Relations and Reality. Avant-Garde Artists and Applied Arts beyond the 3Ts, in: Promote, Tolerate, Ban: Art and Culture in Cold War Hungary, Isotta Poggi and Cristina Cuevas-Wolf eds., Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2018, 57–70. (original) (raw)
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The Soros Center for Contemporary Arts of the Soros Foundation is approaching the tenth anniversary of its establishment, and in the present paper I w ill attem pt to give a brief account of the last five years of its existence. The last decade is divided into two periods by a historic change the events of which occur maybe once in 50 years in the history of a country, let alone a whole continent. The end of 1989 and the beginning of 1990 marked such a turn in the history of Hungary and all of Eastern Europe. The political transition that took place in this region brought about changes in every sphere of life, including art. Although the main changes occurred in politics, they have had an effect on the general state of art and the life of artists. To mention only the most immediate effects: the plans for the re-burial of the executed Hungarian prime minister, Imre Nagy, were made by artists. Another symbolic act o f the 1956 revolution's re-evaluation was the erection o f the monument to the martyrs of the uprising. A great number of artists entered the ir plans for the com petition which a board selected one from. On the basis of this plan the monument was then built. In the new circumstances, some artists started to deal with politics more and more actively. Before the changes, art was one of the possible ways o f expressing p o liti cal views indirectly. A great deal o f political issues, which during the existence of the one-party system could only be dealt with in the language of art. could now be discussed directly. Thus, they became separated from art. The arts were no longer categorized according to the infamous "three Ts" (which stood for T űrt, Támogatott, Tiltott, i.e., supported, tolerated and banned arts) which made a dis tinction between works of art not only on the basis of the ir content or message, but also on the basis o f stylistic criteria. Abstract art, for example, was considered unwelcome. The exhibitions showing works that, under the previous regime, could only be shown illegal ly (e.g., Underground Art in the Aczél Era) illustrated perfectly how the new situation re-writes the history of arts in retrospect. Works rep resenting lasting value have become clearly distinguishable from those which are ephemeral, merely conveying current social and political issues w ithout inherent artistic merits.
Hungarian art +/- Europe, Contested Spheres, Kassak Muzeum, 2016
3 programme 2 Intro the conference on Contested Spheres: Actually Existing Artworlds under Socialism aims to provide a platform for fresh research into the art history of eastern europe that brings to light the varied solutions that artists and cultural workers found to living and working inside the socialist system in the period of the 1960s and 1970s. While some took the path of direct confrontation with the authorities, leading to harassment, imprisonment or exile, and refused in principle all collaboration with state-run art institutions, others complied with the demands of the party and freely placed their talents at the service of communist ideology, either through conviction or in exchange for public commissions, exhibition opportunities and institutional positions. there was also a wide band of artists, curators and art historians who, like the majority of citizens of 'actu-ally existing Socialism', devised their own individual strategies for negotiating a haphazardly repressive system and actively participated in shaping a complex artistic landscape of alternative spaces, transitory gatherings and artist-run galleries , as well as semi-independent institutions, associations and open air symposia , which all functioned according to the unorthodox rules of the socialist art economy. examining the art worlds of mid-to late Socialism not from the top down perspective symbolised by the notorious 'three t's' of Hungarian cultural policy, which divided artists into the categories of supported, tolerated and forbidden, but rather through a bottom up approach that examines the variety of possible attitudes adopted by cultural producers to the socialist system, ranging from confrontation and withdrawal to conformity and compromise, this conference sets out to foster debate about the conditions of artistic production during the last decades of Socialism and how these affected the individual trajectories, aesthetic choices and post-communist legacies of east european artists. papers presented at this conference examine how artists, curators or art historians, or even entire art scenes, responded to the demands of the socialist system, investigating, for example, prominent cases of refusal and resistance, the self-image and social role of official artists, as well as instances of disingenuousness, ambiguity and doublespeak in the machinations of late Socialist art worlds. other speakers uncover the workings of the artistic economy under socialism, and the different ways in which artists reacted to, suffered under, or turned to their advantage the distinctive material and economic environment established by the socialist state. the conference is co-organised by Kassák múzeum – petőfi Literary museum and translocal Institute of Contemporary art and takes place within the framework of the Kassák museum's ongoing research project into the art of the 1960s and 70s,
FIGHTING AGAINST THE APPARATUS: PHOTOCONCEPTUAL PRACTICES IN HUNGARY FROM 1968 TO 1979
Hungarian or better said, Hungarian-born photographers are well-known in the history of photography, although none of them truly practiced photography in their homeland, and their entire oeuvre was predominantly created before the Cold War. Thus a question arose; what happened to the ones who stayed and operated in post-war socialist Hungary? After the preliminary research, I decided to confine my focus to an eleven-year span between 1968 and 1979, investigating Photoconceptual practices in Hungary. This time range covers a period when – according to many scholars and writers including Rosalind Kraus, Jeff Wall, Matthew S. Witkovsky and Sándor Szilágyi – photography’s understanding and its position in the Western art world fundamentally changed. This change, which was strongly related to the extensive use of photography in Conceptual Art, manifested itself in photography’s increasing presence in museums, exhibitions, collections, auctions and in artistic practices. My aim was to gather these events and effects, and “apply” them to an Eastern-European country that was under the suppression of a USSR-supported socialist government. Throughout this research, the only comprehensive study on the subject by Sándor Szilágyi was revised, and his most important findings were thoroughly studied. This examination was supported by a rarely published image material, introducing the works of György Lőrinczy, Bálint Szombathy, Dóra Maurer, Károly Halász and László Haris. The dissertation attempted to establish an objective, impartial and solid base for further research into the history of Photoconceptual practices in Hungary.