Performative Interactions with the Past:

Reinterpretation and recontextualization… play an important part in the work of the Hungarian artist group Little Warsaw. In the fall of 2005, they invited Tamás Szentjóby to repeat his action entitled Exclusion exercise. Autotherapy to prevent punishment in their studio as a public event. The original action was realized in 1972 in the context of the “chapel shows” in the lake-side resort of Balatonboglár, a series of underground art exhibitions that was monitored by the secret police and forbidden the following year. Of particular interest here are Little Warsaw’s motives for asking Szentjóby to repeat this action and his reasons for agreeing to do so. As he had done thirty-three years previously, he sat on a chair, placed a bucket over his head, hung a piece of cardboard round his neck bearing the words “Exclusion exercise. Autotherapy to prevent punishment” and subjected himself to questions from the audience for two hours. The action included a piece of paper nailed to the wall with suggestions for possible questions. They included the following: “Is it really the task of art to raise awareness, is our destiny identical with history?”’[2]

Dóra Hegyi finishes her essay, “Art and the Amnesiac Society: The Neo-Avant-Garde Revisited” (2006), with an open question that concerns the inscription of the past into the artwork. In this particular case of a repeated action history, archive and the memory of things are “imprinted” on the body of the artist (Tamás Szentjóby) itself.[3] As Zdenka Badovinac has observed in the case of Eastern European alternative art, “the performer’s body emphasizes the necessity for the ‘museification’ and ‘archivization’ of the local tradition. … fighting against the amnesia of the great historical and art utopias.”[4] The ways in which these particular artists archived their own performative activity is equal to an archive being understood as a medium of dynamism and self-reflection.[5] At the core of Badovinac’s argument stands the necessity of the body as a creative repeater of actions dated back in time, keeping them constantly alive.[6] According to the “original” definition of body art, the most raw material for an artist is his/her work with his/her own body.[7] François Pluchart defined art corporel in 1974 as follows: “The body is the fundamental given. Pleasure, suffering, disease and death are inscribed in it and, in the course of biological evolution, they shape the socialized individual, i.e. condition… that might satisfy all the requirements and constraints of the powers that be.”[8] Pluchart’s concept describes the body not only as an extremely material and physical source of inspiration, but also as a corporeality attached to chains generated by social, economic, cultural, and political order. Trapped in the absurd system of socialist rules of (mis-)realized utopia, this was especially true for performances, action, and body art pieces produced in Kádár’s Hungary. As the case study taking center stage in this essay will prove, the conditions of the body placed in a socialist context are reappearing and rethought in an action reenacted by the same person that “distill[s] meaning from past events, store[s] them, and find[s] embodied modalities to express them in the here-and-now.”[9]

Some nonconformist artists from this region during the late socialist period used every possible strategy to find their own way of producing, respectively documenting art on/of the margins: this happened, for example, either through establishing unconventional modes of archiving already in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, or through reflecting on their own experiences through art, but only after the fall of the communist model. For the latter, the most effective way was to reach back to the reconceptualization of previous performative works. The deconstruction and criticism of the disciplined body in performative “flashbacks” was one of the most effective ways to detach from the rules and memory politics of actually existing communism. This moment of detachment is, as I will argue later, the “pointing finger” of the artist at a place in performance and action art history that is being forgotten in a canonized view on late socialism’s art scenes. Avant-gardists tended to take up statements like “the ‘unwritten’ is often unremarked”[10] in order to approach it with an increasing aesthetic interest. Deconstruction and criticism of the rules within which the artists were allowed to act are best observed in the breaking of formal and aesthetical regulations, as well as turning to elusive practices like body art, where the disciplining of bodies was getting complicated, if not impossible. By recalling, or at least trying to recall, the intention of a performance, event, action, or a piece of body art in a post-socialist condition within reenactments denotes an interesting attempt and attitude towards the history of how to preserve unofficial art and how to relate it to existing narratives on socialist realist or global art history. Arguing with Péter György, who is convinced that the understanding of the (official) culture of the Kádár era is only possible through a diversity and large number of theoretical and methodological frameworks, one of these could be a reconceptualization of archives and forgetting in a post-socialist context.[11] The lens through which to look at the interconnectedness of archives and forgetting are reenactments in the “unconscious” condition following the fall of the Wall.

