| EUROPE: ART'S
SPOTS / BUDAPEST ARTPOOL Artpool Art Research Center |
| Judit Bodor |
"...my desire (is) to know what, today, can be called art. It had been a part study, part voyage, in the course of which hitherto unknown territory comes into view, the discussions of an alternative life"
/Galántai György/
How to make "art of behavior" and how can we understand it? How to be "inside and outside" in the same time: being a practicioner as well as the organizer of an institution, that - by using the results of the past and by questionning of what may happen in the future - communicates and exists as the generator of contemporary culture? These questions formulate the focal points of György Galántai´s works as an artist and a human being who uses creativity to understand his place in contemporary society.
1. Galántai's sign works (series of prints) at the open air exhibition in Szentendre, 1973
Although graduated at the Department of Painting of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, Budapest (1963-1967), Galántai had soon stopped thinking of the aesthetic values of art, and turned towards the conceptual problems of culture, that he visualized through different mediums (graphic designs, sculptures, objects, actions etc.). The problem of identification of art in terms of the wider culture was general among European artists in the 60s, but in the so called Eastern block, self-identification and existence problems of artists were manifested differently. As a result of the cultural changes that followed the civil movements at the end of the 1960´s, and contrary to the tenets of capitalist market economy of western societies, the non-mercentary and anti-aesthetic nature of art was explored thoroughly by art which could assert itself as such. Either by dematerialization of the object (concept art) or transitivity (performance), new art broke down the traditional boundaries between art and other fields of culture, and/or carried certain ideological and political ideas, critiques related to the new idea of the social responsibility of art. On the contrary, despite the influences of these new forms of western art, in Eastern Europe the structure of the state socialist regime, the supported social realist art, and the lack of any information made impossible to claim or to criticize the society. In the eyes of the authorities, avantgarde meant suspicious and resistant, its representatives therefore were forced to go underground, but in their works they could not cut themselves from the given social conditions, they necessarly became political, whether the artists wanted it or not. In spite of the fact that Galántai had never wanted to make directly political art, he had been stigmatized as one of the most rebellious and dangerous artist of the era and at the head of the black list of the secret police.
2-3. György Galántai: "Sign Action", Balatonboglár, 1972
His experiences of the milieu around him, the ego problems that he dealt with and the need of certification of his existence by others, his hunger for communication and for information about new trends of art had led him to organize his first "institution-project" at countryside: the Chapel Exhibitions at Balatonboglár (a small village near to Lake Balaton), that - looking back in time - was the embryotic form of Artpool.
After renovating the ruined chapel with the help of some friends and using it as a "summer studio," beginning in 1970 he organized events and exhibitions of hungarian and international avant-garde art. His "studio" was an island of freedom for those who refused to submit the conditions imposed by the state on cultural life. Altogether thirty-five exhibitions (included the first exhibition of conceptual art in Hungary, 1972), concerts, theatre performances and film shows were held during the four years of its existence, with the participation of the creative community of the best avantgarde artists from Hungary and guest artists from abroad. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the authorities did not like the "scandalous" activity of ´young hippies´ and in 1973 Galántai had been under police supervision. After three years of constant fighting the police managed to ban the "Chapel Exhibitions," ruining Galántai´s life for years and soon having an affect on his carreer. In 1973 an exhibition would have consisted of his sign-works completed between 1970 and 1973. At first the board of censors had accepted the works, but later they rejected about two-thirds of them. That decision of the board gave the "possibility" for Galántai to make "art of behavior": arranging the works according to his original plan, he wrapped the banned works in paper, but left them on the wall. He also made a new invitation card: he photographed himself in front of the packed ´Summer´ of the ´Four Seasons´ series (the one that might have been banned as a hint at his activities at Boglár) and mailed the invitation to art critics and other leaders of the art world. This "re-action" against the decision, manifested through photo-documentation, changed the whole meaning of the exhibition, as it became more about the exhibition of the wrapped works than the visible ones. Those works became his first trans-functioned objects, and the "packaged exhibition" was the first of his "scandal art".
