past shaped his critical attitude towards communist ideals: his father was executed having previously served as the socialist government’s Minister of Internal Affairs. While working as an architect and as a graphic and stage designer, he became involved in the Hungarian democratic opposition in around 1980. Rajk not only founded

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an underground publishing business but also opened up an illegal samizdat shop in his own apartment.7 While Rajk’s politicism was obvious, Bachman pursued an aesthetic radicalism, both progressive and avant-gardist, that did not wish to get involved with the sphere of everyday politics – not even with the politics of the democratic opposition.8 Other artists who did not want simply to silently witness social and political change became politically involved. Avant-gardists such as the politically radicalized INCONNU Group adopted a more activist position when the collapse of the Kádár regime approached. *** By the end of the 1980s the division between the non-obedient and the ordered public sphere had become blurred. The second public sphere had grown in prominence and begun to shape the mainstream public discourse, rather than simply generating ideas that circulated in alternative venues. Apartments, studios and cellars were replaced by dedicated exhibition spaces in public and urban areas.9 Meanwhile, the first public sphere, which had previously been exclusively directed and monitored by the communist government, lost its previous hegemony over public discourse and its regulatory measures were weakened. Internal (national) and external (international) factors accompanied and determined this weakening of the once-dominant first public sphere. The Soviet Union’s structural crisis in the mid-1980s in both military and economic terms and Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempt to move away from bureaucratism and to introduce market-like reforms in the USSR were just as important in facilitating change as the demands of civil intellectual groups and of reformminded communists from within the party.10 Although these voices grew louder and louder, and certainly contributed to the process of social and political liberalization both in Hungary and across the Warsaw Pact states, the transition from a permissive-repressive dictatorship into a democratic, pluralist republic was neither simple nor direct.11 The political and social climate in Hungary began to change around 1980 due to several factors. Intellectuals from outside the party, coming mainly from universities, the liberal democratic opposition, and other oppositional conservative-nationalist groups, began to demand democratic rights and an end to one-party rule. At around the same time, some communists within the party supported Gorbachev’s Perestroika 1986 reform plan – a change that could be orchestrated from above.12 The Soviet military occupation of Hungary established shortly after the Second World War was becoming more and more

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unacceptable to Hungarians in this pro-reform environment, a feeling that was also fuelled by events in Poland, where Solidarność, an independent selfgoverning trade union, was founded in 1980. Moreover, the Kádár regime’s dependency on external power and resources from both ‘East’ and ‘West’ also contributed to domestic transformations during the 1980s. This dependency included, amongst other things, a reliance upon foreign loans, trade arrangements and the increasingly tiresome and mainly bureaucratic support provided by the USSR to control the population. In 1988, reform measures spread to Hungary’s domestic economic life and to its foreign affairs when personal income tax was introduced and Hungarian citizens were allowed to apply for a ‘world passport’, which allowed travel without restrictions.13 In 1988 and 1989, the foundation of non-socialist parties paved the way for Hungary’s transition to democracy. On 23 October 1989 the (third) Hungarian Democratic Republic was born.14 Between 1980 and 1988, the Kádárian system attempted to maintain its grip on power, but this task became increasingly difficult as the years passed. There were occasional house searches and police questioning of members of the democratic opposition, and authors and artists were often banned from publishing or exhibiting their work. However, the intensity of these surveillance and restrictive measures were not comparable in their scope or scale to those that had been implemented in the early 1960s or 1970s.15 Only explicit and outright criticism of the communist system was punishable by this time, and artists began to establish an independent gallery network, thus enabling them to bypass the Kádár regime’s state-controlled exhibition venues. By the mid-1980s the party had powerful political (and cultural) opponents, and was no longer able to dominate the public sphere as it had done in the previous three decades. The party also fell victim to its own paradoxical existence in the 1980s  – it opened up the socialist political system for reform, but remained paranoid of losing its all-powerful grip on society.16 In this environment, no real obstacles remained to prevent political and artistic dissent gaining influence within the expanding first public sphere. Experimental artworks at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s took advantage of the fading (and then obsolete) socialist power and the emergence of democratic forces. The site-specific pieces discussed in this chapter, which emerged in the immediate aftermath of the system change, were optimistic about the possibilities that a real public sphere could offer. A catafalque to commemorate the victims of the 1956 revolution built by the architects Gábor Bachman and László Rajk in 1989, for example, fostered a

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real public awareness about an attempt at reform that had hitherto been condemned in official communist histories. Bachman and Rajk’s installation also contributed to the foundation of new identities in the new-born democracy. Like the 1956 catafalque, the art project Polyphony from 1993 also encouraged public debate. The main intention of Polyphony was to support the development of political and socio-critical art in Hungary in line with new (liberal) role models for the public sphere. Unlike the previous decades, it now seemed that urban sites could become forums of discussion that were truly accessible to citizens and artists alike. The optimism of these early years of Hungarian democracy had turned to scepticism and criticism by the 2010s. Beginning in 2010, the conservative government of Viktor Orbán started to introduce a ‘directed’ democracy with nationalist and limiting tendencies. The government’s growing control of the state media and the press, and the restrictions it placed on higher education and other aspects of intellectual life, to give just two examples, threatened the cohesion of the public sphere that had slowly evolved since 1989.17 In response to this growing control, and echoing the emergence of a second public sphere in the 1960s and 1970s, a non-obedient attitude emerged in civil engagement, NGO activities and the independent contemporary art scene. The final case study presented in this chapter will briefly analyse the independent civil art event series of the OFF-Biennale (2014–), which has encouraged social and political dialogue. As has been illustrated by the OFF-Biennale and other independent art projects, it appears that a second public sphere is once again emerging as a space of artistic autonomy in response to the development of the first public sphere in an increasingly prescribed, ordered and repressive direction.

From counter-revolution to revolution: Installation at a public site In the last months of communist rule, as Kádárian censorship began to loosen, the art of the second public sphere grew in visibility and prominence. As the following section will outline, the celebratory reburial of the martyrs of the 1956 revolution, including the former Prime Minister Imre Nagy, on 16 June 1989 at Heroes’ Square (Hősök tere) in Budapest marked a turning point in the history of Hungarian civil society. With this event, the increasingly blurred border between the first and second public spheres in Kádárian Hungary lost even more definition. In discussing the memorial by Gábor Bachman and László Rajk, two

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issues are fundamental: what public discussion through art actually involved in a transforming political atmosphere, and how identity was built by means of the presentation of historical role models in a new post-dictatorship country. Bachman and Rajk’s catafalque was in remembrance of the 1956 revolution, which took place between 23 October and 10 November of that year. Broadly speaking, the revolution was an attempt to reform socialism through a bottom-up initiative by members of a supressed civil society. At the end of the period of moderate political liberalization that had begun with the death of Joseph Stalin in March 1953, Hungarian citizens demanded the return of the influential socialist politician Imre Nagy to the government. Since his prime ministership in 1953, Nagy personified a version of reform communism that minimized forced industrialization, and promised justice, the restructuring of agricultural politics, and higher living standards. Because of these views, by the end of 1955 the party’s Political Committee regarded Nagy as oppositional, and he was removed from their inner circle of trust. Through him, many people hoped to reduce Soviet influence and to replace it with a new, national form of communism. At this time, national (or reform) communism meant altering rather than completely annihilating socialism in Hungary. A peaceful protest by a few hundred people soon turned into a mass uprising across the whole country, mostly involving young people. The shared aim of activists and armed freedom fighters in 1956 was to adapt the ideals of the socialist commonwealth to national circumstances.18 Their efforts were crushed by the intervention of Soviet troops that led to significant violent repression and many deaths. Following 1956, the Kádár regime banned references to, and commemorations of, the failed revolution. Despite this, it remained important in the second public sphere – both in everyday life and artistic life.19 The official purpose of the catafalque and reburial in 1989 was therefore to show that civil society had never passively accepted the government’s repression, even during the most authoritarian phases of Kádár’s reign. Further, a newly democratic Hungary needed to identify with the tradition of independent, creative thinking and acting, which had existed even during the dark days of totalitarianism: 1956 represented ideal evidence of such a tradition. According to sociologist and political essayist Péter Kende, the upheaval had contributed to the development of intellectual opposition in Kádárian Hungary. In this interpretation, the attempted revolution was not a failure, but rather, it marked the beginning of a period of free thought.20 It is significant that the catafalque and reburial of the Hungarian martyrs took place in Heroes’ Square, a place with both historical significance and the physical

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attributes to make it the most appropriate venue. Heroes’ Square was part of a large-scale building project in 1896, which had celebrated the 1,000-yearanniversary of the Hungarian state. As part of the project, the two important museum buildings of the Museum of Fine Arts and the Kunsthalle, which sit across from each other at opposite ends of the square, were also erected. In the central part of the square a monument comprising fifteen sculptures of key political leaders from Hungary’s past was built. Additional statues symbolized Hungary’s Christian heritage and values such as work, welfare, knowledge and glory. The major thoroughfare of Andrássy Street (Andrássy út), with its numerous governmental buildings and Europe’s second oldest underground transportation system, ends at Heroes’ Square. Since it was established, this urban site has been subject to regular change with the advent of major political events – including, for example, the naming of the Hungarian Council Republic that removed the statues of the Habsburg emperors and for 1 May covered the whole monument with an ephemeral red installation. In 1926 the monument with its fifteen statues returned to its (almost) original appearance. The current look of the Heroes’ Square sculpture constellation was determined in 1945, with some modifications made to the original: the five Habsburg rulers were replaced with five historic Hungarian figures who were deemed to better fit the socialist ideology of proletarian dictatorship.21 The temporary memorial installation by Bachman and Rajk, which was part of the reburial ceremony, consisted of a tilted, rusted steel frame at the top of which a white triangle-flag with a hole in it was fastened. Although the catafalque was originally intended to be placed at the centre of the square,22 it was set up in front of the Budapest Kunsthalle’s façade, which itself was covered with white and black textile. The coffins of the important public figures of the failed 1956 revolution, such as Imre Nagy, the journalist and politician Miklós Gimes, the state minister of Nagy’s government Géza Losonczy, the defence minister of the same administration, Pál Maléter, and the revolutionary, attorney and police lieutenant József Szilágyi, alongside various unknown martyrs, all formed part of the installation. Smaller geometrical elements also surrounded the platform in front of the museum. The installation and scenery of the reburial of the 1956 revolutionaries in Budapest contained references to martyrdom, represented by the empty coffin of the revolution’s anonymous victims; a gibbet, because hanging was a common method of execution for political dissent in the 1950s; and the eternal flame, burning for the fallen souls.23 These carefully arranged elements of the catafalque were strongly reminiscent of a theatre stage. The five-hour long ceremony itself, which took place on 16 June

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Figure 6.1  Gábor Bachman and László Rajk, Catafalque at the Heroes’ Square, Budapest, 1956 memorial, 1989. Painted photograph by László Rajk, 1989. Courtesy of the artists.

