tamás szentjóby
AUTOCENSORSHIP = COMPROMISES = PRECIOUS LITTLE
by late 1965 issues of ethics had become issues of the theory of signs for my and issues of the theory of signs had become issues of ethics. the worldview that my writings prior to that had been steeped in – and which worldview was being incessantly reproduced – suddenly became useless: - i stopped writing.
pop art stuck its blood pudding-like tongue into the monstrance of questions of the theory of signs and those of ethics – this really disturbed me. then, one day, living behind the information blockade, where I am still living, and feeling damned awful because of the connection between sign and meaning having been annihilated, a question arose in me: - is there a thing called a pop poem, and if there is, what can it do? and will i rot away while writing one?
i instantly got down to it, whacked the arias of some traditional geniuses against the wall, gutted them out and was convinced that not only is there no divine connection between sign and meaning, nature and whatever the fuck else but that all that pompous art and culture with its golden club ever did was conceal the essence of life with their vulgar judgement-signs and with the emblems of power rule that can by default be nothing but deceitful and horrible. it dawned on me then that contrary to the rumours circulated by the hierarchical elite culture, it has become clear that i am free if i demonstrate my freedom. that is, i should do precisely what traditional signs - ‘PROHIBITED!’ - conceal: ‘PERMITTED!’
stripping poems of their material layers and the first happening in hungary – which i organised with gábor altorjay in 1966 – dealt 400 black blows in my anabaptist face, a pleasure suicide, the nearby cultural authorities immediately mobilised themselves to obstruct my leap from whispering about heavenly things to howling about earthly ones. indeed, until the glorious pig succeeds in doing so, i obviously have not yet found the most effective way to changing our lives, in other words
i keep entering into a comprise detrimental to freedom.
28 February 1974
Source used in the newspaper poster of the exhibition "Underground Art in the Aczél Era” and in the writing published above:
tamás szentjóby: autocenzúra = kompromisszum = édeskevés [autocensorship = compromise = precious little], in: Szógettó. Válogatás az új magyar avantgarde dokumentumaiból [Word Ghetto. Selected documents from the new Hungarian Avant-garde] (collected and selected by Tamás Papp), "Jelenlét", 1989/1-2, 270. [dossier codenamed “Painter”]