4. György Galántai on the roof of his Chapel at Balatonboglár, 1973
After the closing of the Chapel Studio many artists were constrained to emigrate, others remained with no bigger plans and the organizers disappeared completely. This caused a kind of vacuum space in the culture. Galántai decided to stay in Hungary inspite of the fact that he was cut off from the world around him. Without any work and money he tried to survive and continued working. Using "trans-functioning" as the main method for breaking the limits of traditional genres, he started to make objects from junk, used equipments and scrap metal, "that were sculptures, graphics and painting at the same time: in other words, visual objects whose main purpose is visual effective communication" (Diary, 1974). In 1975 he created a new visual sign, the very personal motif of his own footprint (sole), that symbolized a person´s taking steps, getting around, going ahead etc. Playing with the motif´s methaphoric meanings, his objects contained different layers of meaning: one that anybody - even a child - could understand and another - those who wanted - understood, but no one could prove their direct political or social criticism. One good example for this is his "Medium Cultivator" (1975), a horse-drawn plough turned upside down, which ploughs the space instead of the earth. He gave names to each part of the complex object: Dynamics, Effortlessness, Persistence, Selectivity, Moderation, Creativity, Will, Confidence, Competence, Diligence, Imagination. These titles highlight the methaphoric meaning of the work: the will to communicate the virtues of cultural politics by "making a dent in the frozen air of communication" with the political and artistic milieu around him. The frozen air of state socialism also made him think how he could circulate information among practicioners of the avantgarde art world without the possibility of having a similar exhibition place as the Chapel was before. He would have to wait. The situation changed slowly, but at last, in 1978, two things happened that changed his life.
During the spring of 1978, with Julia Klaniczay, whom he met in 1976 and who then became his wife and the co-founder of Artpool, they went off to Amsterdam. They visited significant art institutions and specific collections, like the public video archive of the De Appel art centre, the collection of performance documents of the Fodor Museum, and Ulisses Carrion´s alternative bookstore called "Other Books and so...", which sold every kind of alternative publications from postcards to rubber stamp publications. These public centres of alternative culture, - of which in Hungary he had known little, but towards which he had taken steps as an artist - had fortified his resolution of creating a similar creative place in Hungary that would exist as an information pool based on artistic exchanges. The beginning of which came by accident. In the autumn of the same year, he had a solo exhibition from his copper and brass bookwork objects and their imprints at Fészek Klub in Budapest. The exhibition was opened by Anna Banana, an american/canadian neo-dadaist artist, who had read the hungarian accompanying text written for the occasion without understanding a word of it. After the vernissage, Galántai sent the bilingual poster of the exhibition to hundreds of addresses all over the world, that he had accumulated years before, with the stamped request: "Please send me information about your activity." Surprisingly, his call was answered by more than 300 practicioners, and the documents received became the part of the "archive," which was set up soon at the private apartment of him and Júlia Klaniczay. This step led to the next institution project under the name: Artpool, that referred to the act of collecting from diverse and endeavors with an aim to develop a creative cultural environment that preserves and documents the works of international and Hungarian artistic movements, generates new projects.
5."Packaged Exhibition", Galántai in front of the wrapped "Summer", Technical University, Budapest, March 1973
"Artpool, as an institution, is my artistic medium today, and my job is to construct the institution as a ´work of art´"
/György Galántai/
It was not easy for Galántai to start a community work again. Due to his "well known" past, his renewed activity again drew the attention of the Ministry of Interior, which led to the opening of his secret police folder, nicknamed „Painter”. He also needed a person who could help him in the international correspondence and administrative tasks. Klaniczay´s knowledge of languages and practice as an editor solved the problem of division of labour. Working together they completed each others skills and started the "Artpool project": an avantgarde art archive.
What does the idea of an "institution as a work of art" mean? Even if Artpool acted as a "pseudo institution" in a private flat, in the context of the anti-institutional campaign of the avantgarde movements in the 70s, this idea might have sound strange. But for Galántai the institution became the subject of art. This refers to the second focal point of Galántai´s interest that I´ve mentioned before: the duality of being a practicioner as well as the organizer of an activist institution, which communicates and exists as an organic body by supporting and participating in the avantgarde events, while - in the same time - archiving them, keeping the documentations alive and using them as possible ground for future works of art. The primary aim of Artpool was to give and receive information whether in the form of documents and/or ideas. The general way of getting information from abroad happened through mail art activities, although - as it is known from the report of the secret police - the larger part of the letters did not arrive because of the postal control. Galántai also had to register Artpool as his professional name because of his permanent problem with receiving those letters that had been addressed to Artpool. Besides the mail art activities, and despite the general difficulties of that time with travelling from the eastern countries to the west, the Galántais managed to organize a couple of travelling projects (Italian tour in 1979 and Artpool´s Art Tour through 6 countries of Europe in 1982), during which they could personally meet the artists and collect their materials by exchanging them for artworks and publications of Galántai and Artpool.
