Behavior-art as “Samizdat Culture”*
“Behavior-art” – practiced first indirectly, then directly – was the form that resisted the “socialist” aesthetic norms existing in Hungary prior to 1989.
The “second generation” of the Hungarian avant-garde, like the roughly inter-war first generation (Lajos Kassák et al.), resigned itself to having to define its place in both the European, and the specifically Hungarian, cultural tradition while living in exile, either domestic exile, or actually abroad. The non-figurative artists of the 1960s formulated their task as one of “bridge building.” They spoke of the need to build two bridges: one toward Europe, the other toward Hungary’s cultural heritage, and devoted most of their energies to this task. Theirs was a passive resistance to the aesthetic demands of “socialist realism”, the compulsory aesthetic ideology of the time, but even this passive resistance was treated as political resistance by the regime. In sheer self-defense, these initially apolitical artists grouped together, and step by step became more politicized.
This second generation was influenced as much by Kassák’s Constructivism and political non-conformism as by the universal values and autonomy of the group called European School. Though few of those involved were aware of it at the time, the Hungarian “happenings” of the mid-1960s, and conceptual art of the early 1970s owed as much to the Hungarian dadaists as to the international Fluxus Movement.
Conceptual art, autonomous, unique and communication-savvy as it is, is the “art of last resort” for non-conformist artists who had been cornered. Geared as it is to using channels of communication intended to fall outside the view of Big Brother, it is a direct form of “behavior art”. Conceptual art does not need an exhibition space, permissions, has no genre, can happen uncontrollably at any field of independent, autonomous activity. Unlike the banned non-figurative works of art, the works of concept art that appeared from the early 1970s onward had a concrete political content; hence the panic they caused among the politicians seeking to dictate the terms of Hungarian culture. A further challenge to this cultural dictatorship was the unauthorized opening in 1970 of an alternative art space in a much-frequented resort town: the Chapel Studio of György Galántai at Balatonboglár. Far enough away from the capital to be difficult to keep a watchful eye on, the Chapel Studio would become the forum of the new avant-garde. Hungarian alternative artists were also quick to make the most of the communication opportunities afforded first by mailing lists, and then the international flow of mail art. (“ART = THE DOCUMENTATION OF THE IDEA” – László Beke.) This was also the time that the “personalized” underground artistic periodical EXPRESSZió got off the ground every reader was obliged to take out a page or more, insert a page of his own, and make five copies of the new version to pass along to friends, who were obliged to do the same. The journal was the perfect underground medium: source unidentifiable, unanalyzable, and incorruptible.
In response to the new situation, the country’s cultural dictators came up with an innovative solution, and to test this outwardly repressive tactic, they shut down the Chapel Studio in Balatonboglár in 1973. However, at this time they also abandoned their insistence on Socialist Realism, and instead, spoke of the “3Ts”: támogat (to support), tűr (to tolerate) and tilt (to ban). Hungarian non-figurative art was officially shown abroad by way of illustrating the artistic freedom enjoyed in the “happiest barrack in the Eastern camp,” and this same “divide and rule” move succeeded in causing a rift within the ranks of the avant-garde. Not that the Party shied away from the more direct means. The cultural secret service infiltrated, isolated and exploited personal antagonisms, discredited the leading figures, etc. These tactics, used against progressive artist, remained in effect until 1989.
By the mid-1970s, progressive artists had either left the country or had retreated into domestic exile. Subsequently, in the period of consolidation, the influence of conceptual art spread, in an indirect and apolitical form, to every branch of art. Happenings gave way to performance art, though its best traditions lived on in the banned experimental films. Concept art and fluxus would yield to a veritable rage for mail art in the early 1980s. The secret police were quick to note the international networking that mail art allowed, and took care to interfere particularly in Hungarian artists’ contacts in the Eastern block. We can take it as symbolic that the last exhibition banned by the regime was a mail art exhibit in 1984, entitled: Hungary Can Be Yours / International Hungary (organized by Artpool).
The year 1983 marked the beginning of “New Painting” in Hungary, in an illegal gallery in a private home (Rabinec Gallery). The opening lecture was about “the end of the avant-garde”. The event was marked by the launching of a samizdat art periodical, the AL (Aktuális Levél / Artpool Letter); the eleven issues of AL helped greatly to accelerate the unfolding of events. New Painting was apolitical, and found acceptance in the eyes of the political leadership as early as 1984; painting was taken off the agenda of the cultural police. New Painting had room in it both for some of the “accepted” members of the second-generation avant-garde, and the new generation of painters. There were recapitulations of everything that had ever been in painting: there was New Expressionism, New Constructivism, and New Eclecticism. Painting became the movement of reconciliation; everyone was painting and looking for markets, galleries opened up, there were large-scale state-sponsored exhibitions of New Painting, and the “accepted” members of the second-generation avant-garde held one-man shows, complete with catalogs and state purchases.
Many people maintain that 1984 was the year of the political changeover in the cultural sphere. Avant-gardism had become passé; art was now a professional matter, not a matter of attitude or behavior.
At this point the introductory part of Miklós Erdély’s 1981 Optimistic Lecture about “The Features of Post-neo-avant-garde Attitude” as well as the final sentence are worth remembering: “The informational short circuit will be somehow avoided through the resourcefulness of need; a way of coming into contact with what is essential will be found, and what has become obsolete will lose its validity in light of a new discovery, or at least in the hope of such.” (György Galántai, 1979)
____________________
*Source: Galántai György: A magatartás-művészet mint “szamizdat kultúra”, www.artpool.hu/veletlen/naplo/0605a.html. Text written by Galántai in 1999 to accompany Artpool’s concept for presenting Hungarian samizdat art at the exhibition SAMIZDAT – Alternative Kultur in Zentral- und Osteuropa in 2000 at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin (finally not used by the organizers).
English translation by Éva Pálmai.