1989, was constructed as a large-scale performance. It featured the garlanding of the private individuals, organizations and officials who had paved the way to civil society and democracy, actors reading the names of the revolution’s victims aloud, bells ringing, and a series of speeches, among them one by future Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, of the Alliance of Young Democrats (Fiatal Demokraták Szövetsége, FIDESZ), demanding the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary. It ended in a procession of thousands of people to Rákoskeresztúr cemetery.24 To art historian Miklós Peternák, the commemoration was almost like a media event, while writer and editor Judit Lakner compared it to a performance.25 The broadcasting of the event on television and radio, the ritualistic quality of much of the ceremony, the speech-acts of the orators, and the co-presence of participants, indeed helped to make the reburial an intermediated processual event, the main stage of which was the bier installed by Bachman and Rajk. The catafalque contained many visual elements reminiscent of the revolutionary enthusiasm of 1920s Russian constructivism. Lóránd Hegyi compared the reburial setting to El Lissitzky’s Lenin Tribune (1920/4).26 Bachman and Rajk’s clear reference to this tradition of the historical avant-garde allowed a variety of interpretations as to why the architects had turned their

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attention to the glorious early years of the Bolshevik Revolution. On the one hand, this reference could be viewed as a critical retrospective of the previous four decades of communism in Hungary that had failed to fulfil the promise of a socialist utopia. On the other hand, it might have been seen as a call for new ideals stimulated by the revolutionary spirit and aesthetic radicalism of the historical avant-gardes. Or, as a third possibility, the Soviet elements of the installation could have been an attempt to present new symbols designed for a more democratic era: an age in which citizens could draw inspiration from the dissenting visual culture of Hungary’s second public sphere27 and futureoriented constructivism and productivism.28 No matter whether it was a critical, an enthusiastic, or a creative voice that motivated Bachman and Rajk, or indeed a combination of these impetuses, their site-specific artwork was a response to the atmosphere of tense transformations. Indirectly, the memorial tested the limits and opportunities of the changing public sphere. Besides the empty coffin, gibbet and the eternal flame, the 1956 upheaval was also remembered via a white flag with a hole burned in it, and by a street stone, the simplest weapon during the days of the revolution. The stone alluded to the urban battles that took place at the time. A further reference was to mourning, in the black-and-white drapery that covered Kunsthalle and the giant platform in front of it, as well as in the four white candelabra that burned throughout the reburial ceremony.29 The materials chosen by Bachman and Rajk thus combined historic with abstract elements to create the foundations for a new imagery. Tradition stood for the revolution’s visual culture, abstraction was the fall back to the historical avant-garde’s constructivist heritage, and a new identity meant the opportunity for democratization in 1989. Homogeneous, slightly textured surfaces contrasted with the Kunsthalle’s neo-classicism and the catafalque’s baroque-inspired details. But, the rusty metallic parts of the tower evoked the sharpest contrast with the other pieces. This raw metal was, on the one hand, a reference to the 1950s obsession with steel – a reference to forced industrialization30 – while on the other hand it coupled the communist ideals of the 1920s with the potential of a democratic way for Hungary by referencing de-constructivist architecture. One of the most important features of the 1956 catafalque was its direct engagement with the events of the day. The installation hinted through a variety of aesthetic means at historical-political identity production, and it also addressed the discrepancy between the ideals and implementation of socialism and the failed attempts to reform it. Overall, it was a medium with critical and reflexive impact. Bachman and Rajk’s installation thus produced

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a space of in-betweenness in which a strengthened second public sphere was explicitly interwoven with the weakened first public sphere. The reintegration of 1956 into the public memory of Hungarian culture meant that the narrative (or even myth?) of the non-obedient public sphere was taken up by the emerging democratic forces as a cornerstone of their cultural legitimacy. Thus, the 1956 memorial and catafalque contributed to the anchoring of Hungarian dissent in diversified post-1989 public awareness. It did not draw a strict line between the past and the future, but instead formed a bridge between them, connecting both the first and the second public sphere. Bachman and Rajk’s catafalque may have been the most overt artistic celebration of 1956, but it was not the only one. During the course of the 1980s, 1956 had become one of the most important symbols within dissenting circles. In rare cases, the iconography of 1956 and the schematized idea of overthrowing the communist regime functioned as political metaphors. This was especially true in the case of the INCONNU Group’s work, which comprised ‘de-autonomized’ and politicized art. This kind of art appeared in the early 1980s and for INCONNU, was the consequence of harsh party restrictions.31 The borderline between art actionism and political activism was very narrow in INCONNU. Aesthetics often intersected with actual political content, as had been demonstrated by their piece created for the exhibition Hungary can be yours!. In a number of cases, the main subject of INCONNU’s art events was explicitly the 1956 revolution. In summer 1989, for instance, the group organized an intervention at the assumed resting place of the upheaval’s victims, in the New Communal Cemetery (Új Köztemető) in Budapest. As part of this event, the collective ‘carv[ed] and erect[ed] 301 wooden grave markers’ that were considered illegal and were removed by the police shortly thereafter.32 Through this performative act, which involved appropriately commemorating the officially rejected victims, the group highlighted the reforms and values of 1956 and set them against the denial and condemnation they had received from communist politicians. This gesture of assigning identities to those whose identities had been officially denied was also a key feature of Bachman and Rajk’s installation. The other INCONNU art event that was closely related to the revolution was the apartment exhibition The Fighting City, which opened on 28  January 1987, with historian and author Timothy Garton Ash, writer Danilo Kiš, György Konrád and writer, film director and activist Susan Sontag on its advisory board. The Fighting City featured forty-three Hungarian and international artworks, all of which commented on the Soviet military intervention and the defeat of the revolution.33 Prior to the show, an international call for participation had been

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made in Hungarian samizdat issues, Parisian émigré journals and in the New York Review of Books. Yet, despite this international reach, Communist Party organs blocked submissions by closely observing postal communications. The police even shut down the exhibition’s opening and confiscated artworks they deemed offensive in order to avoid the displaying of ‘hostile content’. Instead of the artworks, INCONNU then provocatively exhibited the confiscation documents. Thus, ‘[b]y not respecting the relative autonomy of either the artistic or political field, [the group] provoked both spheres’.34 INCONNU refused to allow limitations on their freedom of expression to be imposed either by traditional aesthetics or by the state. Despite the constant efforts of the party to stifle the most radical and political tendencies in post-avant-garde art, the expansion of the second public sphere was clearly visible by 1987. The Fighting City was exhibited in a typical underground venue (an apartment), where it presented artworks, as well as information on the artworks it had attempted to gather from all around Europe and across the Atlantic. The closure of the show sparked a wave of international solidarity. The imagery of the 1956 revolution and the ideas that it stood (and was still standing) for could no longer linger in a monitored alternative culture. As a milestone in the fight for democratic and human rights, The Fighting City had the potential to build the foundations of a more democratic era to come. To art historian Juliane Debeusscher, ‘the exhibition sanctioned the Hungarian Revolution as a plural and transnational symbol of resistance, and gathered support for a collective process of mourning’.35 In many ways, the public reburial and memorialization of the martyrs of the revolution only two years later marked the culmination of this societal reckoning. The particular relevance of 1956 to Hungarian dissent lay in its character as an anti-totalitarian revolution that ‘challenged the totalitarian system from inside with the aim to recover elementary rights and freedoms abrogated by the dictatorship’.36 To the democratic opposition, including the circle to which László Rajk also belonged, this unsuccessful attempt to reform socialism had a moral message, and as such, was a shared historical memory that could serve as a reference point for a potential political transformation.37 Simultaneously to the revolutions of 1989/90 that swept across the Eastern bloc, the rehabilitation of the 1956 revolution inspired civilian political action, which ‘travelled’ from the non-obedient public sphere into the ordered public realm. This process went hand in hand with attempts to replace the socialist urban and rural landscapes with ‘fresh’ iconography focusing on pre-Soviet history and the nation state prior to the establishment of socialist rule in 1949. The upheaval of 1956 became

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a folk symbol, and it was a medium of freedom and anti-totalitarianism fully in line with the new self-directed redefinition of democratic Hungary. *** By 1988, like many other contemporary artists, László Rajk had become interested in the topic of the revolution. He was, for instance, involved in a symbolic grave design commemorating 1956 at the famous Pére Lachaise cemetery in Paris. The resting place he created for a symbolic group of people resembled a storm damaged ship; the revolution’s flag, featuring two granite blocs coloured black and red-white-green, also formed part of the memorial over the grave.38 The simple geometric nature of the catafalque’s pier was not yet present in the Paris piece. The sinking ship harked back to the past, symbolizing mourning, unlike the catafalque at Heroes’ Square. Yet, in addition to the melancholic memories inherent in the installation, the sinking ship also pointed to the future, with new symbols of democratic identity. This aspect of future orientation is important in addressing the question of why it was Gábor Bachman and László Rajk who constructed the Budapest reburial setting. Both had been involved in the experimental art scene to challenge boundaries of official culture.39 Bachman and Rajk’s 1956 catafalque was not only inspired by the rediscovery and aesthetic reinterpretation of constructivism; their creative goals also had subtle political implications. Identification with the utopian enthusiasm of the Russian avant-garde went hand in hand with exploring the possibilities of agitprop, as well as the potential of combining ‘local traditions, working-class culture, and Leftist art history’.40 Both Bachman and Rajk were intellectually active artists whose efforts to call attention to the ‘purity’ of early Marxist thought were inspired by the failed implementation of communism in real life. In preparation for the International Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition in 1985, Bachman and Rajk cooperated with György Konrád and Miklós Haraszti. Konrád’s philosophical position was important to both architects: he viewed architecture as a metaphor through which to ‘criticize[] the philosophy of state planning, with architects becoming symbols of the supranational socialist bureaucrats who controlled every possible segment and element of quotidian life’.41 Like László Rajk, Gábor Bachman challenged state control mechanisms with his architectural designs and buildings.42 From de- and recontextualized constructivist symbols, similar to those that had once been applied by Alexander Rodchenko, Liubov Popova, Vladimir Tatlin and Kazimir Malevich, Bachman helped to create a radical and critical architecture, the most successful

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implementation of which was his building ‘Work-Act’ Pub (‘Munka-Tett’ Kocsma, 1986).43 To Bachman, this pub was a parody that combined elements of Hungarian socialism, postmodernism, punk and socialist relicts.44 Péter György regarded the ‘Work-Act’ Pub as representing the realization of a total work of art: The refurnished pub resembled a classical Constructivist structure. The metal surfaces, red letters, and iron chairs recalled the inventions of the Russian classical avant-garde – Rodchenko’s design and Mayakovsky’s Window of RosTa. It evoked the spirit of agit-prop art and the revolution it promoted in art and politics – such could be an innocent, artistic reading of the building. But this pub didn’t belong to the recent art world of Budapest . . . The building itself was one of the characterless concrete cubes on the outskirts of a housing project built for the working class. In such an environment, the art historical bricolage, the irony of the red capital letters ‘WORK-ACT,’ became dramatic.45

The dissonance between real-life socialism and a constructivist utopia was made explicit in ‘Work-Act’ Pub.46 The almost heroic representations and symbols of the historical avant-garde had nothing in common with workers’ actual everyday lives in 1980s Hungary.47 This revisited engagement with constructivism most likely had its origins in the disillusionment that intellectuals and architects experienced even before the more optimistic and liberal 1980s. Following Péter György’s line

Figure 6.2  ‘Work-Act’ Pub, Szigetszentmiklós, 1986. It was designed by Gábor Bachman architect-designer. This pub was destroyed in 1988. Photograph by Zoltán Bakos.

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of thought, the revolutionary aesthetics of a reinvented constructivism became a ‘politico-aesthetical criticism of the system’.48 László Beke has also detected a similar critical attitude in Rajk’s architecture.49 Criticism might have been just the starting point for the re-establishment of constructivism. Bachman and Rajk’s work, especially the 1956 catafalque, arguably cleared the way for a visual language to emerge from the non-obedient public sphere’s attitude. Both Bachman and Rajk represented a persona that unified the figures of the critical architect and the de-constructivist artist. Their analytical and deconstructive approach ‘distract[ed] Russian constructivism into small pieces, interconnect[ed] them to signs of reality, utopian immaculacy and monolithic homogeneity opposed to the fragmentation of personal experience, of genuine life’.50 Their artistic and architectural work creatively absorbed Jacques Derrida’s philosophical concept of deconstruction, which intended a multifaceted and analytical approach to thought that questioned both Hegelian dialectics and the ‘thesis-antithesis-synthesis trinity of Hegelian and classic modernist thinking’.51 Avant-gardist stage or film set designs also formed part of the architects’ creative de-constructivism.52 Bachman and Rajk’s engagement with the art of the second public sphere, for instance, was manifested in their scene sketches for avant-garde film-maker Gábor Bódy’s films, Rajk’s acting performance in Miklós Erdély’s film Version (Verzió, 1981),53 and their fine art and stage design.54 It was the film scene that was especially open to aesthetic radicalism and experiment. Bachman recalled executive producer Ottó Föld’s statement that socialism could release films of a comparable standard to those of the West German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder.55 The encounters with alternative art were inseparable from their architectural projects. In the 1960s, Bachman and Rajk became acquainted with the neo-avant-garde inner circle and their experimental behaviour and attitudes. These encounters with aesthetic dissenters reflected the two architects’ engagement with the second public sphere. Bódy’s and Erdély’s works were, for example, de-constructivist in their manner, never providing simple answers to complex questions. These artworks could be interpreted in non-linear and multilayered ways. In the political and cultural transition of 1989, an in-between space, a newly ‘free, “empty” space and place’,56 appeared for artists’ use. Here, the roles and positions of the first and the second public sphere were less clear than they had been in previous years. The first public sphere had lost its controlling influence over all aspects of cultural life; as a result of this shift, the art of the second public sphere no longer needed to follow the requirements of the socialist visual regime. The de-constructivist attitude of Gábor Bachman and László Rajk’s work,

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treading a path to postmodernism,57 further highlighted the dissolving borders between these spheres. Their catafalque to the martyrs of 1956 also spatially (re)presented the tensions between a simulated socialist affluence and the world behind the symbols and rituals of a regulated everyday life. The architects refunctionalized signs and symbols drawn from the classical avant-garde and the 1956 revolution, and combined them into a set of new semiological objects.

