Gábor Klaniczay (H)

HAPPY 80TH BIRTHDAY – GYURI!

On this occasion I collected some of my statements and writings from the past decades discussing your work or linked to it, and I also attached one of my unpublished pieces too.

The story, as I already mentioned ten years ago, in the video I made for your 70th birthday back in 2011 goes all the way back to the late seventies, but that was before the digital age and my presence at your underground exhibitions and events is at best documented in Artpool.

Then the change in the political system came, and on 2 February 1990 I mounted an exhibition in the Kossuth Club together with you as part of the “Liberal Evenings” series, which I organised. It was titled “Underground Art in the Aczél Era”, and TV footage made of it has survived:

Our cooperation became even closer when you asked me to join the Artpool Performance Art series of talks. I gave a talk on 3 May 1995 titled “Tormented Body, Torn Clothes”, of which a video recording was made.

The Hungarian text was published twice:

Elgyötört test és megtépett ruha. Két kultúrtörténeti adalék a performance gyökereihez [Tormented body, torn clothes. Two contributions from cultural history on the roots of performance art], in A performance művészet [Performance Art], sel. ed. intr. Annamária Szőke, Artpool-Balassi Kiadó-Tartóshullám, Budapest, 2001, 145-183; reprinted in my book: Ellenkultúra a hetvenes-nyolcvanas években [Counterculture in the Seventies and Eighties]. Noran, Budapest, 2003. 86-124.

I am grateful that Artpool had this text translated into English and it is accessible on its homepage:

Tormented body, torn clothes. The roots of performance art – two contributions from cultural history. Artpool 2017.

The next fruit of our collaboration was when I had the opportunity to hold the opening speech on 27 October 2001 at the rearranged version of the exhibition titled “Hungary Can Be Yours”, which had been banned in 1984, in the Galeria Centralis of the Vera & Donald Blinken Open Society Archives:

I talked about this banned exhibition not only in Hungary but also in a German series on subculture, on 5 November 2014 in the Nato Club in Leipzig.
The printed German text can be accessed here:

At this round birthday, let me give you the original Hungarian text of this lecture.

And in the spirit of this German memory: BIS HUNDERT-ZWANZIG!!!!!

Ferenc Hammer, Gábor Klaniczay and Judit Gesko at the Symposium about the underground art of the 1970s and 1980s, its international context, importance and research, at the AID CONCEPT festival to save the documents of underground art, 2005

● AID CONCEPT ● CEU ● Wikipedia ●