Talking about reenactments raises the question of how the performing arts and history are related to one another. In the Benjaminian sense, history is transitory and elusive, and its authentic moment can only be captured in the passing flow of time.[12] It is already common knowledge (but at the same time debated) in performance and theatre studies that the performing arts represents one of the fields in aesthetics that is most closely linked to Benjamin’s understanding of historiography, because the nature of performance is determined by fluidity and disappearance.[13] Amelia Jones underlines this argument when she states that “history is performative reenactment,”[14] and “there is no singular, authentic ‘original’ event we can refer to….”[15] Although other performance theoreticians like Rebecca Schneider question the complete disappearance of performative pieces,[16] the elusive link between event-based art and history/historiography stands at the core of a clandestine art that tried to escape the order of socialist cultural norms. Therefore, I insist on this particular relationship, which relativizes the micro-narratives introduced in the present paper. Referring again to Jones, and also to Adrian Heathfield, embodying history in process-based art should have a conscious criticism and (self-)reflexive approach towards historicization and the (exclusionary narratives of) historiography in general.[17] This particular access is present in a number of reenactments reaching back to the era of East-Central European neo-avant-gardes.

This paper is an attempt to provide an adequate reading of history’s “processing” in performative works as a reflection on clandestine art activity under communism. The investigation should not help to fulfill requirements of “Western” categories,[18] or build a counter-canon, but it should rather serve to support understanding the complexity of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde’s return in post-socialist reenactments.

As mentioned briefly earlier, further questions I would like to address in this essay are attached to the aspects of visibility and invisibility in the field of Eastern European art history from the socialist era in which ideology had disappeared. Related to the phenomena of the archive and documentation is the matter of what is remembered and included, and which moments of history under dictatorship were (or are still) excluded—forgotten. Referring again to György makes clear that the Kádár era in its entirety is a ghost-like figure: dead in social, political, and ideological terms.[19] Szentjóby’s and Little Warsaw’s reenactment tries to build a discursive bridge to an alternative art culture that is now non-existent, and whose sign systems, or symbolic metaphorical language, cannot be decoded by current generations. Forgetting is also a form of vanishing from the consciousness. This description is partly in line with what Hegyi called “amnesiac society” in the title of her paper cited at the beginning of this essay. She claims that the silence of the Kádár era continues to exist, because the writing of the (art) history of that period is still happening in something like an isolated “second public sphere.”[20] Her proposition is only partly correct, because scholars have begun a systematic analysis of Hungarian neo-avant-garde tendencies in the last few years,[21] although the international introduction, for example, and relatedness of (especially) the Hungarian alternative art scenes is still much more “backward” than that of other regions in the former Eastern Bloc. Again, it is the question of which information and memory has a place in the historiography of twentieth-century art and which does not. A way to deal with these issues is to look into performances and actions covering the phenomena of forgetting and archives. Sven Spieker comes to the point: “Archives do not record experience so much as its absence; they mark the point where an experience is missing from its proper place, and what is returned to us in an archive may well be something we never possessed in the first place.”[22]

Here, I am not interested in the detailed description of mechanisms how an “amnesiac society”[23] was created under socialist rule, but in the attitude of artists creatively marking—in the sense of Spieker—fractures on the shield of the communist period’s extensive archive, drawing our attention to the distracted body as a different source of coming to terms with the past. By adding another piece of the puzzle to the missing coherent, comprehensive, and critical analysis of East-Central European event-based art,[24] the task of the present investigation is, on the one hand, to reflect upon a special form of alternative historicization through performance in the work of Tamás Szentjóby and in the approach of the artist duo Little Warsaw, and, on the other, to keep looking for fragments; markers of forgetting in constructing the history of art and performing art in the region.