After the wall: Establishing public art The new, democratic Hungarian government formed in 1989 kept some traces of the surveillance state in place. Furthermore, most communist-era officials were not held accountable for rights violations committed under their watch. In many cases, former communist leaders changed their clothes and their political rhetoric, and continued to occupy influential positions; others began a peaceful retirement. The establishment of parliamentary democracy felt rushed, as it was done without publicly exposing the crimes and abuses of the Kádár regime. This was partly because important figures in the political and financial elite of the country managed to stay in influential positions.58 How could a system change take place if the previous rulers remained close to state decision-making? Since the establishment of democracy in 1989, Hungary has faced a series of political, social and economic problems. Its democratically elected leaders quickly realized that socialist industry was anachronistic, and that Hungarian industry could not compete in an international free market, even though capital and companies were transferred to private owners. Hungary also took out a number of foreign loans that did not succeed in stimulating industry, instead only enlarging the country’s debt. Post-1989, many ordinary Hungarian citizens were unable to take advantage of the freedom they had recently won. Many citizens often referred to the separate peace that they had made with the previous regime that had allowed them to make a decent living and to sleep well at night. In contrast, soon after Hungary became a democratic, liberal state, its people were confronted with high unemployment and other social insecurities, such as increased crime, poverty and depression.59 Yet, despite the day-to-day hardships of the transition to post-communism, when the last Soviet troops finally left Hungary in 1991 its people could live in a society devoid of control. This enabled a greater freedom of expression than most Hungarians could remember. In this context, art historian Piotr Piotrowski saw a chance for dialogue between an emerging civil society and a critical new avant-garde. In order to capture

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the social and cultural transformations that were moving in this direction, he introduced the term ‘agoraphilia’ to refer to the eagerness of citizens to take action, provoke change and articulate critical opinion: ‘[A]goraphilia represents both a critical attitude directed against those types of efforts aimed at limiting free speech, as well as a call for realization of the creative and civic freedoms’.60 In doing so, Piotrowski did not deny that the socialist past presented obstacles to the former communist states of the Eastern bloc to realizing civil initiatives, due to the ingrained habits built by decades of repression and weak civil organizations. At the same time, he was searching for alternative narratives that could bring together the formative historical experience of living under socialist rule and the prospect of a liberating democracy. Based on Chantal Mouffe’s concept of an agonistic democracy, Piotrowski imagined agoraphilia as a framework of action and space that did not settle on a consensus. Mouffe believed that the conflict of ideas in public space would benefit both politics and society;61 her idea was to turn the us vs them differentiation (antagonism) of politics into agonism – a battle between disparate hegemonic projects that could never rationally reconcile with each other – which, for her, was a requirement of democracy. This ideal of democracy involves a genuine confrontation between diverse parties, regulated by a number of democratic, mutually accepted procedures.62 The public sphere should also be adjusted to this conflict-based, real democracy. The visions of how the take over of democracy actually took place in the early post-communist years are divided. The optimistic perspective of Piotrowski and Mouffe is in sharp contrast with Jürgen Habermas’s critical position on the transition in forms of government that took place in the late 1980s beyond the Iron Curtain. Habermas viewed the events of 1989/90 in East, Southeast and Central Europe with pessimism. He criticized the fact that most former socialist countries had adopted the capitalist Western model of a democratic constitutional state. Habermas was disappointed because he expected more innovation and less adherence to an existing political model that had significant (and manifest) problems.63 While Piotrowski had faith in the positive impact of artistic dissent and civil engagement in the transition from dictatorship to a democratic system, Habermas questioned the reformist capability and achievements of the political opposition. Both artists and political reformists are visionaries, which is why Piotrowski and Habermas had such faith in them. Yet, if artists had the potential to direct attention to urgent social and political issues, it was the political visionaries whose proximity to power might enable them to instigate change on a national scale.

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Particularly after cultural censorship ended, contemporary artists who wished to comment on their society’s actual situation would no longer remain silent. In this newly open context, artists used both public and site-specific art in the early 1990s to make their message heard. As the case of the 1956 memorial by Bachman and Rajk has shown, urban space was no longer exclusively the terrain of authoritarian rule, but had become an open field for artistic experiment. The anti-communist elements of the second public sphere’s art largely disappeared. At the beginning of the 1990s, attempts were made to open up the public space to political and socio-critical art. Compared to the neo-avant-garde art of the second public sphere, these artworks did not go underground and were no longer subtle or reticent.64 An art project entitled Polyphony (1993), for instance, invited artists to create politically and socially sensitive site-specific and installation art in postcommunist Hungary. The project included many smaller pieces of performative and intermedia art, and encouraged participating artists to rethink their stillfresh experiences of social conditions and identities in a restrictive state. Via an open call for participation, Polyphony sought the submission of artworks by Hungarian artists that used all the potentialities of public space and addressed the freshly recovering public directly. The selected artworks were merged in an exhibition, which according to one of the main organizers, Suzanne Mészöly, provided ‘Hungarian contemporary artists a forum to express their broadest social commentaries.’65 Almost all submitted artwork proposals addressed and nuanced ongoing changes in the public sphere. In the newly democratic setting, the twenty-nine exhibited artworks66 profited from the potential of mass media and mass communication and made efforts to reverse the presumed silence of Eastern European societies.67 Prior to Polyphony, neo-avant-garde art’s presence in public urban spaces was rare in Hungary. Under the communist regime, any public art that disturbed the ordinary path of passers-by, hindered the view of buildings, or obstructed traffic was removed almost immediately. Most performative interventions therefore only left a temporary, reticent mark in the regulated urban setting. Costumed actions, protest boards placed in parks, paintings hung in narrow streets, a foodvending machine placed on a busy square, and stickers pasted all over the city are among the many examples of how performance artists nevertheless entered urban spaces in the Kádár era.68 The visibility of art – whether it was tolerated or quickly removed by the police – was a key feature of these fleeting urban artworks. Via acts of disobedience, the creation of temporarily visible art pieces was a cautious workaround allowing artists to access space that was meant to be public, in the Habermasian understanding of the word.

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The importance of complex signs and metaphors in contemporary nonrealist art had decreased by 1989, as subversive acts lost their relevance. To Péter György, liberalization and moves towards democratization by the Kádár regime had already began by 1980. From then on, the party lost its ability to exercise control over a homogeneous culture, and socialism in Hungary as the promise of future communism only existed in the present, with no credible prospect of the realization of its goals.69 Philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás’s opinion touched on this: ‘If communism is not future in some sense, then it is nothing. And this is precisely what it had become in the 1970s and 1980s: nothing.’70 The 1980s thus passed by in an atmosphere of a ‘discursive dictatorship’, a term coined by political scientist Ervin Csizmadia, in a time in which the Hungarian intellectual elite had created conditions for importing ‘Western’ modes of government to Hungary in the post-communist era.71 In the years after the system change, public space became a freely accessible, yet still not entirely neutral, field. The contemporary art scene of the early 1990s took the opportunity to conquer this forum – not cautiously, but with every possible tool of experimental euphoria. It was in this context that Polyphony took place and triggered the social and political sensibility of contemporary art in democratic Hungary. The Polyphony exhibition was an initiative by the Soros Center for Contemporary Arts Budapest. In 1984, inspired by the Popperian concept of open society, the multibillionaire hedge fund manager and Hungarian émigré George Soros established his Open Society Foundation, which was designed to help ‘establish open societies in place of authoritarian forms of government’.72 The foundation worked behind the Iron Curtain and grew in importance as socialism began to weaken. According to one of the organization’s public relations statements, ‘[a]s communism collapsed, Soros moved quickly to seize the revolutionary moment and create foundations in countries throughout Eastern Europe and Central Asia’. The foundation’s website praises Soros’s role in former socialist countries’ liberation: ‘His work contributed to the emergence of democratic governments and substantially more open societies in most countries of the former Soviet empire.’73 The Soros Foundation Fine Arts Documentation Center, founded in 1985 and from 1991 onwards known as the Soros Center for Contemporary Arts, like its parent organization (the Open Society Foundations), defined its purpose as helping to democratize and reform contemporary art in Hungary. To advance this mandate, the Soros Foundation started to collaborate with Kunsthalle in 1985. The policy of the foundation was that it supported those kinds of art not supported by the socialist government, which mostly belonged to the category of the

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experimental. Scholarships, financial support for organizing exhibitions, and the publication of exhibition catalogues were among the Center’s most common means of supporting artists.74 Another important task of the then Fine Arts Documentation Center was to collect and store information ‘on twentieth-century Hungarian artists for students, scholars, collectors and dealers from within Hungary and from abroad’.75 Art historian and sociologist Kristóf Nagy thoroughly researched the documentation and fine art support of the foundation in Hungary, with a focus on the late 1980s. Nagy understood the Soros Foundation as representing a ‘liberal counter-hegemony’ in opposition to the hegemonic Kádárian regime. The organization constructed a new canon of fine arts and supported the establishment of what can now be called ‘contemporary art’.76 Besides making Hungarian art more visible beyond the nation’s borders, Soros’s notion of ‘democracy-popularization’77 was in reality a slogan giving directive to contemporary artists in Hungary.78 According to Nagy, in the 1980s the zones of contact between East and West grew in number and were less controlled by the authorities. Hungarian artists’ works should have appealed to both Soviet and Western artworlds. The Soros Foundation’s funding scheme kept ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ standards of art production in sharp opposition, as Western academic methods were contrasted with Eastern irrationality and laziness, and Western independence and neutrality were confronted with Eastern inhibition.79 In order to navigate these new circumstances and to promote capitalist art and culture’s advance, the Soros Center for Contemporary Arts offered help to Hungarian artists – but it did so while imposing liberal values, methods and structures on them. These changes affected the public sphere in a fundamental way. Nagy’s application of the term ‘hegemony’ in the context of socialist hegemony and liberal counter-hegemony is helpful here in describing the transformation of the public realm that had occurred by the end of the 1980s80 in that the Open Society Foundation did not contribute to the complete autonomy and independence of the public sphere. Paradoxically, it introduced new role models and norms to which the public sphere should adapt. Because Polyphony was an initiative of the Open Society Foundation, it was given the same directive. According to the director of the Soros Center for Contemporary Arts Budapest at the time, Suzanne Mészöly, the main goal of Polyphony was ‘to provide contemporary Hungarian artists a forum to express their broadest social commentaries . . . [T]he exhibition planned to confront the public in a number of public spaces in the capital of Hungary’.81 To experimental artists, the most important difference between practising art at that time and in the repressed

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second public sphere of the past was that their concepts and works now received more financial support, infrastructure and public acceptance than they had during the Kádárian era. Indeed, by 1993, contemporary artists were openly invited to display their works and share their ideas in urban spaces, both indoor and outdoor, an option that in previous decades had been off-limits to them. Under state socialism, neo-avant-garde artists were ‘[l]acking the option to show political works, [this is why] artists lived their political art . . . they occupied spaces in society and behaved in certain ways which made it clear that their creations, no matter how abstract or devoid of innuendo, were metaphors of their dissident views’.82 As we have seen in the case studies of neo-avant-garde art from the 1960s and 1970s set out in the previous chapters, those performative and intermedia artworks were expressions of attitude and lifestyle. The intimate fusion of art and life was one of the reasons why so many pieces sprung up in closed spaces, such as apartments. In contrast to this neo-avant-garde approach, one major goal of post-avant-garde tendencies in Hungary was to disengage art from life, and to display their separation. There was still interest in addressing political and social matters, but in a much wider physical and virtual space and without the ego of the initiator. The discourses of intimacy and clandestine behaviour were carried out in the former ordered public sphere – that is, in the urban space. By the end of the 1980s and at the beginning of the 1990s, contemporary art had rid itself of many of its previous burdens and started to conquer new territory. *** Polyphony directed political and socio-critical art into line with the new postcommunist social spirit of experimentation. It began with a call for participation that sought project proposals and artworks that would shake up the ‘silence’ of civil society after 1989,83 with the request that submissions should be social and political in their intentions.84 Polyphony aimed at transforming and diversifying the public sphere. My analysis of Polyphony, which is presented below, will look at three works submitted in response to the call that were accepted. All three used public urban (outside) space in two respects: they disturbed and manipulated the environment in which they were staged, and they sought to transform passive passers-by into active participants of performance art. The first piece from Polyphony that I explore was by sculptor, intermedia artist, painter and graphic designer Róza El-Hassan. Her Boulevard Stroboscope was a site-specific installation staged along the Budapest ring road. El-Hassan

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reversed the logic of the motion picture when she installed pieces of an image on human-sized advertising pillars along the route of tram number 6, between the stops at Oktogon and Lujza Blaha square (Blaha Lujza tér), for one day only. The ‘movie’ effect was achieved through the spectator’s movement while the picture remained stationary, but the perceptions of those who saw the images suggested something else. The artist was interested in how this unconventional situation within everyday life would disturb the behaviour of tram passengers. Specifically, she was curious about how the spectators would react, and how much of the urban surroundings in which they lived they really noticed. She turned the attention of passers-by towards recognizing the restructuring of signs in their own urban environment.85 The central idea of Gyula Július’s art project was closing all Budapest-based exhibition spaces, galleries and museums on the occasion of Marcel Duchamp’s death. Visual Silence – on the 25th Anniversary of Marcel Duchamp’s Death was not a successful event because not all the city’s institutions replied positively to Július’s request to temporarily shut. The written rejection letters were, in the manner of conceptual art, exhibited during Polyphony. According to the exhibition catalogue, the purpose of the action was to question the right of these art institutions to exist and, further, to ask what their role was in the society of the time.86 Július chose the artist (Duchamp) and the date (Duchamp’s death

Figure 6.3  Róza El-Hassan, Boulevard Stroboscope, Polyphony project, Soros Center for Contemporary Arts Budapest, 1993. Courtesy of the artist.

