The first installment, featuring texts from Poland, can be found here. The second installment, featuring texts from Hungary, can be found here.

The four texts we are offering here for the first time in English translation belong in the context of Slovak action art of the 1960s and 1970s, a period when the major protagonists of the older generation of action artists from Slovakia—Alex Mlynárčik, Peter Bartoš, Július Koller, Vladimir Popovič, Jana Shejbalová-Želibská, Milan Adamčiak, and Robert Cyprich—were developing the core ideas of their practices. Glancing over the texts chosen for this project, it is interesting to note that all of them address, in one way or another, some form of designated environment—be it social, urban, or natural—and the formation of a community, however temporary, within such an environment.

Alex Mlynárčik’s “Manifesto Concerning ‘Interpretation’ in Fine Art” (1969) was published one year before the 1st Festival of Snow, which Mlynárčik organized together with Robert Cyprich, Miloš Urbásek, and Milan Adamčiak in 1970 in Slovakia’s High Tatra Mountains. The idea of the festival was to invite participants to use snow as a means to react to the work of international artists from the canon of twentieth-century art. This ephemeral art show resulting in three hundred installations in or with snow—which Mlynárčik explicitly and perhaps ironically likened to a sports event—not only rebuts the focus on stable objects associated with galleries and other spaces conventionally designed to show art, it also rejects, in the spirit of Marcel Duchamp, the fetishization of the artwork as a monadic, self-enclosed form. In this context opening up art to process and dialogue, Mlynárčik understands “interpretation” less as the extraction of meaning from an existing object or text than as an active process of tactile assimilation (in German, Nachvollzug) that can, incidentally, also serve as a model for the assimilation of international trends by artists from Eastern Europe. 

Snow also plays a role in Peter Bartoš’s “Physical and Optical Manifesto” (1969), though unlike Mlynárčik, Bartoš is more interested in the phenomenon of change, and the way in which its perception in nature correlates (or not) with the perception of change in art. Bartoš pits the accumulation of goods—in economic terms, the goal of accumulation is an increase in the overall quantity of capital—against what he calls concentration, a term he reserves for describing the successive aggregate states of a natural phenomenon such as snow, its transition from swirling in the air to landing on the ground, melting, etc. While “accumulation” is measured and, as such, an abstract value, “concentration” is experienced and, as such, tactile and embodied. The difference here could not be more dramatic; its historical roots again lie with Duchamp, whose experiments with different forms of embodied measuring were surely not lost on artists in Eastern Europe. The second part of Bartoš’s manifesto mentions several actions from the late 1960s that connect with these concerns, culminating in an announcement for The Behavior of Snow in the Air and on the Ground for 1969–70, a work that closely mirrors the issues and proposals outlined above. 

Robert Cyprich’s action Time of the Sun (1969), which he developed in collaboration with the Czech performance artist Eugen Brikcius, involves the drawing of lines forming a sundial by members of two groups in two cities in countries on either side of the Berlin Wall (Ružomberok in the ČSSR and London in England) at the same hour. The punch line of Cyprich’s text is remarkably similar to Bartoš’s: once again the lines drawn by the group members function not as abstract marks of measurement but rather as reflections of their lived experience of dialogue and exchange. Mahatma Gandhi, to whom Cyprich dedicates his project, is key to this idea. For Gandhi is known not only for his unfailing punctuality, but also for his (related) belief that time is a shared property of all people in the world, and that consequently we do not have the right to waste it. Cyprich’s decision to call his action “exercise” is important in this regard: much like Gandhi propagated the need to exercise one’s responsibility for shared time so as not to waste it, so too is Cyprich’s action—adapting Gandhi’s lesson for the divisive reality of the Cold War—rooted both in the (trivial) insight that time is something people on either side of the Iron Curtain have in common, and in the belief that it is necessary to embody (“exercise”) time through lived and shared experience. If that happens, the “synchronicity” enacted by the two groups divided by the Iron Curtain ceases to be an abstract idea and becomes a form of lived community across borders. 