In July 1972, at the chapel studio of Balatonboglár, a remarkable clandestine art venue of the Kádár era, Szentjóby conceptualized and performed the action Kizárás gyakorlat: Büntenésmegelőző autoterápia (Exclusion exercise: Autotherapy to prevent punishment), in the manner described earlier by Hegyi. The “production” was part of a series of events under the title DIREKT HÉT (DIRECT WEEK), which approached and encouraged audiences to become active participants in the creation of the artwork.[25] As a result of Szentjóby’s radical intellectual and artistic development that began in the early sixties, in most of his initiations, including the conceptualization of the DIREKT HÉT, he was keen to smash the social and cultural consensus of Kádárist Hungary.[26] As Emese Kürti articulated in her recent essay on the history of the first Hungarian happening, improvisation and experimentalism were central to the oeuvre of Szentjóby.[27] Because late-socialist bureaucratism at the beginning of the seventies was still paranoid and obsessed with control, plus intuitive, destructive, and activating,[28] non-representative art belonged to a sphere of exclusion. The art produced by Szentjóby explicitly denied the existence of the regime. One of the main purposes of the event series was to challenge the boundaries of spectatorship. With this undertaking, the organizers of DIREKT HÉT violated the “unwritten” social agreement of the passive consumption of art. The biggest danger of an art like this was that the activation of the spectator could have unpredictable consequences.

In Kizárás gyakorlat, the situation of sitting on a chair with certain isolation from the outside world was, in the words of Szentjóby, borrowed from the Christian tradition of confession.[29] The piece was not only implicitly referring to a form of habitualized Eurocentric religionism, but also to a Chinese habit of punishment. As these global references already indicate, the meanings of Kizárás gyakorlat are exceedingly complex; therefore, I will concentrate only on a few possible interpretations related to the main questions. Visitors of the chapel could approach Szentjóby with about twenty questions listed on a sheet of paper that was attached to the wall. The questions could only be answered by the artist with “yes” or “no.” The “audience” was encouraged to make up additional questions, but Szentjóby could not change his answers. He describes the experience of being committed and sitting for about eight hours on a chair with a bucket on his head as extremely strenuous.[30] The artist himself emphasized that the message of the performance was more general than only a critique of state socialism; it was directed against the hierarchies of state and church, with the intention to debate the relationship between the individual and these institutions.[31] Szentjóby clearly demonstrated what is happening to the body if it is exposed to the forces of any kind of hierarchical order. The freedom of autonomous action disappears, which is the most elementary right of a social being. With Kizárás gyakorlat, the artist intends to debate brute force against the individual. This particular violation does not necessarily have to be physical, although Szentjóby is explicitly displaying the effects of rule with a static, paralyzed pose of his corpus. His senses were nonfunctional (the bucket on his head isolated him from the outside world), and in this way he subversively created an almost completely mute subject, one that is the ideal element of a repressed and controllable society. For Szentjóby, it was important to avoid violence from the authorities, so the performer himself conducted punishment demonstratively. Those who took part in the performance by asking Szentjóby questions also participated in the act of punishment—at the same time being paradoxically collaborators of religious and state systems, as well as the performer. Through the vehemence of questions addressed to Szentjóby, he was not able or willing to interrupt the process of penalty. It is an interesting and not inconsiderable remark that Kizárás gyakorlat took place in the circle of members of a parallel culture, where a symbolic, deconstructive language used by Szentjóby was more likely to be understood.

Reducing the intention of Szentjóby’s action to an equation with a reaction towards repressive politics in late-socialist Hungary, Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski offers the following reading of the original Kizárás gyakorlat:

The psycho-masochistic character of the performance had two opposing impulses: on the one hand, it afforded an opportunity for the purification and expression of internalized anxieties, on the other it presumed the need for responsibility and punishment inscribed within this traumatic experience, a type of politico-psychoanalytic session. According to psychoanalytic theory, re-experiencing a trauma activates the mechanism that eventually leads to healing. The potential and the actual police interventions into the artists’ lives were a constant source of such trauma. Szentjóby’s performance could be seen in this context as a form of therapy, an attempt to reprocess and desensitize the traumatic contact with the political police.[32]