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day) very carefully, as Duchamp represented the high point of modernist art and in the 1910s had attacked the then-traditional forms of art, their ‘language, institutions, structures of meaning, expectations, and reception’.87 With his readymades, he denounced and exhibited the uselessness88 and the reduction89 of the art object. Moreover, Duchamp also reflected on the ‘figure of the artist’, problematizing the artist as agent and decentring his/her subjectivity.90 One of the most important questions posed by the readymade addressed the functioning of the basic discourses of Modernism and the art world: ‘with his R. Mutt, Duchamp [was] pinpointing the tautological norm of exclusion on which the modern establishment is based’.91 Art theoretician Thierry de Duve summarized the achievements of Duchamp as follows: he had managed ‘[t]o negate the work as material object . . . [t]o negate the work as being the opus of an author . . . [t]o negate the work as visual phenomenon offered to the viewer . . . [t]o negate the work as institutionalized value . . .’.92 This latter aspect may well have been of interest to Július when formulating his criticism of those institutions that had failed to mark the anniversary of Duchamp’s death by closing for the day. The final example described here of an artwork answering Polyphony’s call for participation is that of neo-conceptual artist Gyula Várnai’s audio installation Agitator. This installation was not only site-specific but also a self-constitutive artwork. In it, Várnai placed a tape-recorder at the intersection of two crowded streets in Budapest, which recorded all the sounds from the neighbourhood, ranging from human chatter to traffic noises – thus literally capturing the local ‘polyphony’. Passers-by could, if they wished, take the initiative and be part of the creative process by recording their own voice. As Várnai explained, ‘The end of the event is indicated by the silencing of the tape-recorder, that is, the non-reproducibility of the past and the impossibility to document the future’.93 Várnai’s intentions were clear in that he wanted to step back and let others create a participatory artwork that would purely be built from individuals’ own initiatives. Várnai offered the possibility, and waited for others to take it up. His intervention in public space was thus a relatively minor and delicate attempt to evoke agency through disturbing the routines of daily life. As the organizers of the event argued, the central purpose of Polyphony was to stimulate the production of socio-critical and political art inspired by liberal values. At first glance, the optical manipulation, institutional critique and participatory public art on offer in the project differed little from its neoavant-garde predecessors. But, in the three site-specific artworks, the artists no longer had any reason to fear repercussions, and were therefore free to be more explicit in their critique. The elements of disturbance and the activation of the passive perceptions of passers-by in order to transform the (former) first public

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Figure 6.4  Gyula Várnai, Agitator, Polyphony project, Soros Center for Contemporary Arts Budapest, 1993. Courtesy of the artist.

sphere were also present in other artworks participating in Polyphony. Painter and graphic designer Ilona Kiss, for instance, published fake advertisements in the weekly newspaper Hungarian Orange (Magyar Narancs);94 painter and graphic designer Zsolt Koroknai presented a phone box in which people could listen to, or have, fictitious conversations;95 Antal Lakner mounted a large text installation on the Elisabeth bridge (Erzsébet híd);96 and János Sugár used the electronic signboards at Lujza Blaha square to transmit encrypted messages.97 In each of these actions, the artists enjoyed relatively easy access to public sites and media, and their artworks were not subject to censorship as had been the case for the neo-avant-garde. In Kádárian Hungary it would have been unimaginable

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to use popular and highly visible venues for creative purposes, or to propagate contemporary non-realist art. Almost all the site-specific artworks that formed part of Polyphony addressed people living and acting in the urban environment. They also contained intermedia elements by combining diverse genres and intentions that crossed into one another. Although the works produced in response to the call for submissions continued the intermedia and performative tradition of the neoavant-garde, they failed to make a major public or political impact, and nor were they particularly innovative in form. According to art historian András Zwickl, neither the context nor the people in Budapest in 1993 were ready for innovative public art. To Zwickl, the whole initiative was a caricature; as he explained: ‘ . . . I feel [the works] do not function in the Budapest of here and today as provocations, they do not invoke thoughts but are simply funny in an entertaining way’.98 One participating artist, Tibor Várnagy, was also sceptical about the social and political impact of the Polyphony exhibition.99 As well as failing to achieve their intended goal, which was to convey social and political meaning, the artworks also failed to embody the liberal values that Polyphony’s organizers sought. No matter how noble the organizer’s intentions were, it was problematic that this particular artistic ‘occupation’ of the public space was artificial and top-down. While the support of the Soros Center offered greater freedom for artists, which they could use to intervene in and shape the public sphere, it was nevertheless another form of authority acting as a self-appointed directing force in Hungarian contemporary art. Creating openly critical, even political public art was important to building a democratic state, but Polyphony demonstrated that the Hungarian art community was not yet fully independent of the first public sphere of the communist years. The moment for this kind of contemporary art to appear had not yet arrived. That said, the works realized within the framework of Polyphony took steps in the direction of loosening boundaries in space and between people. Polyphony brought debates and formal experiments out from formerly underground spaces into public urban venues, which should be considered an achievement in itself. The works briefly presented here showed various ways to creatively extend the capacities of the public sphere.

The remains of the second public sphere: The 2010s At the time of writing in 2020, the liberal democracy George Soros dreamt of, and the open public sphere in which Polyphony could unfold, have become endangered. Since 2010, Hungary has been governed by the FIDESZ party (the

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Union of Hungarian Citizens, in Hungarian Fiatal Demokraták Szövetsége  – Magyar Polgári Szövetség), which has a conservative, right-wing political orientation. At the time of its establishment in 1988, FIDESZ was a liberal and alternative group of young intellectuals who expected the transition away from communism to result in a parliamentary democracy free from major corruption and which would embrace cultural diversity. From 1992 onwards, however, disillusionment with the promises of capitalism and democracy led the party to begin drifting to the right and to become increasingly centralized in its structure. Over the next two decades, as FIDESZ continued to move right, more and more Hungarians identified with the party’s ideology and programmes. At the national elections in 2010, FIDESZ gained two-thirds of the seats in Hungary’s parliament. The government, led by party head Viktor Orbán, even passed a new constitution in 2011 that cemented FIDESZ’s vision of a centralized state with national values. Journalist Gergely Nagy highlighted the all-embracing control of ‘Orbánism’ in ‘media, education, health care, culture and economy’. Because FIDESZ no longer has any viable political opponent in Hungary, Nagy argues, Orbán has ‘turned against the field of culture and the arts’.100 The year 2011 was also important in cultural terms, having seen the founding of the Hungarian Academy of Arts (Magyar Művészeti Akadémia), an organization with a major influence on the funding, guidelines and aims of national cultural institutions. The academy is an organization that has emerged directly out of the 2011 Constitution’s stated intention ‘to protect cultural values, to preserve, to pass on and present national art traditions, to encourage the production of new works, to strengthen the requirements of qualitatively high creative, collective work, [and to satisfy] the claim of artistic collaboration’.101 The academy is under government control, and decides how the state budget for art is distributed. The institution’s members – who are Hungarian artists with ‘excellent intellectual and artistic achievements’ – are directly elected by the General Assembly (a branch of government).102 The appearance and activity of the Hungarian Academy of Arts, alongside other centralizing measures put in place by the FIDESZ administration that have affected culture in the past decade, has caused frustration in contemporary art circles in Hungary. Literary historian and poet Győző Ferencz stated that it is customary in Hungarian cultural politics to believe that state funding should favour the ruling party’s ideology. Independent organizations’ freedoms are constantly endangered,103 and while artists, critics and other intellectuals have highlighted that a certain autonomy in the arts can be achieved through the academy, its critics have argued that the academy’s reforms come from the inside of a ‘rotten’ regime,104 where the decision makers in cultural politics are completely invisible and

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almost impossible to identify – a situation not unlike that of the Kádárian communist era. As the Hungarian Academy of Arts illustrates, political forces in Hungary over the last few years have sought to homogenize and control the public artistic sphere. Yet, history shows that in most hegemonic political system, counterdiscourses have appeared that cannot be silenced. In present-day Hungary, this dissent in many ways resembles that which was expressed in the ‘historic’ second public sphere. In 2017, various creative ways of protest joined together against the forced closure of the Budapest-based Central European University.105 The same ‘tradition’ continued in demonstrations against threats to the freedom and independence of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.106 Gergely Nagy has recently stated that ‘civil organizations in Hungary are stronger than ever . . . the academic field is alive and continues to fight for its autonomy [and also] [t]he arts community has not given in’.107 Most significantly, ‘[a] major part of contemporary art is thinking about society’s transformation, it [contemporary art] joined in the conversation about politics and society’.108 Today, the importance of art as a critical discourse and a force for autonomy has been strengthened, as shown by the OFF-Biennale event series, an annual festival bringing together those artists, curators, activists and cultural players seeking to produce culture independent of Hungarian state control (and funding).109 OFF is a mainly artistic festival comprising a wide variety of performance, installations, discussions and events, that runs throughout Budapest with an annual theme unifying its programmes. The first edition of OFF, which took place in 2015, lasted five weeks and had about two hundred different events in its programme. The second edition, addressed here briefly, took place between 29 September and 5 November 2017. In this edition, the themes of the artworks were more focused, but they still featured an immense variety of exhibition openings, workshops, performances and other kinds of events. OFF is the result of civilian engagement and collaboration between individuals, groups and institutions. The goal of the event series is to produce, show and debate art of both the present and the past.110 Like the sporadic and ephemeral event-based and intermedia art pieces that emerged during late socialism, the OFF has also occupied and revitalized alternative venues: ‘Settling in private apartments, vacant shop premises, industrial buildings, alternative theaters, and public spaces, it invites the public to explore the city.’111 The multiplicity of programmes located all over Budapest invites everyone including casual passers-by to navigate through the metropolis as self-determined moving actors. Beyond the content of the OFF events, the initiative creates a

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topography of the public sphere that is integrated into the official atmosphere while retaining its own logic. Because of its focus on the counter-hegemonic character of the disobedient public sphere, a single exhibition is outlined here: Somewhere in Europe – Gaudiopolis at the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives in Budapest (29 September–29 October 2017): ­ audiopolis or ‘The City of Joy’ was a children’s republic, founded in the G postwar years in Budapest by a Lutheran Pastor Gábor Sztehlo. In the aftermath of WW II, hundreds of children had to face the trauma of losing their parents or homes. Gaudiopolis provided a shelter for these children and a place where they had the opportunity ‘to become independent and confident citizens, familiar with practical matters and trained in theoretical issues, striving for a better self-recognition and self-criticism’ . . . The exhibition presents the history of Gaudiopolis along with similar initiatives which were most often born out of the courage, the perseverance and enthusiasm of private individuals (or smaller groups) driven by their beliefs in a just and equal society. These were individuals who tried to reform the political discourse, the cultural life and the education in their country, and who even though most of the times considered themselves as leftist, were later pursued and persecuted by the communist regime.112

Figure 6.5  Image of the exhibition space Somewhere in Europe – Gaudiopolis, 2017. © Dániel Végel and the OFF-Biennale Budapest Archive.