The situation was more difficult in the hungarian art scene. The Galántais tried to follow every major exhibition, lecture, concert etc. to record and document them, although only a few people knew about the underground events and there was no video at that time. Different tactical and technical problems emerged again when Galántai started to stimulate local mail art activity so as to draw the hungarian artists into the international network. In her text about the publications of Artpool that were exhibited at BALTIC Art Centre, Newcastle (2003), Júlia Klaniczay gave a clear description of how it was almost impossible to publish anything because of difficulties: the right to publish was reserved by the authorities, permission was needed to place an order at a printing house and no copy machines were available to the public. It was fortune that Galántai was also a graphic artist and could make the publications himself, declaring them as his numbered works of art, that could not be taken away by the authorities as samizdat publications. After making the ´master copy´ at home and printing and copying them on the black market, Artpool could publish materials that now are unavoidable sources of the history of hungarian avantgarde art: e.g. Pool Window 1-30, a mail art newsletter from 1980 to 1982, the AL 1-11 (Artpool Letter) a samizdat art magazine of the alternative culture (between 1983-1985), as well as several catalogues, small booklets, postcards etc.
6. György Galántai: "Main-Road-Signs Group", 1975
7. György Galántai: "Liberty / Prison", 1979
Three different examples will light up how he worked in the 1980s on these complex works of art, how he performed the archive in different forms, from the concept through realization to documentation and publication. In the project of "World Art Post" in 1982 he not only organized a huge exhibition from the works of some 600 participants, but made a bookwork from the documents and a film of the works that was inspired by chance: the stamp designs arrived each day by mail as responses to his call for the exhibition and he gave them a consecutive number. As the day passed, he discovered that the accidental sequence of the images turned into an intelligible series, as if they were continuations of one another, and became a coherent work. That result inspired him to make a film of this accidental montage with music that had also come from the artists who supplied the pictures. Other example was his artistic idea of a collective rubber-stamp action, called "Everybody with Anybody" (1982), where the concept was that the members of the audience would be the artists, who made collective works by using anyone`s stamp that were made for the event. Therefore the opening of the exhibition was at the same time the action of realization of the material that was exhibited. The third example is the exhibition "Hungary Can Be Yours / International Hungary" (1984) that was qualified by the authorities as anti/Soviet, irredentist and opposed to Hungary`s political system, therefore it was banned. This exhibition later became significant as the last banned exhibition in Hungary, but also because it has its own history after the recontextualization of the original show. In December 1989 the exact reconstruction of the exhibition was extended by the round-table discussion of the former censors and censored, and the catalog of the exhibition (edited in 1984) has also been published. The reason of the next reconstruction, in 2001, was the accessibility of the secret police reports after the political changes. The opening of the files gave the possibility for a wider audience to see the original artworks, photos and video recordings taken at the opening, the report of the secret agent about the event, as well as documents from the 1989 reconstruction - all in the context of the 1984 "official country image." In 2003 a new context was raised, connected to a curatorial project, which showed socially engaged art projects from Eastern Europe to the western audience in London. Currently (2004) the exhibition is part of an international samizdat travelling exhibition, as an example for samizdat culture in fine arts. Recontextualization is therefore an important form of "performing the archive," it expresses that the meaning of the materials could change in different context. Turning back to Galántai´s method of "trans-function," recontextualization is the "trans-functioned act" which examines how a former act (exhibition, performance etc.) changes its meaning, when it changes its form (archival material, documentation) thus becoming part of another context.