Piotrowski’s appreciation of this conceptual performance[33] suggests that the Hungarian neo-avant-garde has one essential characteristic in relation to politics: it was always (directly or indirectly) affected by political repression and brute force, as well as shocks and traumas caused by the distorted hierarchies of state socialism. Relating to my brief analysis of Kizárás gyakorlat, Piotrowski’s assumption is not entirely true. Szentjóby’s attitude is a general anarchism whose origin is only partly to be associated with communist dictatorship. Artists had a chance to decide if and/or how to deal with this condition of being (mostly) on the margins of this particular political situation.[34] Some members of the Hungarian subcultures at the time just shut their eyes and lived as if no secret observation and control existed,[35] or demonstrated the vanguard convergence of art and life. Artists like Szentjóby debated and openly provoked diverse forms of control (not only that of the Hungarian socialist order) with the help of a complex symbolic language of aesthetics and deconstruction. Szentjóby, like a number of his fellow artists, was against the exaggerated “institutionalism” in which the utopia of communism had ended up. At this point, one could raise the question about why Little Warsaw chose this particular performance to reenact in an apparently different historical, social, and cultural context. Maybe the circumstances have changed, but the message was still valid. The critique of dominant institutions, order, and ideological and sign systems is also an issue in the practice of documentation, archiving, historiography, and the performing arts, which was and still is an important way of looking at a problem—both in the 1970s and in the 2000s. As the title of Szentjóby’s original and reenacted action suggests, “exclusion” was and remains present, independent of our historical awareness. Exclusion mechanisms were more visible and obvious during the existence of the socialist regime, but even in democratic societies traces of expulsion remain—especially in the market-oriented art world and in the canonized production of art history. Forms of aesthetic deconstruction and forgetting are remarkable moments of exposed exclusion in the way Szentjóby, and later on Little Warsaw, realized it.

The link between the original and reenacted versions of Kizárás gyakorlat is the act of performing and marking exclusion. This kind of performing is considered here as the document which is subject to archiving, forgetting, and deconstruction. There is a specific reason why the fragile document of performing has become so interesting for the artist duo Little Warsaw. Against the background of Hungary’s communist past, documents have lost their authenticity: the manipulation and falsification of data in those times radically changed the notion of “trusted information.” The question arises whether the individual can still trust institutionalized knowledge and data. A sensible and critical handling of information is required, not just if one is screening files of the secret police. The question concerns both historians and artists from the neo-avant-garde scene, with direct and indirect forms of criticism against diverse kinds of information, data, and documents—and even their own art having its origin in socialism—which had and still have significance in producing art outside of a system with historical awareness. In the context of the performing arts, the traditional understanding of archives as “containers” of information that mediate documents loses its classical meaning completely.[36] This is also true for the installation works of Little Warsaw, which recall central questions of writing history. Regarding these characteristics of event-based art and art with an intended historical attitude, interesting dimensions of both archives and documents appear. These dimensions can easily be applied to methods of analysis in the way Piotrowski imagined writing the history of Eastern Europe: considering local, often excluded and marginalized traditions, and thinking in heterogeneity[37]—a methodology based on integration, working with nuances. In a certain sense, Little Warsaw entered the same path, because “they focused on the possibilities of local art-making practices within… new conditions.”[38]

György Galántai, the Hungarian artist and founder of the Artpool Art Research Center, one of the most important archives on the alternative art scene of the communist period in East-Central Europe, formulated the concept of the “active archive,” which is, similarly to innovative concepts of post-custodial archiving, an open-ended project. As Galántai argues, “The archive expands through calls for projects, co-operation and exchange as well as circulating information and enlarging the network. … it works with an exact aim and direction sensitively detecting changes and adjusting accordingly.”[39] The first passage of the manifesto neglects the collecting task of the archive and sees one of its main functions in the process of co-creation, where human and material factors enrich and cooperate with one another.[40] For a number of artists, including Galántai himself, creating their own creative archives and own kinds of archiving was crucial during the time of state socialism: “Artist’s archives are a testimony to [their] permanent process of demystifying the socialist institution of art in which [some of them] publicly participated in [their] own way and which [they] could not escape. … the aspect of mediating and sharing information flanks and prevails to document and preserve ephemeral forms of artistic communication.”[41] Those who were engaged with “deviant,” unofficial means of documentation with respect to historicization developed an own discursive field of aesthetics that contained philosophy, art production, and diverse forms of communication. This kind of understanding of the archive is in line with Michel Foucault’s notion, which is “the general system of the formation and transformation of statements,” a structure that incorporates “tradition and oblivion,” and that “reveals the rules of a practice that enables statements both to survive and to undergo regular modifications.”[42] Again, in this sense, the archive is not a simple storage of data but a system of relating information to each other. Without having other opportunities to step aside from the norms of socialist rule, archiving artists found another way to arrange information on a micro-level of their own history.