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Fluxus + Konzeptuell = Kontextuell
György Galántai antwortet auf sechs Fragen
Fluxus + konceptuális = kontextuális
Galántai György válaszai Petra Stegmann kérdéseire
(a kiállítás katalógusából)
György Galántai / Foto:
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Do you consider yourself a Fluxus artist?
I prefer to think of myself as dealing with things that liberate me. It is the unlikely possibilities in art that attract me. I describe myself as an art researcher, but was classified by the Hungarian Ministry of Culture during the days of the Party state as "not that kind of artist," and by the police department's anti-culture division as a "cultural criminal." It was only Pierre Restany who called me a Fluxus artist when he opened the water-sculpture show in Budapest in 2000. "I am delighted to see Galántai in the show, the Fluxus artist, the artist of true global communication, making an appearance with his usual sense of humour in the form of his famous water-spouting soles." Well, Restany loved his brandy. Perhaps he was being kind because I dedicated a work to him—a bottle of my Absolute Fluxus Year '95 Pear Brandy. After all, you're never anyone in yourself, only as part of a network of relationships.
What would you call the essence of Fluxus?
Fluxus stems from John Cage's elaboration and dissemination of an attitude of Marcel Duchamp. Its essence is in undefinedness, and in making art impersonal. The natural conclusion would be that a Fluxus artist is no artist at all, and that Fluxus can never become an -ism. In other words, Fluxus activity in art would be an innovation that solves—or does away with—the problem of the artwork as a commodity and also the problem of the artist's ego.
How did you come into contact with Fluxus?
I was studying to be a painter in the 60s, thinking that I would try to examine artistic work as a form of research. I did a great deal of experimenting with all kinds of materials, techniques, and ideas—but when I received an official state prize for one of my paintings at an exhibit in 1970, I couldn't bring myself to paint any more. It was then that Marcel Duchamp's monograph was published in Hungarian; this reinforced my inclination to treat art as a fundamental kind of research. The other issue that has engaged me all my life is the cultural environment of art. Back in 1966, I came upon an abandoned cemetery chapel that I rented from the Catholic Church as a studio—the "Chapel Project", site of my first institution-experiment. This inspired random reactions, both from society and from the political sphere, that turned the project into a unique Fluxus product, an institution-work.
The work of artists invited to the Chapel Studio in Balatonboglár included not just Hungarian works, but international Fluxus and conceptual works as well. State authorities closed the chapel in 1973 for cultural-political reasons, so my personal contact with Fluxus only developed later, after 1979, in the days of the Artpool project. I first came into contact with Robert Filliou and Wolf Vostell in 1979; then with Ben Vautier and A.M. Fine in 1980; with Ray Johnson, Alison Knowles, Giuseppe Chiari, Ben Vautier, Charles Dreyfus, and Peter Frank in 1982; with Robert Watts, Shozo Shimamoto, Mieko Shiomi, and Geoff Hendricks in 1983; with Gilbert & Lila Silverman and Jon Hendricks in 1985; with Emmett Williams and René Block in 1988; with Dick Higgins, Barbara Moore and Carolee Schneemann in 1990; with Eric Andersen, Ken Friedman, Robert Delford Brown, and Július Koller in 1992; with Milan Knížák, Jackson Mac Low, Jonas Mekas and Yoko Ono in 1993; with Jean-Jacques Lebel, Larry Miller, and Ben Patterson in 1995; with Philip Corner, Jean Dupuy, and Armin Hundertmark in 1997; with Daniel Spoerri in 1998; with Takako Saito in 2000, etc.
What was the role of Fluxus within the Artpool Project?
Building on the experiences of the "Chapel Project", and retaining its open outlook, the Artpool Project was a much more potent — and uncensorable — "apartment-institution" that Júlia Klaniczay and I developed. Originally I called it the "Artpool Avantgarde Art Archive" to indicate that it sought out new forms of societal activity, organised events, and took a formative role in processes, all while documenting this, archiving it and freely distributing information. The "active archive" that results is a living institution that can be interpreted as an organic and open artwork or an activist kind of art practice. Its field of operation is the whole world; it works with an exact aim and direction sensitively detecting changes and adjusting accordingly.
Artpool, which began as an archive, ran its various public activities as "independent institutions". This idea was inspired by Robert Filliou, the father of the "Eternal Network", with a request he made on one of his postcards. The poster created from this request hung unnoticed for a month on the announcement board at the Young Artists’ Club in Budapest as the first manifestation of Artpool’s Periodical Space (APS no. 1).