The last translation, Ján Budaj’s “Three Sunny Days,” focuses on a three-day Happening that Budaj planned for 1980 in Bratislava’s Medical Garden. The event, which was to be part of a series of related projects combining art and street theater in the Slovak capital, ended up being cancelled by the authorities for unknown reasons. Though Budaj’s summary dates later than the previous texts in our project, it shares with them a clear focus on the environment and the idea of building a diverse community through a galvanizing event. The environment, it must be added, figures in Budaj’s text in a double sense, both as the urban environment of Bratislava and as the participation of ecologists who would enlighten the public about ecological issues not, or only insufficiently, covered by the state media. One particularly important and easily overlooked aspect of Budaj’s description is his mentioning the administrative trickery required to receive the permits necessary to perform in the streets of Bratislava, and the way in which this institutional work ended up shaping the project until it became “an event that could be realized and still remain ‘ours.’” Here the environment that serves as the operational focus of Budaj’s project is, in effect and by necessity, expanded to include not only the public in the street but also the (city) bureaucracy, hinting at the need to conceive the artist’s work as organizer as broadly as possible. 

With special thanks to the authors and members of their family who graciously conceded the rights for the first English language publication of the four texts here, including Alex Mlynárčik and Zuzana Bartošová. We also thank Mira Keratová for her generous advisement and assistance throughout, translator Zuzana Flaskova, and the Foundation for Contemporary Slovak Fine Art, Bratislava. Produced by Meghan Forbes, C-MAP Fellow for Central and Eastern European Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, with early assistance from the previous fellow, Ksenia Nouril. – post editorial team

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The first installment, featuring texts from Poland, can be found here. The third installment, featuring texts from Slovakia, can be found here.

INTRODUCTION

Miklós Erdély (1928–1986), who was active in a broad variety of media and roles, was the most influential yet also the most enigmatic figure among the members of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde. Trained (and practicing) as an architect, he understood his far-flung activities as a way of putting to the test, in a continuous process, all available definitions of art. After the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, contemporary art could no longer fully ground itself in either the heroic belief in progress displayed by members of the Hungarian avant-garde—whom Erdély admired—or the transcendent and universalist categories of its conservative detractors. [On the attitude of Erdély and his circle to the Hungarian avantgarde of the 1920s and 30s, and the transformation of that attitude in the wake of the repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, see Lóránd Hegyi, “The Total Art Work Between Dadaistic Legacy and History”, in: Gedächtnisräume. Hommage für Miklós Erdély. Filme. Installationen. Performances. Vorträge (Berlin: Künstlerhaus Bethanien, 1993), p. 19.] For him, the only sustainable way of grounding art and justifying the artist’s existence is through the persistent questioning of its most basic premises, irrespective of canon and dogma—and from many different points of view (including scientific, para-scientific, aesthetic, philosophical, and literary). As he wrote in his famous article “Art an Empty Sign”: “If the artist is engaged in a variety of genres and styles, he may well provoke the description of inprincipled [sic!] time-server whereas in actual fact he is questioning the very core of art. [. . .] Regardless of moral pressure [. . .] we must formulate for ourselves what we think of art, based on our experience and available information.” [Miklós Erdély, “Art as Empty Sign,” in Gedächtnisräume. Hommage für Miklós Erdély. Filme. Installationen. Performances. Vorträge (Berlin: Künstlerhaus Bethanien, 1992), 39–40.]

The texts by Erdély published here for the first time in English translation are committed to precisely such an effort to give account of what the artist “thinks of art.” In the first, “What is Avantgardism? Can we consider it an avantgarde act that Miklós Erdély, György Jovánovics and János Major exhibited a coat?”—referring to a simple coat that Erdély, Jovánovics, and Major exhibited in 1973—the artist discusses modernism’s problematic attachment to permanent formal innovation and the restrictions this places on those who follow the avant-garde’s original practitioners: condemned to repeating their moves, the former find themselves (as Peter Bürger would also find) in a position of inescapable inauthenticity and unoriginality. The only way out of this impasse, according to Erdély, is through either the readymade (Marcel Duchamp, Claes Oldenburg) or art as idea (Joseph Kosuth), and yet it is clear that the innovative potentials of these procedures reached dead ends long ago. All there is left to do, then, is to declare that not only is nothing in the exhibition of their coat new, but also that not even the fact that there is nothing new is not new. Such conceptual “deadening” of the readymade describes the dilemma in which Erdély found himself—between modernism, on the one hand, and neo-avant-gardism, on the other—a dilemma that he has addressed in his work many times over. 