8. György Galántai: "Medium Cultivator", 1975
9. György Galántai: "Diary" (book object), 1977
Although at that time Galántai was known more as a creative organizer than a practicing artist, Galántai always took part in the Artpool projects, and continued working in experimental art. He followed his trans-functions in sound-works, light-works, and trans-functioned "the act" in a series of conceptual performances with Klaniczay, that were based upon a performance of Galántai, Klaniczay, and the italian mail artist, Giuglielmo Achille Cavellini, under the title: Hommage to Vera Muhina (1980). The performance was the reinterpretation of Vera Muhina`s famous statue that stood on the top of the soviet pavilion at the Paris Expo of 1937, and later became the emblem of Mosfilm Studio and the symbol of the Soviet Union as a whole. Galántai and Klaniczay trans-functioned the statue, locating the performance on the Heroes´ Square, Budapest, the scene of political power under whatever government. Reinterpreting the figure of a man and the woman as the symbols of different classes to the smallest unit of a society, and replacing the hammer and sickle by a book with the reproduction of the original statue, they became a "statue-vivante," that expressed the idea of man as a "trans-functioned" statue, while Cavellini´s presence and his action of writing the names of the most famous artists of the history of art on their white dresses, was a "trans-functioned act" by recontextualizing the history. By way of continuation, the performance was followed by several others in different places between 1980-1984.
10. György Galántai and Anna Banana (on the right) at the opening of Galántai´s exhibition of his book objects, Fészek Klub, Budapest, Autumn 1978
When the state socialist regime in Hungary began to weaken, the Archive had been receiving support from the Soros Foundation for four years between 1985 and 1989. Further change came closer in 1987 when the introduction of laws concerning the operation of institutional foundations provided a framework for the rebirth of the Hungarian non-profit sector. Galántai and Klaniczay saw an opportunity within these legal changes to establish Artpool legally for the first time as a non-profit institution, which they were able to negotiate with Budapest Municipal Council and open to the public. The Artpool Foundation was thus born in 1990 after ten years of "illegal" existence and was followed in 1992 by the opening of a public institution named Artpool Art Research Center in the centre of Budapest, the only institution in Hungary where the documents of progressive international and hungarian art of the past 30 years can be researched.
Working with the help of volunteers from university students and researchers, Artpool´s main agenda is the research and theoretical analysis of the changes and results appearing in the recent trends of Hungarian and international art, focusing its activities on the various new media, as well as on the relations between society and art, or between art and everyday life.
One of the main activities of Artpool are the practical projects. Artpool has organized about 300 exhibitions, lectures and other art events which relate to the general topic of the current year at the Research Center. In the "Year of Introduction" in 1992 the programs contained the conceptual background of some lesser-known art forms that Artpool supported and practiced for years, like stamp images on computer, slide as medium of art, architectural visions, fax and electrographics. Between 1993 and1996 Artpool has organized thematic projects, which lasted for a year, on the most important movements of international contemporary art, like fluxus, performance and installation. These projects raised the question of documentation: how to process the so called time-based and intermedia art which dominate in contemporary art, and how to prepare the documents for future research. The beginning of the projects were always to create a historical context of the current problem by preparational research in the collections of Artpool: Fluxus, performance, sound poetry, visual poetry, artists´ bookwork, mail art, artists´ stamps, artists` postcards, artists` periodicals, copy art, computer art, video art, public (socially engaged) art and the Hungarian samizdat art of the ´70s and ´80s. Then by linking the past to the present context, the genres were discussed in the form of exhibitions, meetings, performances, artists` talks, videos, and slide shows the duration a year. At the end the results were published.
11. AL (Artpool Letter) 1-3, 1983
12. "Hungary Can Be Yours / International Hungary", Commonpress 51, call for participation, 1984
13. György Galántai: "Homage to Vera Muhina", performance by Giuglielmo Achille Cavellini and Júlia Klaniczay, Heroes´ Square, Budapest, 24. May,1980 (photo by György Hegedüs)
Judit Bodor
2004 Budapest
Here are the details of Artpool:
Artpool Art Research Center
Budapest VI., Liszt Ferenc tér 10., I.1.
Postal address: Budapest 23, Pf.52, H-1277, Hungary
Tel.: (+36 - 1) 268 0114
Fax: (+36 - 1) 321 08 33
e-mail: artpool@artpool.hu
internet: http://www.artpool.hu
Opening hours of the archive: Wednesday and Friday between 2-6 pm. (closed in July and August)
Artpool P60: temporarly open during exhibitions according to a schedul indicated on the invitation card.
16. Artpool Art Research Centre (Reading room), 2000
Peowiaków 12
20-007 Lublin
tel. (081) 536 03 19
performance@osp.art.pl