The APS series had 14 events, each dealing with various aspects of publication in space. There were exhibitions, performances, screenings, actions, concerts, and performance pieces on a range of themes. Among these were several of our network projects that made Artpool known all over the world. We arranged an exhibition for G. A. Cavellini in 1980, for example, as well as a joint performance on Heroes’ Square in Budapest, Hommage à Vera Muhina, and in 1982 we did an artistamp exhibit (World Art Post) whose collection has now grown to be the largest in the world through the workings of the "Eternal Network."
Another type of institution was the Buda Ray University, which built on my correspondence with Ray Johnson between 1982 and 1994. (The exhibitions tied to this, between 1986 and 1997, constituted Artpool’s Ray Johnson Space.) The 15 exhibitions based on facsimiles of the correspondence were shown in many countries (Italy, Canada, Ireland, Hungary, Netherlands, Slovakia, and France), and the ever-growing number of participants reached 316. We supplemented the mail-contact data with personal documents through two European art travel projects (Artpool’s Art Tour 1979,1982), then published all this in samizdat (Artpool Radio no.5 and AL/Artpool Letter 1-4). This was the first, "non-officially sanctioned", illegal period of the Artpool Project from a Fluxus perspective.
After the regime change, Artpool began its "sanctioned" legal period as a "paradigm-changing institution." With support first from the city, then on the state level, it continued its activities under the name Artpool Art Research Center.
It is an interesting coincidence that Artpool’s new start coincided with the 30th year of Fluxus. In honor of this anniversary, I invited 100 artists to participate in Flux Flags, the first open-air exhibition, held on Ferenc Liszt Square. Works were submitted by, among others, Eric Andersen, Robert Delford Brown, Charles Dreyfus, Ken Friedman, Davi Det Hompson, Bern Porter, Shozo Shimamoto, and Endre Tót.
We devoted the following year entirely to Fluxus research, and particularly to making it researchable in Hungary. We showed everything that had accumulated in Artpool. We were the first to present a George Maciunas show in Hungary, or to show the Zero works of Endre Tót.
There were also several performances, and meetings, that were products of chance, like Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles, or Anne Tardos and Jackson Mac Low, or Geoffrey Hendricks’ performance and exhibition at Artpool. The large-scale installations of Ben Vautier’s, Ben-tér, (Ben Square) of 1993, on Ferenc Liszt Square, were preceded by long collaboration, but again, it was mere chance that Jonas Mekas was also there to participate in the event. We tried to extend Fluxus events to other settings as well, as with Ben Vautier’s performance at the Institut Français. Finally René Block came to Budapest to open my exhibition Life Works at the Ernst Museum and hold a lecture at the Goethe Institut entitled Fluxus Music: The Everyday Event.
What do concept art and Fluxus mean to the Hungarian Neo-Avantgarde?
I was seeking the answer to this question in the 90s at Artpool, by spending each year studying a fundamentally unknown concept, incorporating wherever possible every Hungarian artist of self-defined standing and theoretical expert. The subject for the "year after Fluxus" (1994) was Miklós Erdély, whom I see as the closest to Fluxus, and the most effective Hungarian artist of the post-neoavantgarde. Our goal at the very least was to present his work, making performances, slideshows, encounters, video presentations and inaccessible documents—in a word, his oeuvre—accessible to research.
Miklós Erdély’s view of concept art was that: "Its days have passed, because it has too thoroughly renounced the sensual, the direct, the total effect, something that art had always required in its communication. Art is again seeking visual and sensual effects; the aesthetics of this are marked by an influence of concept art and the odd and paradoxical thought models of this world view. Since the 80s, an aesthetic has evolved that expects of artworks (both visual and musical) a kind of beauty that is reminiscent of pure thought, or the beauty of thought itself." [1] In another of his writings, he says "It has always been my intent to try to transform the quality of an idea into a condition." [2] Indeterminacy and the growing impersonality of art—its proximity to Fluxus—were in my view most characteristic of Erdély’s interdisciplinary thought. On this was built his wide-ranging but unified oeuvre: his ethics, the works that arose from his research (writings, lectures, films, objects, installations, paintings etc.), and even his group exercises (Creativity Exercises, Fantasy Developing Exercises, and Inter-Disciplinary-Thinking Courses, the InDiGo group).
If we posit that Hungarian Fluxus exists, and we are curious about its precursors, we will find them in Lajos Kassák’s journal Ma (Today) and in Károly Tamkó Sirató’s Dimensionist Manifesto, signed by Marcel Duchamp, among others. But did Hungarian concept art and Fluxus in fact exist? To answer that question, we must first create—in the manner of Maciunas’ diagram, but now on the World Wide Web—a research location that enables us to understand relationships through acquaintance with the Hungarian documents.
So then what do you think of the relationship between conceptual art and Fluxus?