If “What is Avantgardism?” functions as an auto-critique of the (neo-)avant-garde, the contradiction between repetition (copy) and identity was always at the core of Erdély’s concerns (note the Theses on the Theory of Repetition from 1972–73, for example). In his famous indigo drawings, produced with the help of rolled-up carbon paper (“indigo” in Hungarian), Erdély, in 1978, found an almost alchemistic solution to the problem by combining an original drawing and its copy on the same sheet of paper. Meanwhile, the installation In Memory of the Council of Chalcedon (1980) at Bercsényi College (Budapest), to which the second text (“Lecture on the Exhibition”) relates, extended this experiment in a direction that opens the readymade to the investigation of the problem of identity. For the major theme of In Memory of the Council of Chalcedon is the relationship between matter and meaning, between materialism and deism (the Council of Chalcedon affirmed Christ’s double nature). In “Lecture on the Exhibition,” which the artist read from within the installation, Erdély gives a vivid account of the way in which an installation like his may (in a manner reminiscent of Joseph Beuys and far exceeding the neutrality and expressive evisceration of the Duchampian readymade) symbolically connect an artist’s biography to a broad range of seemingly random materials or objects. And while this “symbolic” approach permits the synthetic expression of experience across these materials or objects, their expressiveness is narrowly circumscribed. For as the artist writes at the end of “Lecture on the Exhibition,” creation more often than not is the result of chance, and hence the opposite of intentional, “intelligent” design.

The problem of repetition and identity found another outlet in Erdély’s interest in the phenomenon of the Möbius strip, a one-sided surface formed by holding one end of a rectangle fixed, twisting the opposite end through 180 degrees, and then connecting it to the first end. By 1972 Erdély had already produced his Möbius Projection at Balatonboglár Chapel, showing heads of state shaking hands and, in an endless procession, changing places. The text “Time Möbius,” on the other hand, can be read as a commentary on Erdély’s work Journey in Time (1976), a photo series consisting of montaged images that show the artist in the same diegetic space as certain characters from his past, including himself as a child. Like a Möbius strip, Journey in Time collapses the chronological properties we associate with linear time. In the numbered theses that make up “Time-Möbius”—whose theme (the care of Self) and form are reminiscent of East Asian poetry—Erdély uses such “warping” of time to elaborate once more on the problem of identity and its formation, arguing that in order to become ourselves, instead of “progressing” through time, we must “turn back” and act as a cause upon ourselves in the same way in which the artist “visits” his forebears in Journey in Time. In this way, Erdély returns to his ardent critique of the (Western) belief in linear progress and in pedagogy rooted in that belief, arguing instead that true freedom consists in the kind of “twofold determination in time” familiar to everyone through dreams. 

In 1975–76 Erdély designed a series of “creative exercises” that, in 1978, led to the formation of the group known as Indigo (Interdiszciplináris Gondolkodás, Hungarian for “Interdisciplinary Thought”). An experimental teaching studio, Indigo was inspired by Eastern philosophical traditions and many other pedagogical and artistic sources. As the 1982 interview with Zoltán Sebök published below shows, the ideas behind Indigo also owe something to the Möbius strip: Erdély’s ambition to find a creative function or impulse that lies beyond “normal” creativity (“Thus, we wanted to do something that humans had been incapable of before”) clearly lies beyond the pale of traditional pedagogy with its emphasis on the transfer of knowledge from teacher to student, and its belief in a child’s progressive formation over time. Questioning these values—values that underpin the history of Western art as much as its philosophy—was one of Miklós Erdély’s most persistent concerns.

I would like to extend my warmest thanks to Annamária Szöke, Budapest, for her invaluable assistance in the selection and translation of the texts published here for the first time in English. – Sven Spieker

With special thanks to the Miklós Erdély Foundation who graciously conceded the rights for the first English language publication of the four texts here by Miklós Erdély, Annamária Szőke for her curatorial assistance in putting this source content together, members of the Erdély family, György, Daniel, András and Simon Erdély, translators John Batki and Adele Eisenstein, as well as Katalin Orbán, Ksenia Nouril, and Meghan Forbes. Produced by Ksenia Nouril, former C-MAP Fellow for Central and Eastern European Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. – post editorial team

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The second installment, featuring texts from Hungary, can be found here. The third installment, featuring texts from Slovakia, can be found here.

INTRODUCTION

In this project I present, in three installments, previously untranslated texts by contemporary artists from the former Eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia). More specifically, the publication is part of a larger plan to edit, in book form, annotated translations of key texts by Conceptual artists from the region. Such a resource is not only a crucial step in the ongoing recalibration of Conceptual art as a diverse, internationally oriented phenomenon with a global reach, it will also demonstrate that Conceptual art from Eastern Europe, far from being a decorative outgrowth of its US or Western European equivalent, actively critiqued some of the key positions associated with Western Conceptualism from the beginning—and from a viewpoint that was infused with, among other things, the specific experience of life behind the Iron Curtain.