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Gaudiopolis was the leading theme of the 2017 OFF-Biennale because it was regarded as an overarching symbol of civilian courage and of the strength of bottom-up social processes. The exhibition Somewhere in Europe sought to present analogies of present and historical repressions and hopeful responses to overcome hegemonies. It showed how, at the peripheries of society and upon the ruins of a physically and mentally destroyed country after the Second World War, an alternative model for living together could be built. Many stories of experimental yet democratic education and community were told in Somewhere in Europe that can easily be viewed as stories of second public spheres. While the second public sphere is often considered as a shelter and/or a space offering necessary refuge, this book has shown that artists in the sphere have nonetheless produced art and ideas that engaged the first public sphere. OFF’s mandate was very ambitious when it stated that: ‘It [the biennial] strives to take an active part in the social discourse on public issues and to enhance the culture of democracy by the means of art.’113 The project has a great many followers and enthusiasts throughout the Hungarian and international contemporary art scene; its goal seems noble, and despite its limited visibility in the most influential Hungarian media outlets, it continues to stress the importance of critical consciousness among the public. The second public sphere under the communist regime was fragmented, scattered and loosely connected across many layers of society. The present second public sphere is similar, at least as represented by the OFF-Biennale. The ultimate goal is for there to be a public sphere that is open to all, and which encompasses state and private funding and artists who are free to express themselves in any way, whether political or personal, without interference. *** Along with the OFF-Biennale, the 1956 memorial and the art events of Polyphony presented here demonstrate the continuity of the second public sphere from its origins in the late 1950s up until today. The case studies discussed in this chapter have shown that artistic dissent in recent decades has followed the example of the second public sphere from the communist era by finding ways to oppose and protest against oppressive social, cultural and political directives. In each case, the artworks were responsive to changes in society and politics. Their artists aimed to create a forum through which to express and share their dissenting thoughts: this forum was the disobedient public sphere, a terrain where identities could be retrieved, and where criticism against a hegemonic political order could be articulated.

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The second public sphere in state socialism originally came into being because artists required a physical and intellectual space for free, or at least semifree, creativity. The art of the second public sphere was, on the one hand, deeply rooted in lived experiences of political and social oppression. On the other hand, this art was about turning an unfavourable situation into a favourable one. Both aspects were accompanied by attitudes of scepticism and (critical) responsiveness. Most of the elusive and trans-border artworks produced by artists of the second public sphere were subtle because they were created in a closed political regime, and their makers could not or did not want to be persecuted by the authorities having been labelled radical practitioners of countercultural aesthetics. Following the fall of communism in 1989, a democratic, non-ordered public sphere welcoming artistic experimentation might have been expected. However, today’s Hungary does not offer that. Rather, the country is a controlled democracy (irányított demokrácia) with a prevalence of regulations and centralizing tendencies in culture and the arts. Again, circumstances have arisen where the public sphere – represented by the government – does not wish to fulfil its Habermasian function of facilitating open discourse. Other venues and spaces are therefore needed to fill this gap, and the second public sphere has re-emerged to serve as a space where ideas can be openly expressed. As it now operates in a markedly different context to that of communist one-party rule, where dissenting aesthetics needed to be subtle and reticent, Hungarian artists today are systemcritical in more straightforward ways, and willing to expose counter-opinions without relying on coded meanings. However, these contemporary artists have inherited the non-obedient second public sphere’s ability to repurpose existing institutions and settings to advance their own agendas. By expressing themselves in this way, today’s artists indirectly pay tribute to the generations of avantgardists before them who did not settle for silence.

Notes 1 2

Galántai, ‘Resistance as “Behavior-Art”’. Ákos Birkás, ‘The Death of the Avant-garde (Excerpts),’ in Dóra Hegyi, Zsuzsa László, Emese Süvecz and Ágnes Szanyi (eds.), Art Always Has Its Consequences. Artists’ Texts from Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Serbia: 1974–2009, Berlin: Sternberg Press, transit-hu, 2011, pp. 136–144, here p. 142. 3 Ibid. 4 Forgács, Hungarian Art, pp. 188–189.

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5 Ibid., p. 192. 6 How it unfolded in both the first and the second public sphere has also been underlined by Forgács; ibid., pp. 200–201. 7 Barbara J. Falk, The Dilemmas of Dissidence in East-Central Europe: Citizen Intellectuals and Philosopher Kings, Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2003, pp. 127–130. 8 Cseh-Varga, Interview with Gábor Bachman; in this interview, Bachman clearly highlights that he did not identify with the notion of the second public sphere or counterculture as understood by László Rajk or György Galántai. Although Bachman’s aesthetic radicalism and talent were accepted and supported by the Kádár regime, at least in part, this did not mean that he was interested in politics, or that he should be represented as a so-called ‘samizdat-artist’. This concept of the ‘oppositional artist’ was, in Bachman’s opinion, created by intellectual politicians such as Rajk and György Konrád. 9 Csaba Nemes, ‘A rendszerváltás utáni magyar művészet társadalmi-politikai szerepvállalása,’ DLA thesis, Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, Doctoral School, Budapest, 2010, pp. 9–11. 10 Eric Hobsbowm, Das Zeitalter der Extreme. Weltgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts, Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2009, pp. 521–525. 11 Zoltán Ginelli, ‘A rendszerváltás narratívái,’ tranzitblog.hu, 4 January 2020. Available online: http://tranzitblog.hu/a-rendszervaltas-narrativai/(accessed 11 March 2020). 12 Kalmár, Történelmi galaxisok vonzásában, pp. 515–522. ­13 Ibid., pp. 527–539. 14 Ibid., p. 560. 15 Ignác Romsics, ‘A Kádár-rendszer legitimitásvesztése az 1980-as években,’ RUBICONline. Available online: http://www.rubicon.hu/magyar/oldalak/a_kadar_ rendszer_legitimitasvesztese_az_1980_as_evekben/ (accessed 11 March 2020). 16 Ibid. 17 János Mátyás Kovács and Balázs Trencsényi, Brave New Hungary: Mapping the ‘System of National Cooperation’, Washington, DC: Lexington Books, 2019. 18 Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Der Sowjetblock. Einheit und Konflikt, Cologne and Berlin: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1962, p. 328; Fejtő, 1956, a magyar forradalom, p. 69. 19 Csizmadia, A magyar demokratikus ellenzék (1968–1988), p. 47. 20 The same opinion came was also expressed by János Kenedi; ibid., p. 191. 21 Éva Kovács, ‘A terek és szobrok emlékezete (1988–1990). Etűd a magyar rendszerváltó mítoszokról,’ Regio – Kisebbség, politika, társadalom, Vol. 12, Issue 1, 2001, pp. 68–91, here p. 71. 22 Cseh-Varga, Interview with Gábor Bachman. 23 Lóránd Hegyi, ‘A nyolcvanas évek magyar képzőművészete,’ in Lóránd Hegyi (ed.), Nézőpontok/Pozíciók. Művészet Közép-Európában 1949–1999,

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Budapest: Kortárs Művészeti Múzeum – Ludwig Múzeum Budapest, 2000, pp. 285–295, here p. 292. 24 Tarján M. Tamás, ‘1989. június 16. Nagy Imre és társainak újratemetése,’ RUBICONline. Available online: http://www.rubicon.hu/magyar/oldalak/1989_ junius_16_nagy_imre_es_tarsainak_ujratemetese/ (accessed 11 March 2020). 25 Judit Lakner, ‘Bachman-Rajk-Peternák: Ravatal-Cataflaque. NA-NE Galéria, H., é.n. 73 old., ár nélkül,’ Buksz, Vol. 11, Issue 1, Spring 1991, pp. 97–99, here pp. 98–99. 26 Hegyi, ‘A nyolcvanas évek magyar képzőművészete,’ p. 292. 27 Typical icons of the revolution included, for instance, a perforated flag from which the Soviet symbols in the centre had been cut or burned out, and the frequent use of the national coat of arms, which features the stripes of the historical Árpád dynasty. 28 Hegyi, ‘Közép-Európa: Eszmemodell és életterv,’ in Lóránd Hegyi (ed.), Nézőpontok/Pozíciók. Művészet Közép-Európában 1949–1999, Budapest: Kortárs Művészeti Múzeum – Ludwig Múzeum Budapest, 2000, pp. 9–43, here p. 25. 29 Géza Boros, Emlékművek ’56-nak, Budapest: 1956-os Intézet, 1997, p. 39. 30 Gábor Bachman and László Rajk cited in ibid., p. 40. 31 Kristóf Nagy, ‘Aesthetics and Politics of Ressentiment – The Inconnu Group’s Shift towards National Populism,’ MA thesis, Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University, Budapest, 2016, p. 15. 32 Ibid., p. 18. 33 Debeusscher, ‘Information Crossings,’ Afterall, p. 77. ­34 Nagy, ‘Aesthetics and Politics of Ressentiment,’ p. 17. 35 Debeusscher, ‘Information Crossings,’ Afterall, p. 82. 36 Falk, The Dilemmas of Dissidence in East-Central Europe, p. 110. 37 Ibid., pp. 110–111. 38 János M. Rainer, ‘Szimbólikus sír Párizsban,’ História. Available online: http://www. historia.hu/archivum/2004/0405rainer.htm (accessed 24 February 2016). 39 Havasréti, Alternatív regiszterek, p. 44; Péter György, ‘Hungarian Marginal Art in the Late Period of State Socialism,’ in Aleš Erjavec (ed.), Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition: Politicized Art Under Late Socialism, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2003, pp. 175–207, here pp. 185–187; Katalin Néray, ‘Construction – Deconstruction – Reconstruction. Gábor Bachman and the Exhibition Architecture,’ in Mihály Varga (ed.), The Architecture of Nothing/ L’Architettura del Niente. VIth International Architecture Exhibition. Venice 1996. VIa Mostra Internazionale die Architettura Venezia 1996, Budapest: Műcsarnok, 1996, pp. 34–53, here p. 50. 40 György, ‘Hungarian Marginal Art in the Late Period of State Socialism,’ p. 188. 41 Ibid. 42 Néray, ‘Construction – Deconstruction – Reconstruction,’ p. 50. 43 György, ‘Hungarian Marginal Art in the Late Period of State Socialism,’ p. 189.

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44 Cseh-Varga, Interview with Gábor Bachman. 45 György, ‘Hungarian Marginal Art in the Late Period of State Socialism,’ p. 194. 46 The pub only existed for two years. Two patrol officers from the police grew suspicious about the visual elements and name of the ‘Work-Act’ Pub. As a consequence, all its important symbols were destroyed, and the pub was given the more neutral name of Gösser Pub. Cseh-Varga, Interview with Gábor Bachman. 47 Ibid., p. 201. 48 Ibid., p. 187. 49 László Beke, 5 Projects/Terv/Projects. Rajk László, 1977, not paginated. 50 Hegyi, ‘Közép-Európa: Eszmemodell és életterv,’ p. 25. 51 Forgács, Hungarian Art, p. 209. 52 György, ‘Hungarian Marginal Art in the Late Period of State Socialism,’ pp. 184–185. 53 Havasréti, Alternatív regiszterek, p. 44. 54 György, ‘Hungarian Marginal Art in the Late Period of State Socialism,’ p. 185–188. 55 Cseh-Varga, Interview with Gábor Bachman. 56 Miklós Peternák, ‘On Gábor Bachman’s Architecture,’ in Mihály Varga (ed.), The Architecture of Nothing/L’Architettura del Niente. VIth International Architecture Exhibition. Venice 1996. VIa Mostra Internazionale die Architettura Venezia 1996, Budapest: Műcsarnok, 1996, pp. 58–73, here p. 71. 57 Forgács, Hungarian Art, p. 210. ­58 Tamás Fricz, ‘Die alte Elite im neuen demokratischen Ungarn,’ in Hans-Joachim Veen (ed.), Alte Eliten in jungen Demokratien? Wechsel, Wandel und Kontinuität in Mittel- und Osteuropa, Cologne: 2004, pp. 285–307; Mária Schmidt, ‘Ungarn zwölf Jahre nach 1918, 1945 und 1989,’ in Hans-Joachim Veen (ed.), Alte Eliten in jungen Demokratien? Wechsel, Wandel und Kontinuität in Mittel- und Osteuropa, Cologne: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004, pp. 85–99. 59 Tibor Valuch, ‘Social Transformation and Changes in Daily Life in Hungary, during the Period of the Change of System,’ METSZETEK, Issue 1, 2014, pp. 192–201. 60 Piotr Piotrowski, Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe, London: Reaction books, 2012, pp. 7–8. 61 Ibid., pp. 11, 63. 62 Chantal Mouffe, Über das Politische. Wider die kosmopolitische Illusion, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2007, p. 30. 63 Jürgen Habermas cited in Petr Pithart, ‘’68 álmától ’89 valóságáig,’ in Mária Schmidt (ed.), Dimenziók éve – 1968. 2008. május 22-23-án Budapesten rendezett nemzetközi konferencia előadásai, Budapest: XX. Század Intézet, 2008, pp. 14–29, here p. 24; Boris Buden, Zone des Übergangs. Vom Ende des Postkommunismus, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009, p. 52.