Artpool’s study years—its art research years—arranged themselves in a sequence of concepts: Performance (1995), the Internet (1996), the Network (1997), the Installation (1998), Context (1999), Chance (2000), the Impossible (2001), and finally Doubt (2002) which was both the last concept and the first number-year. From then until 2009 came either new concepts or new perspectives on old ones, organised by the numbers. Since my constructive technique involved not planning the ultimate order of the concepts, but merely allowing them to pop up during our work and take the program on a detour towards the random, Artpool then telematically became a conceptualized institution in the spirit of Fluxus.
Specifically relevant to this issue is Impossible Realism, a 2001 study exhibition on the Hungarian aspects of international Fluxus and conceptual art. This show grew out of a symposium organised by the Slovak and Hungarian sections of the AICA (International Association of Art Critics) called Conceptual Art at the Turn of the Millennium. Bratislava had already held a Slovak conceptual show, but Budapest had never had one, so the president of the Hungarian section asked me—or Artpool—to organise a Hungarian Conceptual show. I responded that I was not so interested in conceptual art itself, but rather in something between Conceptualism and Fluxus, and would gladly work with the objects informed by them, with the differences and similarities in the information relevant to these objects, from any country and any time from Duchamp to the present.
First I must note that I never distinguished between original works, copies, reproductions and reconstructions in the study exhibitions I put together, as I consider everything to be original information in context. The realism of the "Fluxus region" applies to "all art," to the interchangeability of art and life, while the realism of the "Conceptual region" truly casts off the concept of art altogether. I thought that I could gain new information by examining these regions together in the "area of impossible realism," and associating each piece to the most everyday themes. An effort was made to represent each theme with the greatest possible number of pieces from anywhere at all, independent of the date of their creation and place of origin. The themes were sports, objects, people, money, time, space, relationships, lectures, language, image language, region, and institution. The parallelisms between Fluxus and conceptual art within these themes were perceptible. As a demonstration, I prepared a fictive work, making a conceptual piece of Marcel Duchamp’s Trébuchet (Trap) using Joseph Kosuth’s textual technique. For me, one of the interesting lessons of this show was coming to see the difference between Fluxus and Concept as the difference between the left and right hemispheres of the human brain. Fluxus, with its identification with life, is irrational, emotional, and surreal. Concept on the other hand is rational, constructive, and minimalist. Both approaches, though, are real, or realistic, each a realist region in the territory of impossible realism - or perhaps its two poles. This can best be verified through interpretations of the concept of time. By simply saying that clock=time=object, Joseph Kosuth’s One and Five Clocks shows this through object, image, and text documents, extending the realism of ready-made in the direction of text-based interpretation. Fluxus time is by contrast a subjective or relative realism. "Everyone is an artist" is analogous to Einstein’s dictum that "every particle has its own time."
My greatest experience was to discover a third time of difference beyond Fluxus vs. Concept, a region distinct from both of them, yet related, one that in Poland had already been called "contextual art." Surprisingly, this term is applicable to all the good works of all Central and Eastern European Neo-Avantgarde artists. Surveying anew the works of Hungarian artists, I established that everything not a mere epigone of Fluxus or Concept, but a true relative thereof, was contextual. Clearly, contextual art here differs from its western counterparts by dint of arising in a different cultural environment.
Now that we have contextual art, I would make a bold assertion: George Maciunas’ Flux Ping Pong Table & Rackets is much more contextual than Fluxus works. Why is this? Its obvious precursor is John Cage’s prepared piano and the broken and cacophonous pieces written for it, which are the musical equivalents of the Zen dictum that "every day is a beautiful day"—"every sound is a beautiful sound." In response to this, Maciunas’ prepared sports equipment uses humor to consider the impossibility of following the familiar rules, and of attempting action without rules. The preparations of Cage and Maciunas, and the divergence in their purpose, are the best illustration of the difference between Fluxus and contextual approaches. For Cage, everything is music, and everything is information. With Maciunas, humor lets us experience the manner in which things exist. This kind of contextual essential interpretation is an East European specialty. To make this experience available, I reconstructed Maciunas’ work for Impossible Realism. This can now be tried out at the Fluxus East exhibition as well.
[1] Miklós Erdély: "Optimista előadás", 1981 ("Optimistic Lecture", 1981), in: Tartóshullám. A Bölcsész Index Antológiája. Budapest, 1985, pp. 143-149. Republished in Miklós Erdély: Művészeti írások (Válogatott művészetelméleti tanulmányok I.), Miklós Peternák (ed.): Képzőművészeti Kiadó, Budapest, 1991, pp 133-147.
[2] Miklós Erdély: "Apokrif előadás", 1981 ("Apocryphal Lecture", 1981) in: Jóvilág, (1984), Budapest, pp. 35-40.
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