The embrace of Conceptualism by unofficial artists from Eastern Europe is generally viewed as part of their effort to overcome international isolation. Deprived of an audience and of institutional outlets for showing their work, unofficial artists embraced “idea art” as a way to loosen the state’s stranglehold on the exhibition and circulation of art. Importantly, and contrary to current trends in corporate globalization, this did not translate into the erasure of difference or into political indifference. In fact, all three texts, offered here in translation for the first time, can be read as emphatic pleas for difference and as impassioned rejections of ideological dogma. 

Jarosław Kozłowski, Ewa Partum, and Zbigniew Gostomski, the artists chosen for the first installment of this series, are all affiliated with Conceptual tendencies in Poland. In Jarosław Kozłowski’s “A Raven Will Not Pick a Raven’s Eye, Etc.” (1976), the author questions the possibility of using inductive logic to produce general descriptions of the world. Kozłowski argues that inductive reasoning can only prove something to be correct by excluding whatever may contradict such proof. Writing in an analytical style we associate with the English language rather than with Polish—a style that Kozłowski adopts as if it were a readymade—he extends common-sense skepticism to art: can we define “artistic facts,” using the same inductive method, as always context dependent in the way that some adepts of Conceptual art in the West have done? Skeptical in this regard, Kolzłowski demonstrates that we cannot, since plenty of examples can be found of facts that, while they are indeed context dependent, are not considered art. Hence, we cannot reliably argue that all art is context dependent. Kozłowski writes in the name of what I want to call a radical ontology of possibility whereby what exists does so only by dint of what could be, creating a situation in which the only thing whose existence can be established beyond a doubt is possibility itself: “(1) It is possible that art is context dependent.” / (2) “It is possible that art isn’t context dependent.” 

The same might be said of Ewa Partum, who has devoted her career to thinking about the inclusion of women in social and artistic life as a possibility. Partum’s Address Gallery (Galeria adres, 1972–77), housed in a tiny space under a staircase at the Łódź headquarters of Association of Polish Plastic Artists was set up to exhibit Conceptual art and documents related to mail art that were, as such, manifestly beyond the scopes of the official galleries or museums. Much like Kozłowski, Partum carved an autonomous niche out of the ideologically marked space that surrounded her, creating her own context. In her startling (and, in the context of Eastern Europe, unique) public installation The Legality of Space (Legalność przestrzeni) (1971), she placed an array of real and fictitious public signs (such as CONSUMPTION IS FORBIDDEN) on Liberty Square (Plac Wolności) in the central Polish city of Łódź, together with a statement that, on the wall of an adjacent building, is being published in English for the first time here. Like the inductive logic Kozłowski questions in “A Raven Will Not Pick a Raven’s Eye, Etc.,” the signage Partum exhibited as part of The Legality of Space questions any universal logic or system of signification. By recontextualizing the signs and exhibiting them in a public square, Partum creates her own, semantically empty context (pure possibility) that is, as such, freed from any object: “THIS SITUATION SERVES ONLY TO PRESERVE FREE SPACE, WHICH SHOULD NOT BE FILLED BY ANY FORM OF AN EXPERIENCE.”

Partum’s words could serve as a motto for Zbigniew Gostomski’s influential project It Began in Wrocław (1970), which he conceived for the art symposium Wrocław ’70. Gostomski suggests the progressive distribution of a pair of identical elements (●/) across an urban plane that remains as indifferent to their existence as they remain to the existence of the (actual) city. Like Partum, Gostomski adheres firmly to the tenets of artistic autonomy, aiming to carve out a space free from signification. Perhaps the biggest difference between It Began in Wrocław and Partum’s insertion of street signs into the urban landscape, however, is the fact that Partum’s “semiotic turn” (unlike Gostomski, she uses home-made symbols with meanings attached to them) appeals as much to the abstraction of the law as to an actual audience, implying an element of social interaction that is missing from Gostomski’s vision of a fully autonomous, radically nonsocial realm of non-signification. 

With special thanks to Zbigniew Gostomski, Jarosław Kozłowski, Ewa Partum as well as Foksal Gallery, Karolina Majewska-Güde, Lech Stangret, Marcin Wawrzyńczak, and Joshua Young. Produced by Ksenia Nouril, C-MAP Fellow for Central and Eastern European Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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