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64 János Szoboszlai, ‘Selbstporträt einer Generation. Orientierungspunkte zur ungarischen bildenden Kunst der neunziger Jahre,’ in Hans Knoll (ed.), Die zweite Öffentlichkeit. Kunst in Ungarn im 20. Jahrhundert, Dresden: Fine Arts, 1999, pp. 290–333, here pp. 293–295. 65 Suzanne Mészöly, ‘Foreword,’ in Suzanne Mészöly and Barnabás Bencsik (eds.), Polifónia. A társadalmi kontextus mint medium a kortárs Magyar képzőművészetben. 1993. November 1–30. Hely-specifikus művek és installációk [Polyphony. Social Commentary in Contemporary Hungarian Art. November 1–30, 1993. Site-Specific Works and Installations], Budapest: Soros Alapítvány Kortás Művészeti Központ, 1993, pp. 14–16, here p. 14. 66 Polifónia. A társadalmi kontextus mint médium a kortárs magyar képzőművészetben. Selection of artworks. C3 Videóarchívum és Médiaművészeti Gyűjtemény Katalógus. Available online: http://catalog.c3.hu/index. php?page=work&id=990&lang=HU (accessed 29 March 2020). 67 Mészöly, ‘Foreword,’ pp. 15–16. 68 Tibor Várnagy, ‘Remarks on the Evaluation of POLYPHONY,’ in Mészöly and Bencsik, Polifónia, pp. 87–90, here p. 88. 69 Péter György, A hatalom képzelete: állami kultúra és művészet 1957 és 1980 között, Budapest: Magvető, 2014, pp. 11, 64. 70 Gáspár Miklós Tamás, cited in Imre Szeman, ‘The Left and Marxism in Eastern Europe: An Interview with Gáspár Miklós Tamás,’ Mediations, Vol. 24, Issue 2, Spring 2009, pp. 12–35, here p. 18. ­71 Milán Pap, ‘Az irracionalizmus forradalma? A neokonzervatív-neoliberális fordulat ideológiai recepciója a szocialista Magyarországon,’ manuscript, pp. 1–17, here pp. 13–14. Available online: https://www.academia. edu/14383445/Az_irracionalizmus_forradalma_A_neokonzervat%C3%ADvneoliber%C3%A1lis_fordulat_ideol%C3%B3giai_recepci%C3%B3ja_a_szocialista_ Magyarorsz%C3%A1gon (accessed 27 December 2017). 72 ‘History,’ Open Society Foundations. Available online: https://www. opensocietyfoundations.org/about/history (accessed 27 December 2017). 73 Ibid. 74 Kristóf Nagy, ‘A Soros Alapítvány és a képzőművészeti dokumentáció,’ A művészettörténet útjai 2. konferencia, 23 November 2013, Conference Paper, Pázmány Péter Katolikus Egyetem. 75 ‘Soros Centers for Contemporary Arts (SCCA) Network,’ C3, http://www.c3.hu/ scca/ (accessed 28 December 2018). 76 Nagy, ‘A Soros Alapítvány és a képzőművészeti dokumentáció’. 77 Kristóf Nagy, ‘A Soros Alapítvány Képzőművészeti Támogatásai Magyarországon. A nyolcvanas évek második felének tendenciái,’ Fordulat. Társadalomelméleti Folyóirat, Vol. 1, Issue 21, 2014, pp. 192–215, here p. 193; published in English

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as: Kristóf Nagy, ‘Managing Trans/Nationality: Cultural Actors within Imperial Structures,’ in Beáta Hock and Anu Allas (eds.), Globalizing East European Art Histories: Past and Present, New York and London: Routledge, 2018, pp. 53–62. 78 Nagy, ‘A Soros Alapítvány és a képzőművészeti dokumentáció’. 79 Nagy, ‘A Soros Alapítvány Képzőművészeti Támogatásai Magyarországon,’ p. 206ff. 80 Ibid. 81 Suzanne Mészöly, ‘Foreword,’ p. 14. 82 András Szántó, ‘From Silence to POLYPHONY,’ in Mészöly and Bencsik, Polifónia, pp. 31–38, here p. 32 83 Miklós Sükösd, cited in Mészöly, ‘Foreword’, p. 16. 84 Szántó, ‘From Silence to POLYPHONY,’ p. 34. 85 Róza El-Hassan, ‘Boulevard Stroboscope. Site-specific installation, video. Advertising pillars along the route of tram number 6, between Oktogon and Blaha Lujza Square, Budapest, November 24, 1993,’ in Mészöly and Bencsik, Polifónia, pp. 115–119, here pp. 115–116. 86 Gyula Július, ‘Visual Silence – on the 25th Anniversary of Marcel Duchamp’s Death,’ in Mészöly and Bencsik, Polifónia, p. 147. 87 Hal Foster, ‘What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?’ October. The Duchamp Effect. Vol. 70. Autumn 1994, pp. 5–32, here p. 17. 88 Ibid. p. 12. 89 Thierry de Duve, ‘Echoes of the Readymade: Critique of Pure Modernism’. October. The Duchamp Effect, Vol. 70. Autumn 1994, pp. 60–97, here p. 64. ­90 Alexander Alberro cited in Benjamin Buchloh, Rosalind Krauss, Alexander Alberro, Thierry de Duve, Martha Buskirk and Yve-Alain Bois, ‘Conceptual Art and the Reception of Duchamp,’ October. The Duchamp Effect, pp. 126–146, here p. 131. 91 Martha Buskirk, cited in ibid., p. 136. 92 de Duve, ‘Echoes of the Readymade,’ p. 87. 93 Gyula Várnai, ‘Agitator. Acoustic installation. At the corner of Rottenbiller and Damjanich Streets, Budapest, 12-2:30 p.m. November 19, 1993,’ in Mészöly and Bencsik, Polifónia, p. 272. 94 Ilona Kiss, ‘Vacation in Budapest. Advertisement in a newspaper. Magyar Narancs, November 18, 1993. (p. 28),’ in Mészöly and Bencsik, Polifónia, pp. 159–160. 95 Zsolt Koroknai, ‘Telephone Booth Gallery. Indirect Audio-Mail-Art Action. Public Telephone booths in different locations, Budapest, November 22-30, 1993,’ in Mészöly and Bencsik, Polifónia, p. 164. 96 Antal Lakner, ‘Directions Signs: Text Installation on the Overhead Beams. Elizabeth Bridge, Budapest, November 26-December 17, 1993,’ in Mészöly and Bencsik, Polifónia, p. 177. 97 János Sugár, ‘Electronic Billboard: Headquarters of Newpaper [sic!] Publishing Company, 3 Blaha Lujza Square, Budapest. Everyday at 5:15 p.m. November 3-30, 1993,’ in Mészöly and Bencsik, Polifónia, p. 226.

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98 András Zwickl, ‘Incidental Consonance?,’ in Mészöly and Bencsik, Polifónia, pp. 79–82, here p. 80. 99 Várnagy, ‘Remarks on the Evaluation of POLYPHONY,’ p. 90. 100 Gergely Nagy, ‘Hungary Turns Its Back on Europe: Dismantling Culture, Education, Science and the Media under Orbán,’ ARTMargins Online, 22 March 2020. Available online: https://artmargins.com/hungary-turns-its-back-on-europe-dismantlingculture-education-science-and-the-media-under-orban/?fbclid=IwAR3t07l7bh_ HsbXNXhH1tOwzjpdYKSERUgHPcTCIfJESGmHYJ8HmOE6ozp4 (accessed 29 March 2020). 101 ‘Az MMA történetéről,’ MMA. Magyar Művészeti Akadémia. Available online: http://www.mma.hu/az-mma-torteneterol (accessed 29 December 2017). 102 Ibid. 103 Győző Ferencz cited in ‘Az uszítás minden esetben öldökléshez vezet,’ Magyar Nemzet, 2 November 2017. Available online: https://mno.hu/grund/az-uszitasminden-esetben-oldokleshez-vezet-2424845 (accessed 1 January 2018). 104 Gerzson Szántó, ‘Autonóm művészeti oktatás és az MMA – fórumot tartottak a művészeti egyetemek,’ Átlátszó Oktatás. Available online: https://oktatas.atlatszo. hu/2017/05/20/autonom-muveszeti-oktatas-es-az-mma-forumot-tartottak-amuveszeti-egyetemek/ (accessed 29 December 2017). ­105 Mariann Katona, ‘“A CEU-val vagyok” – Ülősztrájk is volt a Parlamentnél,’ Magyar Nemzet, 4 April 2017. Available online: https://magyarnemzet.hu/archivum/ belfold-archivum/a-ceu-val-vagyok-ulosztrajk-is-volt-a-parlamentnel-3892520/ (accessed 29 March 2020). 106 Nóra Diószegi-Horváth and Levente Szadai, ‘Az Akadémia ügye nemzeti ügy: többezren tüntettek az MTA szabadságáért,’ Mérce, 2 June 2019. Available online: https://merce.hu/2019/06/02/az-akademia-ugye-nemzeti-ugy-tobbezren-tuntettekaz-mta-szabadsagaert/ (accessed 29 March 2020). 107 Nagy, ‘Hungary Turns Its Back on Europe’. 108 Gergely Nagy, ‘Nem túl távoli jelen. Kulturális politika, 2017,’ artportal, December 16, 2017, https://artportal.hu/magazin/nem-tul-tavoli-jelen-kulturalispolitika-2017-__meg-ne/ (accessed 1 January 2017). 109 The politics of FIDESZ also has contradictory elements since, for instance, in 2020 it established the Research Institute for Central European Art History (KözépEurópai Művészettörténeti Kutatóintézet, KEMKI), an institution of the Hungarian Museum of Fine Arts a department of which is the Artpool Art Research Center, which holds valuable sources of experimental art produced from the 1970s on. 110 ‘OFF-BIENNALE BUDAPEST,’ OFF. Available online: https://offbiennale.hu/en/ off-biennale-budapest (accessed 6 January 2019). 111 Ibid.

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112 ‘Finissage – Somewhere in Europe – Gaudiopolis,’ Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives. Available online: http://www.osaarchivum.org/hu/events/ Finissage-Somewhere-Europe-Gaudiopolis (accessed 29 December 2017). 113 ‘OFF-BIENNALE BUDAPEST’.

­7

Conclusion

The spaces used by the artists of the second public sphere in Kádárian Hungary were chosen in response to – and therefore, also reflected – the social and political restrictions imposed on artists by the communist regime. This was especially true of the liminal spaces created or reinvented by artists seeking to carve out zones of autonomy within a repressive social and political structure. Artists’ decisions to make use of cellars, artists’ studios, clubs, apartments and the urban environment, for example, were all attempts to establish autonomous sites where independent artistic creation and debate could flourish. To neo- and postavant-gardists, these alternative spaces enabled and opened up a non-traditional version of the public sphere. Without freely accessible spaces or an open public discourse on their art within the official structures of state socialism, the neoavant-garde was forced to become highly inventive. Hungarian contemporary non-realist artists wanted above all to make their ideas and activity visible to the public. In line with this, Klara Kemp-Welch cited author and social critic James Baldwin: ‘“Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and are as free as they want to be.” Space is no more a given than freedom; it too has to be taken and occupied.’1 The story of the second public sphere in socialist Hungary is a story both of individual freedom and of how the country’s citizens resisted significant pressure to act as the puppets of their communist rulers. According to philosopher Ágnes Heller, who was affiliated with the neo-Marxist Budapest School, the individual could only be free if socialist society changed completely.2 This transformation could only happen within familiar everyday surroundings. To Heller, autonomy meant the ability of an individual to actively change their immediate social framework. The denial of a status quo should have been a part of social habitus – this is the key to total autonomy. Heller’s neo-Marxist perspective suggested that real autonomy in a socialist society signified a desire held by individuals to transform their own destiny, and not to lose sight of the sense and purpose

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of existence.3 The neo- and post-avant-gardist striving towards autonomy was similarly an extension of the given possibilities and possible spaces within their direct reach. There is a connection between disobedience in art and the idea of political dissenters promoting autonomous attitudes within a society. The art of the second public sphere also had a very complex aesthetic dimension. The in-betweenness of the spaces used by artists not only applied to the social and political dimensions of their work but also to the artistic strategies and genres explored by the neo-avant-garde. Intermedia and performance were forms that refreshed realist, naturalist, or even abstract art, while also expressing a philosophy of disobedient creation. As this book’s discussion has shown, in the decades following the first Hungarian happening in 1966 avant-garde art came a long way and facilitated the non-hierarchical exchange of different artistic media and forms of expression. László Beke provided the following summary of the epoch of intermediality and performativity, which lasted from about 1966 to 1980: In 1980 the newest period of the Hungarian avant-garde ended: the sexual revolution of art. The most important characteristic of this period was the appearance of some own, seductive genres respectively media, their intrusion into other media, the open convergence of genre media, or their aggressiveperverted . . . pollination. A few examples of these illegal relations or those of selfproduced media-individuals are: the Pseudo (Gyula Pauer), the indigo drawing (Miklós Erdély), the deferment (Dóra Maurer), the Ames room and the antiAmes room within the reverse camera obscura as an apparently holographic, dematerialized sculpture (György Jovánovics), the environment-like room theatre (Péter Halász and the Kassák Ház Stúdió) . . . The release of genres and media was achieved based on this, a healthy balance between the parties of sexual intercourse. Until 1980 we obtained that each genre/media copulated with all kinds of genre/media.4

