Magyar Hírlap [Hungarian Gazette], 18 July 1971, Sunday
Bitter-sweet Wanderings at Lake Balaton /excerpt/
Problems and potentials
The debut of the Chapel Exhibition in Balatonboglár is advertised on posters in German and in Hungarian. A few young people renovated the chapel on the hill last year with the aim of opening a studio in the picturesque environment and presenting their works to the public from time to time.
“Who are these young people and what is their background?” I went around asking the local inhabitants.
“They are all right. It doesn’t bother anyone that they’re sleeping in the garden and on the floor of the chapel wrapped in their blankets, nor that they have shaggy hair and beards.”
At the same time, no one understood what they were doing exactly.
The other day, for example, an unusual sight greeted the visitors to the exhibition: among other things, a plastic bag filled with sand with a milk pump sticking out from both sides was hanging on the wall. What was this work supposed to express? Perhaps the very idea which one of the artists advertises as his ars poetics on flyers: “I spit on art”?
I walked to the chapel. It is a simple exhibition and admission is free. There is a document proving that the church is renting the building out for exhibitions. Next to it there are newspaper clippings: hand-typed sheets giving accounts about visits by famous people. I wonder if they will include the article recently published in Somogyi Néplap [Somogy People’s Daily], which reports, among other things, that this exhibition is illegal.
I asked the secretary of the local council if they knew what is exhibited in the chapel and by whom? They did not even know their names.
As I was leaving, the last thing that caught my eye was was a peculiar artwork: a dead sparrow painted silver with colour butterflies glued on its body by the ‘artist’...
László Esztergomi