"Three of us came, László Szalma, László Kerekes and myself, to put up the exhibition and for the opening. We slept up in the gallery, where the organ usually stands in churches, and Galántai slept down in the crypt. Usually he would go to bed early and we would come back late in the night, and then we would always shout through the crypt door, "Police! And Galántai jumped up, because he was scared, there were times when the police had been there and they had scared him. It wasn't a very nice gesture on our part, but it was fun for us at the timr. But it didn't turn into a problem. We spent a few days there

People came, we had a very nice audience. And then we had some disguised as journalists, I suppose whistle-blowers of the Ministry of the Interior, asking questions about more than just art, or in a very subtle way, so you could get the feeling that they weren't real journalists."

 

("...we did not have to be discovered afterwards..." Tóbiás Krisztián talks to Bálint Szombathy, 2023)

"When we stepped across the border and looked at the reality here, the difference was quite significant, tangible in many areas of life. Young artists from Hungary had been visiting me since 1971, so I had a fairly accurate picture of the differences between the conditions in the two socialist countries."

 

("I am a faithful avant-garde artist” - interview with Bálint Szombathy, 2019)

"Back in '72, we agreed to bring another Vojvodina exhibition to Boglár. But then it shouldn't be the group, but a bit more mixed, broader immersion, and then three of us came from the group, and four other artists came with us, photographers, sculptors, painters, so it was a bit more mixed. At the opening of this one, we had this performance by Katalin Ladik, the theme of which is a letter O."

 

("...we did not have to be discovered afterwards..." Tóbiás Krisztián talks to Bálint Szombathy, 2023)

Bálint Szombathy
WHAT ARE BANANAS GOOD FOR?

 

A conversation with Canadian bananologist Anna Banana,
BANANA CONSCIOUSNESS, Artpool Art Research Center, 9 October 1993

 

Anna Banana: ..."Everybody had fun at the Banana Olympics. People looked at them as a pleasant way of relaxation, and for us they were artistic events. We had a kick out of other things like this, for example, when we welcomed the Italian master Cavellini in California. We received him as the uncrowned king of the Network and actually seated him on a throne. The street processions and carnival-like scenes organised in his honour were joined by some of the passers-by, which we were very happy about."...

Bálint Szombathy
exhibition opening

 

"... in 2001 Cohen launched a new series under the name of Fractal Portraits . It is basically about Cohen travelling from one country to another, creating portraits, i.e., full body or head silhouettes of the artists he visited in their personal environments. Back home in his own studio, he filled in the drawn silhouettes with visual elements of his familiar Brain Cell iconography. [...]

Through the uniqueness of the body outlines, Cohen attempted to let the physical constraints of the given silhouettes control the synthetically extracted residues of the global language, which in his previous work had only been limited by the paper's rectangular edges. On the other hand, in a creative and simple manner, he intended to fuse the potentials of classical visual representation with the manifestations pertaining to the contemporary visual art forms and techniques found in the fringes of art, which we may encounter in our everyday lives, i.e., subcultural art in urban public spaces. ..."

 

"Art Regained. The Ways of Re-Creation · Four exhibitons · Four openings"

Zsuzsanna Kiss (Zsolt Gyarmati) - Bálint Szombathy (Ryosuke Cohen) - György Galántai (Michael T. Bidner) - Tibbi Várnagy (György Bp. Szabó), Artpool P60, 27 May 2005.

(➜ short video documentary of the event)

“If the fog surrounding Lajos Kassák only really began to lift in the 1970s, it can be said that the neglect surrounding Károly Tamkó Sirató had an even longer lasting effect, as the reception of his progressive work only took place in the 1980s. In essence, both artists only received the professional attention they deserved after their deaths. Not that Tamkó's avant-garde activities can be ranked alongside Kassák's multifaceted activism and socio-political sensitivity in terms of volume, but there was a segment of his artistic ideology derived from poetry that could always be placed alongside the internationally significant output of Kassák's picture-poem production. The basis of this opus, which brings together several forms of poetics, was the dimensionalist view of art, which was a phenomenon of the time, and no one has expressed its character as authoritatively and with as much faith as Tamko, who was in the French capital.”

 

(Bálint Szombathy: "The ways of concrete poetry. From Plane Poetry to Dimensionism" lecture, Artpool P60, 2007)

Bálint Szombathy
ARTPOOL TO THE WORLD

 

“Artpool to the world - without the article. It's like saying: a Hungarian brand for the world. Because Artpool doesn't just give something to the world, it gives itself. Today, we take this so much for granted that we may not even notice it.

But it has not always been so, just as it is a miracle that it has been created and, above all, that it has survived for almost three and a half decades. It has survived all kinds of power constellations, the first of which was the most difficult and the most heroic. From a historical point of view, Artpool began somewhere in the 70s with the chapel exhibitions in Balatonboglár, and can be seen as a continuation of them, as a life project of György Galántai. ...”

 

Artpool. The Experimental Art Archive of East-Central Europe / History of an active archive for producing, networking, curating, and researching art since 1970. Artpool Art Research Center, Budapest, 2013 - edited by György Galántai and Júlia Klaniczay. 

 

(Bálint Szombathy: Artpool to the world /book review in Hungarian/ - EXINDEX, 21 November 2013)

 

 

“I participated in the Balatonboglár Chapel Exhibitions in the seventies, and after that I became a permanent collaborator of the Artpool Art Research Center. In the course of my research work, I became convinced of the high level of activity and international importance of this unique Hungarian institution. ...”

 

Letter from Bálint Szombathy to the Secretary of State for Culture (excerpt)

“... Cavellini's most important contact in Hungary was György Galántai and Artpool. His particular "art of behaviour" and his extraordinary activity contributed significantly to the launching of the Artpool project in Budapest, which had just been created in 1979 - the aim of which, although from a completely different motive, was also to bypass "official art"...”

 

Excerpt from the exhibition preview of Bálint Szombathy (EXINDEX, 12 June 2014)

40 YEARS LATER

 

“... One of the central figures of recent retrospection in Hungary has been Klaus Groh, who, along with Hans-Werner Kalkmann, was one of my first serious contacts with the West through the International Artists' Cooperation, which he started in 1969. In the context of the OFF Biennial in Budapest, Groh's 1972 anthology Aktuelle Kunst in Osteuropa, which was the first to present Eastern European concept and project art to a Western audience, was reconstructed in the form of a study exhibition in the basement gallery of Artpool. ...”

 

Bálint Szombathy: 40 years later, EXINDEX, 24 May 2015 (in Hungarian)