The era of the neo-avant-garde was one of the richest epochs of creativity in Hungarian art. What began as formal and subversive experimentation going beyond genres and disciplines later became a reference point for future artistic initiatives, especially those seeking to cross societal and political borders. *** Throughout this book, I have argued that during Hungary’s communist period, both intermediality and performativity were statements against the hierarchies and rules that were being imposed on artistic production by the

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state. Intermediality and processuality involved continuous movement and the constant flow of communication, information and creative formats.5 The venues, defined by the events that they housed and intermedia, represented networked forums from which the second public sphere emerged. The second public sphere allowed individual artists the freedom to work with any material, and to combine it with other materials, genres and media as they saw fit. In disregarding the traditional borders between spaces and genres, the art of the second public sphere offered an alternative to state-controlled culture, and built a discourse of its own. Despite accomplishments such as breaking down conventional artistic barriers, there was a fundamental paradox in the self-determination of artists of the neo-avant-garde generation. On the one hand, they demanded a position in contemporary international art independent of their country’s geopolitical status. On the other hand, many Hungarian neo-avant-gardists cast themselves as victims of a specific political regime. In other words, they sometimes wanted to be recognized as belonging to a certain context, and at other times for their work to be acknowledged outside that context. This fundamental paradox of post-war avant-gardes in East-Central Europe applied to the second public sphere as a whole. A statement by László Beke in the internationally distributed booklet Hungarian SCHMUCK (1973), an anthology of contemporary Hungarian art, highlighted this contradiction: ‘Considering our [the artists represented in the collection – K. Cs.-V.] special circumstances under [which] we . . . live & work as well as our experiences we have gained about prohibiting measures taken by the supervisory authorities in our firm belief only in lack of understanding declare hereby that we do not assent to the publikation [sic] & distribution of the Hungarian SCHMUCK.’6 Beke went on to describe the conceptual works published in the booklet as follows: Everything that is done by us [by the artists represented in the collection – K. Cs.-V.] and declared as ‘not-typical’ or ‘it-could-have-been-created-anywhere-in-theworld’ may carry some special meaning. we [sic] neither intend to do ‘particularly’ Hungarian art nor to be ‘characteristic’ . . . appearing as an international language for us we should like to give informations [sic] about our particular problems and results, generally speaking about our special situation.7

Both Beke and the collective of artists represented in Hungarian SCHMUCK expressed this important paradox of the art of the second public sphere: both addressed the distinctive production and distribution possibilities of nonconformists, and at the same time the wish to be recognized as participants

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in the global art world. The lack of a constructive discourse on neo-avant-gardist art within the first public sphere resulted in a self-theoretization of the artists’ and art theoreticians’ own positions, roles and ideals within the second public sphere.8 The result of this self-reflection is often a persisting image of the fearless neo-avant-gardists in the former Eastern bloc. Few second public sphere figures talked about these paradoxes openly, but Václav Havel did so. He once explained in an interview that the status of dissenters under European communist regimes is ‘paradoxical; by persecuting us [the dissidents – K. Cs.-V.] the regimes gives us more and more reason to see that what we are doing is terribly important . . . I’ll always enjoy this paradoxical life. That’s the most paradoxical paradox of all.’9 Some intellectuals and artists certainly conformed to the rules and agendas of state socialism, and some even accepted the state’s regulations and believed in serving the socialist cause. Even those artists and actors who championed the second public sphere had to participate in prescribed ways in the first public sphere to varying degrees, and the ability to transition between spheres potentially allowed them to gain acceptance in both the non-obedient and the ordered public sphere. Individuals and groups who opposed the communist regime were also involved in a strategic cat-and-mouse game, in that sometimes they were tricked by the regime, while at other times the artists managed to turn the tables and outsmart the regime. Neo- and post-avant-gardists in the former Eastern bloc have also attracted scholarly attention because they developed countless unexpected ways of existing and expressing themselves independently of what, from the outside, appeared to be a hegemonic social and political system. They rejected and opposed hierarchies through alternative performative and intermedial instruments, and sometimes successfully eluded mechanisms of surveillance. Their subversive practices worked against state forces of repression by demonstrating that despite their firm grip on political power, the state authorities simply could not control the minds and creative energies of all citizens. They showed, in essence, that political control did not automatically translate into full cultural or political control. The enthusiasm and optimism that artists, intellectuals and citizens felt during the political transformations of the late 1980s and early 1990s in Hungary had largely dispersed by the 2010s. Democratic institutions and ideals gradually gave way to power-centralization, with a single party acting once again as the ruling body. This situation in many ways reflected the social, political and cultural changes experienced throughout East-Central Europe in the postcommunist era. In today’s Hungary, intellectuals and artists are both sensitive

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and responsive to these conditions, and have consequently been targeted by state regulations and exclusions. At the time of writing, in an environment where entire academic fields are challenged by government propaganda in Hungary, intellectual freedom is being endangered. The same is true for the arts, where artists have had to take great care in expressing creative agendas and aesthetic opinions that do not match the conservative and nationalist views currently in ascendance throughout the region. Today, most Hungarian artists are seemingly expected to produce art that reflects pride in the nation state, and to avoid promoting liberal, leftist ideals such as civic agency, diversity, or inclusion. Artistic experimentation is tolerated only up to a point, with the expectation that it does not offend conservative moral values, and no open criticism of Hungary’s directed democracy is tolerated. The glorification of the nation state and the integrity of the Victorian family model are now the background and norm for cultural production in Hungary. In reality, both the nation state and family integrity are justifications used by the Hungarian government for more regulations designed to increase the centralization of the economy and culture in the hands of elites close to the leadership. This centralization goes hand in hand with a growing control over (and manipulation of) every aspect of the social and cultural lives of Hungary’s citizens. As the artists of the neo-avant-garde have shown over the decades, no regime can completely monopolize or control the public sphere. Acts of sabotage and self-expression, however minor they may initially appear, have the ability to undermine and ultimately challenge the hegemony of the state. In these dissenting voices and symbols of counter-opinion, the foundations of a more democratic public sphere can be detected. In the past, this public sphere sometimes directly confronted the political order, and sometimes strategically acted in dialogue with the more ordered ‘first’ public sphere. Understanding how the avant-gardists of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s succeeded in carving out space for their creativity and artistic discourse can therefore serve as an inspiration for artists operating in increasingly restrictive environments today.

Notes 1 2

James Baldwin, cited in Kemp-Welch, ‘Species of Spaces in Eastern European and Latin American Experimental Art’. Ágnes Heller, cited in Dániel Vázsonyi, ‘Neomarxista ellenzékiek társadalomfilozófiai nézetei a “hosszú hatvanas években” (1963–1974),’ Eszmélet.

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3 4 ­5

6 7

8 9

The Hungarian Avant-Garde and Socialism Társadalomkritikai és kultúrális folyóirat, Issue 103, Autumn 2014, pp. 32–56, here p. 40. Ibid., p. 41. László Beke, cited in György, A hatalom képzelete, p. 49. Bruce Barton, ‘SubjectivityCultureCommunicationIntermedia: A Meditation on the “impure interactions” of Performance and the “in-between” Space of Intimacy in a Wired World,’ TRiC/RTaC, Vol. 29, Issue 1, 2008, pp. 51–92, here p. 80. Attalai/Bak/Bálint (et al.), cited in Felipe Ehrenberg/Terry Wright/David Mayor (eds.), HUNGARIAN SCHMUCK, March/April 1973. László Beke, ‘Concept Art as the Possibility of Young Hungarian Artists,’ in Felipe Ehrenberg, Terry Wright and David Mayor (eds.), Hungarian SCHMUCK, March/ April 1973. Anik Cs. Asztalos, ‘No Isms in Hungary,’ Studio International, March 1974, pp. 105–111, here p. 107. Václav Havel, cited in Marie Winn, ‘The Czech’s Defiant Playwright,’ newspaper clipping, p. 100, Source: Hoover Archive.

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Index abstract art 10, 31, 110 action art 15, 110, 113–17, 151–2, 201 actors, autonomy of 162 Aczél, György 14, 30 Adolf Fényes Hall exhibition 74–6, 78 aesthetic dissent 158–9 aesthetic modernism 2–3 aestheticization of social life 103, 160 agit-prop 190 agonistic democracy 194 Algol, László 11 alternative communication 102, 123, 129–33 alternative lifestyles, and alternative art 156 alternative public sphere. See apartment culture; happenings Altorjay, Gábor 10–11, 39, 49, 51, 52–60, 62, 65–6, 144 András, László 58 Andrási, Gábor 147–8 anti-poetry 60 apartment culture 11, 16–17, 34, 82, 84, 101, 143–72 architecture. See also Bachman, Gábor; Rajk, László and socialist ideology 1, 39–40 Arns, Inke 74 Art Fund of the Hungarian People’s Republic 15, 30 art installations. See installation art art students. See youth/youth culture Artaud, Antonin 160–2, 163 Artery Galleries 145 artist clubs 103, 107, 117–19 artist studios 31, 42, 71–95 artistic venues 16–17, 25–6, 217. See also individual venues artists’ clubs 30–1 Artist’s Union 30, 107 Artpool Art Research Center 73, 82–3 Association of Hungarian Fine and Applied Artists 14–15, 30

Attalai, Gábor 147, 150 avant-garde, historical 13, 103–4, 105–6, 186 Bachman, Gábor 180, 181, 182–3, 183–8 ­de-constructivist attitude 192–3 ‘Work-Act’ Pub 191 Bak, Imre 152 Balatonboglár chapel studio 2–6, 9–10, 11, 14, 32, 81–95 DIRECT WEEK 91–2 King Kong 166–7, 169 photo-actions 85–7, 89–91 Question Mark Experiments 92–3 Space Confusion 89–91 spatial practices 42, 71–2, 84–5 Bálint, István 145, 154, 156, 159, 162 Balme, Christopher 84 Bán, András 120–1 Báron, György 159–60 Battery Gallery 2 144 Bazin, Jérôme 13 BBC radio 153 behaviour art 95, 102, 143 Behrends, Jan C. 28 Beke, László 78, 91, 192, 216, 217 Benda, Václav 35, 44 Bényi, Csilla 120 Bercsényi 28–30 (journal) 120 Bercsényi Club 119–23 Bey, Hakim 157 Birkás, Ákos 179–80 Bódi, Lóránt 150 Bódy, Gábor 160, 192 body art pieces 65 Bokros, Péter 131 Breath Taking (journal) 132 Brezhnev, Leonid 9, 10 Breznyik, Péter 167–70 Budapest apartment culture. See apartment culture

Index Buddhism 123 Bürger, Peter 104–5 Büscher, Barbara 80 café, as art venue 25–6 Cage, John 60 camera obscuras 76 capitalism 8, 194, 197, 203 Catholic symbolism 87, 89 Cavellini, Guglielmo Achille 128 cellar, the 57 censorship 12, 26, 30, 31, 38, 108, 110 chapel studio. See Balatonboglár chapel studio Chekhov, Anton 170–1 Circle of Stupid Poets 58–9 civil society 27, 28 ­club movement 117–19 Commonpress 125 communist values. See socialist ideology conceptual art 15, 71, 74, 95, 110 confrontational public sphere 39 Constitution, 2011 203 constructivists 73, 105, 186, 187, 191–2 contact art 124, 127 counterculture, influence on Hungarians 34 Csiky, Tibor 153 cultural censorship. See censorship culture houses 34 Czechoslovakia 50, 61. See also Prague Spring de-collage 58, 60, 64 deconstruction 192–3 democracy 194, 203. See also political activism de-montage 58 Derrida, Jacques 192 dictatorships 28, 31 DIRECT WEEK 91–2 Dohány Street, apartment theatre 82, 84, 101, 146, 154–9, 172 and Grotowski 162 King Kong 166–70 officialdom and 159–60 Preparation for Being Together 163–5 Three Sisters 170–1 Donáth, Péter 121, 159 Drozdik, Orsolya (Orshi), NudeModel 130–1 Duchamp, Marcel 199–200

