Budapest - Saturday, May 24, 1980
Today the waitress at the bar was all excited and euphoric and she told us how things had been yesterday during the opening of the show and later. People talked about me and my show and about nothing else. They ordered «Cavellini Beer» or a «Cavellini Cocktail» and they stuck my sticker on all the bottles. And they wanted more of the stickers and seemed to want to put them up everywhere. Nothing even remotely like this had ever happened before at one of the shows of the Artists' Club. I looked at the little box with the phials in it and noticed that only one of them was missing: the Cavellini phial! Julia and Galántai showed up dressed entirely in white (T-shirt, pants, and tennis shoes) and were ready to go to the Square of the Hungarian Heroes to get on with the writing operation we had planned. The Square is absolutely immense. On the right, looking towards the monuments, there's the Museum of Fine Art and this can be said to represent the past; on the left is a Greek style building that represents the present since that's where official shows of any importance are set up. «And from today» said Galántai, «the future will be symbolized by this action we're about to perform right now». The Square of the Heroes dates back to the end of the last century (1895) and was built for the world's fair as a monument to the birth of the Hungarian nation. It contains the tomb of the unknown soldier and the statues of the Hungarian heroes, and so the choice of this square for an action is highly symbolic. This is where all important and official ceremonies take place. Julia and Galántai set themselves up in the center of it, not far from the circular area given over to the monuments, and they posed in the attitude of a statue by the sculptor Muhin, a sculpture now preserved somewhere in Moscow: there are two figures in it, a man and a woman, the man is an industrial worker holding a hammer in his up-raised hand, and the woman at his side is a farm laborer holding a cycle. This sculpture has been elevated to a symbol in the Soviet Union and it has a strong effect upon culture in Hungary. It is obsessively present, and even appears at the beginning of all the TV transmissions. The performance, then, can be seen as either ironic or symbolic. Julia and Galántai took up the position of their models, the right leg bent forward and the left leg held back stiff, arms raised, and they held up a copy of a book open to a reproduction of this statue. The picture of the statue was also adorned with a clearly visible hand-printed message that read «GAC 1980 Budapest». I wrote on their shirts and white pants and covered them with a list of the names of famous artists from all periods of history, names that I had copied down beforehand in a notebook, from Giotto and Cimabue down to Cavellini and Galántai. I only wrote on the front of their clothes so as to make things easier for the man who was making the video tape and for myself as well, not to mention that the pose would have been difficult to hold for too long. To write on their shoes. I had to get down for a while on my knees. I was wearing my top-coat and hat with my life-history on them. The photographers too had quite a job to take pictures of all of the various phases of this operation. Every now and then I'd hear the sirens of the police and I was always afraid that they were coming to make us stop. A great many people stopped to look at us and we had known all along that we wouldn't pass unobserved. At three different moments, three different women came up to me and put some sort of red badge on the lapel of my coat. Galántai remarked, «I've finally realized one of the dreams I had when I was a boy. I wanted to become a hero and to save somebody's life, maybe just as a simple fireman». The afternoon was spent in Galántai's house where I finished up my writing on the back of their clothes. He lives in Frankel Leó út 68/ B, a small tree-lined street that runs up a hill; it's almost like being out in the country. At every landing, up to the fourth floor, I was able to inspect some of his older sculptures,and I found them very interesting; they're made of various found metal objects that have been welded together. Inside his apartment, my own presence seemed to be everywhere, there were stickers and posters on the walls, printed material and photos around everywhere. On the frame of the door that goes from the little kitchen into a large well-illuminated room there was a plaque that said: «Cavellini Study Center». One of the most recurrent forms in his sculpture is the outline of a sole of a shoe, and he had already set up a rectangle of some soft paste in which I too was to leave my footprint. Then he took a nail and printed my seal into it: «GAC 1980 Budapest». He was quite happy with the way it all came out, and will make a metal cast of it. It took about two hours to finish the job of writing on their clothes, and in order to keep from repeating names of famous artists of all the periods of history, I had to consult a good many art books. Julia, Galántai, and their ten year old son later came to my hotel (which is the most prestigious hotel in the city and used only by foreigners) for a farewell dinner. This ,was the first time that the boy had ever been in a luxury hotel and he was full of curiosity and almost intimidated as he looked into the display cases full of Western consumer goods. Julia and Galántai were relaxed and nonchalant in their T-shirts with my sticker printed on them. At dinner I asked this Hungarian artist friend of mine to tell me about himself. His father had been a very intelligent merchant who lived in a small country village and who subscribed to all the magazines printed in the capital. During the war, all commercial activities became the property of the state, but those magazines weren't confiscated, and Galántai read through them all with a great deal of interest when he was nine and ten years old; what interested him most of all were the pages dedicated to art and to the reproductions of  paintings. He decided that he too would have been capable of making paintings like those and he was soon full of a desire to try. He confessed that his greatest aspiration had always been for the world to learn to admire and respect his works. «One of the things that I like about your work is that you've also solved the problem of the distribution of your art». He went to a technical high school and he was able to document himself on the various art movements. His first great loves were for Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Picasso. He did a great deal of drawing and was very restless. And while he was at the academy he began a collection of a few antiques. Later, in 1970, he sold them off one at a time to be able to run an art gallery in a small chapel that he had discovered on the edges of Balaton Lake. He organized shows and performances for four summer seasons and set up a center for avant-garde experimentation, most especially in visual poetry. This was a very unusual way of behaving in Hungary and it aroused the suspicions of the political and cultural authorities: they in fact set about looking for pretexts to have the gallery closed. The firemen gave him a fine because he was keeping inflammable materials in the chapel: paints, paper, and so forth; the department of hygiene put a lock on the gallery since it didn't have a toilet. When Galántai decided to set up the gallery outside of the chapel, he was considered to have made an illegal and unauthorized construction. The authorities thought that Galántai was a capitalist since he allowed himself to take all of these liberties that they considered superfluous and even dangerous. One day forty soldiers came and surrounded the chapel in a true and proper military attack. Galántai was forced at point of arms to desist from his activities as a promulgator of avant-garde art. He was considered a public cultural enemy. Now he has relations with artists scattered all around the world. But Julia says that sooner on later he'll be forced to decide to get some sort of a job to try to make ends meet since the cost of living is very high. While we were talking about art, Galántai declared, «Duchamp appropriated the ready-made object and its space; Cavellini's self- historicization appropriates time». «Duchamp and Cavellini are both on the same level, they both show us the way. Beuys, on the other hand, may be on the crest of his wave today, but he's destined to fall into obscurity, since he's made no real innovations». Julia is convinced that the vast diffusion of my stickers in Budapest makes me the best-known artist in Hungary after Picasso. Back in my room, I found a tiny little painting by Gábor Tóth; it was framed and it was a gift to me; it was on a white background and down in the lower right-hand corner, the artist had written: «Don't make art to you for fear that you will like it!» It was another version of the work that had been on display at the Club. But Gábor Tóth didn't come to see me in person. The day before I left for Budapest I had received a very nice mailing from him and I interpreted it as a gracious gesture of welcome to his city. It seems that Attalai doesn't want to show his work in Hungary; what he does seems to me to be quite up to date and very interesting. His official job here in Hungary, though, is to make patterns for the textile industry. People think highly of him and he manages to make enough money, and perhaps he doesn't want to make life difficult for himself. He's just the opposite of Galántai.