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East European socialism 105. See also socialist ideology East-Central European experimental art 105, 106 Ember, Mária 65 EMKE circle 145 Enlightenment 27 Enterprise for Industrial Architecture Design. See IPARTERV exhibitions ephemerality 79 Erdély, Miklós 73–4, 91, 109–10, 192 event-based art 113 Radio Artpool 126 Space Confusion 89 Eternal Network, The 83 European School 146 event-based art 51, 83–4, 95, 113–17. See also happenings experimental art 9, 14, 30–1, 34, 102–3, 104, 105. See also IPARTERV exhibitions apartments 144 collecting 120–1 commune-like 82 official clampdown on 155 poetry 10 ­experimental music 51 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner 192 Fehér, Dávid 75 Ferencz, Győző 203 FIDESZ party 186, 202–3 Filiou, Robert 83 Fillér Street studio 71, 72, 76, 78–80, 94 Fluxus art movement 81, 95, 110 Foksal Gallery (Galeria Foksal) 59 folk art 110 Forgács, Éva 180 Fraser, Nancy 26 French Institute, Budapest 76–7, 79–80 Galántai, György. See also Balatonboglár chapel studio Artpool 73 on behaviour art 95, 143 Hungary can be yours! 125–9 on professionalization 179 Sign Action in the Chapel 86–7 spatial practices 41 Gaudiopolis, Somewhere in Europe 205–6

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Gáyor, Tibor, Space Confusion 89 genre mixing 129–30 German Democratic Republic (GDR), aesthetic counterculture 80 Gerő, Ernő 7 Gorbachev, Mikhail 181 Grey Zones 35, 36–7 Groh, Klaus 154 Grotowski, Jerzy 160–1, 162, 163 Gulyás, Gyula, Direction-Showing Action 85–6 Györe, Balázs 132 György, Péter 30, 191 Habermas, Jürgen 26, 27, 28, 194 Habsburg rule 61, 185 Hajas, Tibor, Vigil 120, 121–3, 131 Halász, Péter 154, 156, 157, 161, 170 denial of regime 158 forced emigration 159 and Grotowski 162 Hamvas, Béla 147 Hankiss, Elemér 34–7, 44 happenings 10–11, 14, 42, 83. See also event-based art; IPARTERV exhibitions apartment culture 150 Báron on 159–60 The Lunch 49–58, 59–61, 62–6 Haraszti, Miklós 1, 37 The Velvet Prison 38–9 Worker in a Workers State 39 El-Hassan, Róza, Boulevard Stroboscope 198–9 ­Havasréti, József 33, 34, 38, 82 Havel, Václav 33, 37, 218 hegemony, and the Kádárian regime 197 Hegyi, Lóránd 180, 186 Heller, Ágnes 215 Helsinki Accord (1975) 13 Hencze, Tamás 110 Heroes’ Square, Budapest 184–5 Higgins, Dick 81 Hock, Beáta 13, 106, 130–1 housing. See private housing; urban spaces Hungarian Academy of Arts 203–4 Hungarian Academy of Sciences 204 Hungarian Art Academy 14–15, 25–6 Hungarian Council Republic 185 Hungarian National Gallery 15

Hungarian Newspaper 5 Hungarian Orange 201 Hungarian People’s Republic 5–6. See also Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party Hungarian Radio 152 Hungarian SCHMUCK 217 Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party 6, 16, 88, 189. See also Kádárian regime; public spheres, first/ordered; revolution (1956); socialist ideology art critics, and the happening 50 arts funding 3, 15, 30, 119 New Economic Mechanism 12, 62 performative art as threat to 84 and unofficial or semi-official art 106–7 Hungary controlled democracy 207 revolution (1956). see revolution (1956) transition to democracy 30, 182, 193 Hunter, Roddy 83 improvisation 103, 150, 158–9, 160 in-between space 43–4, 172, 188, 192, 216 INCONNU Group 128, 145, 181, 188 The Fighting City 188–9 Metamorphosis of Bodies 131 independence of thought and action. See public spheres, second independent civil art 183 industrial sites 107 installation art 15, 25, 73–4 intellectual workshops 145, 146–9, 154–5 interactions 103 intermedia art/intermediality 14, 16–17, 72, 116, 195, 202, 216, 217 apartment culture 150 processual event 186 repurposing of space 42, 43 state socialism and 80–1 ­International Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition 190 IPARTERV exhibitions 102, 107–17 Jákfalvi, Magdolna 159, 161 Jancsó, Miklós 61 Jankovics, Miklós 53, 54 Jirous, Ivan M. 35, 44

Index Jovánovics, György 72–81 Construction Pressing into the Ceiling 73–4, 76 Fillér Street studio 71, 72, 76, 78–80, 94 First Camera Obscura 76, 77 IPARTERV exhibitions 109 Lying Figure (Misery) 111–13 sound/voice piece 74–6 Space Confusion 89 Július, Gyula, Visual Silence 199–200 Kádárian regime. See also censorship; Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party; public spheres; state (headings starting with) and the 1956 upheaval 7–8, 9 aesthetic dissent 158–9 democratic opposition/political activism 16 hostility towards intellectuals/culture 30 Kádár falls from power (1989) 180 ‘liberal’ attitude/socialist consumerism 8, 10, 15 Moscow Declaration (1979) 15 pragmatism and paradoxes of 13–14, 134 top-down reform 61 Kantor, Tadeusz 59 Kaprow, Allan 50 Károlyi, Amy 145 Kassák, Lajos 31 Kassák Club, Budapest 101, 119 Kassák House Studio 101, 155, 159–60, 162 Kele, Judit 121 Kellér, Márkus 39–40 Kemp-Welch, Klara 62–3, 215 Kende, Péter 184 Khrushchev, Nikita 8–9 Kiss, Ilona 201 Kollár Bongolan, Marianne 154–5, 172 Konkoly, Gyula, Bleeding Memorial 111–13, 117 Konrád, György 11, 37, 190 Koós, Anna 154, 156, 161–2, 171 Körner, Éva 132, 133 Korniss, Dezső 31 Koroknai, Zsolt 201 Kovalovszky, Márta 76

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Kováts, Albert 145 Krasznahorkai, Kata 160 Kunsthalle 185, 187 ­Kürti, Emese 55, 60 Lajtai, Peter 82 Lakner, Antal 201 Lakner, Judit 186 Lakner, László 31, 73–4 Lectorate for Applied and Fine Arts 30, 109 lecture performances 130 liminality 43, 60, 61, 72 Lisziák, Elek 151 Living Theater 160–2, 163 Liza Wiathruck photo series 79, 80 Lunch, The. See happenings mail art 41, 125, 127–8, 129 Major, János 109–10 Matynia, Elzbieta 34, 84, 143–4 Maurer, Dóra, Space Confusion 89, 90, 91 Méhes, László 113 Mészöly, Suzanne 197 Miklóssy, Endre 132 Ministry for Culture 5, 30 Ministry of Interior 120, 126 modernism, artistic 10 Molnár, Gergely 130 Molnár, Sándor 147 Moscow Declaration (1979) 15 Mouffe, Chantal 194 Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest 185 music presentations, collectives 151, 153 Nader, Luiza 144 Nagy, Gergely 203, 204 Nagy, Imre 183, 184 Nagy, Katalin S. 145 Nagy, Kristóf 197 Najmányi, László 63, 81, 102, 131 Nancy, Jean-Luc 40 Németh, Lajos 110–11 neo-avant-garde art/artists. See also event-based art; experimental art; happenings; performance art; individual artists abstract art 31 ascent of (1966) 13–14 as critical/subversive 106

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and data accumulation 148 discussion around terminology 104 elitism of 33, 179 intermediality 16 private houses 34 repurposing of space 41–2 utopianism 82, 105–6, 133, 156, 179 neo-Marxism 215–16 ­neo-realism 10 networking 83 Neumann, Birgit 43 New Economic Mechanism 12, 62 New Sensibility and New Subjectivism 180 New Symposium (journal) 52 newspapers, Party-supported 5 OFF-Biennale 183, 204, 206 official culture 12 oikos. See private spheres Open Society Foundation 196–7 Orbán, Viktor 183, 186, 203 Orvos, András 5 parallel polis 35 Paris Biennial, 8th (1973) 78 Pauer, Gyula DIRECT WEEK 91–2 Flyer Action 87–8 Pécs Workshop 107 Pére Lachaise cemetery, Paris 190 Perestroika 181 performance art 10, 16, 39, 42, 101, 195, 216. See also event-based art; happenings; theatre performances performative democracy, concept 84 performer–spectator relations 64 Petrigalla salon 146, 148, 149–54, 172 photo-actions 74, 87, 89–91 Piotrowski, Piotr 13, 193–4 poetry/poets, Circle of Stupid Poets 58–9 Poland 34, 50, 59–60, 143–4, 182 polis. See private spheres; public spheres political activism 16, 27, 181. See also revolution (1956) Polyphony exhibition 183, 195, 197, 198–202 pop art 110 post-avant-gardists 180, 189 post-communism, transition to 193, 194 postmodernism 10 Prague Spring (1968) 3, 9, 11, 12, 61

private housing 34, 40, 41, 107, 134 private spheres 26, 31, 143–4 process-based art 16, 17, 42, 55, 57, 217. See also happenings PSEUDO 87–8 public spheres. See also apartment culture; second public sphere confrontational 39 first/ordered 11–12, 28–9 and the happening 49 ideal 27–8 second 11, 14, 16–17 utopian 133 ­Rabinec Gallery 179 Rácz, Péter 132 Radio Free Europe 153 Rajk, László 180–1, 182–3, 183–8, 192–3 Rákosi regime 29 Rauschenberg, Robert 128 readymades 200 re-functionalization of everyday environments 103 regulation of cultural activities 5–6, 26, 30, 219 revolution (1956) 7–8, 9, 31 commemorations 32–3, 112, 182–8, 190 Revolutionary Youth Days 61 Rose Espresso (Rózsa presszó) café 25–6 Rottenbiller Street workshop 156 round-table discussion 132–3 rural sites 41, 107 Ruszt, József 155 Sasse, Sylvia 74 Sasvári, Edit 103 Schechner, Richard 42 Schuller, Gabriella 156, 157 sculpture 71, 111–13 second public sphere 32–9, 81, 102, 181, 187, 206–7. See also public spheres; public spheres, second secret service surveillance 28, 31, 126–7, 128 apartment culture 157, 159, 160 and happenings 62, 65–6 self-censorship. See censorship self-publishing 148 semi-official art 107. See also IPARTERV exhibitions Sinkovits, Peter 109, 110

Index site-specific artworks 182, 202. See also Polyphony socialist ideology 3, 29, 39–40, 158, 192. See also Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party socialist realism 29, 31 Soros Center for Contemporary Arts 196–7, 202 sound/voice piece 74–6, 125–9, 132–3 Soviet Union 7–8, 10, 12, 15, 181 space/spatial dimension in-between 43–4, 172, 188, 216 felesleges tér (superfluous space) 84–5 intermedia art 116 Jovánovics’ art 76, 77–8 official, co-option of 110 repurposing of 41–3 spectators 111, 117 alternative communication 102 as participants 91, 162, 168, 169–70 Spring Show (1957) 31 Stalin, Joseph 8, 29 ­state censorship 38. See also censorship state funding 2–3, 15, 30 state propaganda 33 state surveillance. See surveillance, government state-run locations 101–3, 108 state-socialist ideology. See public spheres, first/ordered; socialist ideology Studio of Young Artists 15, 41 studios. See artist studios Sugár, János 201 surrealism 105, 146 surveillance, government 12, 31, 119. See also secret service surveillance Šuvaković, Miško 105 Szabolcsi, Miklós 104 Szeemann, Harald 111 Szentjóby, Tamás 10–11, 39, 123 apartment culture 144 DIRECT WEEK 91–2 Do You See What I See? 113–17 and intermediality 81 The Lunch 49, 51, 52, 53–5, 56–60, 62, 63–4 photo-action installation 74 Space Confusion 89 Szirtes, János 123

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Tábor, Ádám 58, 132, 145, 149 Tábor, Eszter 132 Tárkányi, Zoltán 58 temporary autonomous zones 157 Theatre Laboratory 162 theatre performances 155 apartment culture 154–9, 162–71 Tumbas, Jasmina 82 Türk, Péter, Question Mark Experiments 92–3 Turner, Victor 43 underground publishing 148, 181 unemployment 193 United States of America 61 university clubs 30–1, 41, 103. See also Bercsényi Club university theatre, Budapest 155 unofficial art 106–7 urban spaces 39–40, 183, 185, 195, 198 utopian public sphere 133 utopianism. See neo-avant-garde art/ artists Várnai, Gyula, Agitator 200–1 Végh, László 10–11, 12, 34, 41, 59 apartment culture 144–5, 150–2 interventions 113, 114, 117 Vető, János 122, 123 Vietnam War 61 Voice of America 153 ­Warsaw Autumn (Warsawska Jesień) 60 Warsaw Pact 7 Western European avant-gardists 59 Wolle, Stefan 28 Young Artists’ Club 119, 123–33 Hungary can be yours! 125–9 Youth Union’s Central Committee 123–4 youth/youth culture 12, 25–6, 34, 41, 65, 119. See also Studio of Young Artists Yugoslavia 50, 61 Zombori, Mónika 15 Zugló circle 146–9, 172 Zwickl, András 202

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