Self-financed exhibition by György Jovánovics and István Nádler

Author: Dóra Hegyi - Zsuzsa László
Keywords: abstract art, conceptual art, environment / installation, experimental sculpture, irony, painting, site-specificity

Date: 15 March 1970

Participants: György Jovánovics (1939),  István Nádler (1938)

Opening action with János Frank (1925 – 2004)

Location: Adolf Fényes Hall, Budapest

The Adolf Fényes Hall was a gallery offered for the presentation of tendencies that were not supported but tolerated by the official cultural politics. In addition to István Nádler’s geometric paintings, György Jovánovics exhibited a huge plaster sculpture, whose shape was repeating to the ground plan of the gallery. The exhibition was opened by a fictive radio program that – after the most important international news of the day – reported on the exhibition itself. After the exhibition, Jovánovics transported the work to Miklós Erdély’s garden, where the sculpture became the setting for a number of spontaneous events, some of which were documented in photographs. Later Jovánovics called this work, more precisely the opening “the best work of my life” in a lecture reconstructing the event held in Artpool Art Research Center. In the 1980s it also inspired János Sugár (1958) to make an exhibition and shoot a film in the same location.

Documents:

Tapescript of the opening action (1970)

Invitation leaflet for György Jovánovics’s public lecture at Artpool P60, “The Best Work of My Life” (1999)

János Sugár on Adolf Fényes Hall, his film Persian Walk, and his exhibition “Exhibition Scenery” (1999)

Video of György Jovánovics’ lecture at Artpool (1999)

The First Open Studio

Author: Daniel Grúň
Keywords: artist as curator, collective practices, documentary film, environment / installation, participatory practices, private venue, processuality, semi-public event, site-specificity

Otvorený ateliér / The First Open Studio, 16 mm film transferred onto DVD, 7:04 min. (courtesy Marian Mudroch, Bratislava)

Date: 19 November 1970

Participants and organizers: Milan Adamčiak (b. 1946), Peter Bartoš (b. 1938), Václav Cigler (b. 1929), Róbert Cyprich (b. 1951-1996), Milan Dobeš (b. 1929), Igor Gazdík (b. 1943), Viliam Jakubík (b. 1945), Július Koller (b. 1939-2007), Vladimír Kordoš (b. 1945), Ivan Kříž-Vyrubiš (b. 1941), Otis Laubert (b. 1946), Juraj Meliš (b. 1942), Alex Mlynárčik (b. 1934), Marián Mudroch (b. 1945), Jana Shejbalová-Želibská (b. 1941), Rudolf Sikora (b. 1946), Ivan Štěpán (b. 1937), Dezider Tóth (b. 1947), Miloš Urbásek (b. 1932)

Location: Private house of Rudolf Sikora, Tehelná 32, Bratislava, Czechoslovakia

The collective exhibition ”1st Open Studio,” opened on 19 November, 1970, in Rudolf Sikora’s house—with an adjoining courtyard and garden—on Tehelná Street 32 in Bratislava. It was the first organized protest (in the form of an exhibiton) against the intervention of power over the visual arts, following the events of 1968. The nineteen participants, who gathered there at the invitation Rudolf Sikora, one of the young, emerging artists, shaped the unofficial art scene in the following years. Through the ”1st Open Studio” the artists declared their adherence to the progressive, Slovak art scene in the 1960s. In their work they developed experimental creativity, playfulness, a sensitivity to civilistic poetics of the painting, the art of object and the environment. On the threshold of the period of normalization, in the stifling atmosphere of a closed society and ongoing political purges, the artists’ studios became, not only a place to confront individual artistic practices, but also a space for participation in creative, collective experiences.

(Eugénia Sikorová, ”The Coming of a Generation,” in 1. Otvorený ateliér. Sorosovo centrum súčasného umenia (Bratislava, 2000), 31.

The Legality of Space – plein air installation by Ewa Partum

Author: Ewa Malgorzata Tatar
Keywords: conceptual art, environment / installation, performance, site-specificity, urban space

Date: 21–23 April 1971

Participant: Ewa Partum

Organizers: Ewa Partum and BWA Gallery, Łódź[1]

Location: Freedom Square (plac Wolności), Łódź

The installation appeared in an open space between two houses near Freedom Square in the center of Łódź. Ewa Partum exhibited numerous boards with prohibitions: actual traffic signs and others, created by the artist, bare absurd messages—for example, “Prohibiting prohibited” or “Permitting prohibited.” For the opening, invitations were sent out. Since the road-signs had been borrowed officially from the Transportation Department of the city, they were guarded by the police, and some of the passersby took it as an exhibition of traffic signs. During the opening, Partum drove around the square and from the car with a megaphone shouted the captions placed on the tables. The artist published a catalog of the performence in 150 copies. Her installation was not granted any attention from the official Polish art world. The local media reacted with curiosity and compared Partum to Dalí, the Spanish Surrealist, because her work was equally “crazy.”

Direct Week

Author: Dóra Hegyi - Zsuzsa László
Keywords: artist as curator, artist run space, avant-garde, collaboration, conceptual art, curatorial concept, environment / installation, festival, irony, metaphors of repression, performative practices, political reflection, semi-public event, site-specificity

Date: 6 – 9 July 1972

Organisers: Gyula Pauer (1941), Tamás Szentjóby (1944)

Participants: László Beke, Miklós Erdély, Gyula Gulyás, Miklós Haraszti, László Haris, Ágnes Háy, Tamás Hencze, Péter Lajtai, Péter Legéndy, József Molnár V., Gyula Pauer, Margit Rajczi, Tamás Szentjóby, Endre Tót

Location: Chapel Studio of György Galántai, Balatonboglár

Direct Week was an exhibition and event series that incorporated works and actions replying to Pauer’s and Szentjóby’s call, as well as lectures and screenings that were originally in the program of the “Avantgarde Festival” planned in April in a Budapest Club, but banned shortly before its scheduled date.

Documents:

Gyula Pauer, Tamás Szentjóby: Call for “Direct Week” (1972)

Gyula Pauer: II. Pseudo Manifesto (Advertisement) (1972)

Tamás Szentjóby:  Exclusion exercise – Punishement-Preventive Autotheraphy (1969-72)

Source: Törvénytelen avantgárd. Galántai György balatonboglári kápolnaműterme 1970–1973 [Illegal Avant-garde, the Balatonboglár Chapel Studio of György Galántai 1970–1973], eds. Júlia Klaniczay and Edit Sasvári  (Artpool–Balassi, Budapest, 2003):  126-135.

On the website of Artpool Art Research Center

Today You Open the Exhibition – responsibility-taking action

Author: Dóra Hegyi - Zsuzsa László
Keywords: artist run space, censorship, collaboration, conceptual art, didactic exhibition, irony, metaphors of repression, performative practices, semi-public event, site-specificity, unofficial event

Date: 28 July 1972

Participants: György Galántai (1941), István Haraszty (1934)

Location: Chapel Studio of György Galántai, Balatonboglár

The action took place during the exhibition of the Pécs Workshop (Ferenc Ficzek, Károly Halász, Károly Kismányoki, Ferenc Lantos, Sándor Pinczehelyi, Kálmán Szíjártó, Katalin Nádor) and István Haraszty’s kinetic sculptures.

Documents:

István Harasztÿ – interview (1998)

György Galántai – manuscript (1998)

Source: Törvénytelen avantgárd. Galántai György balatonboglári kápolnaműterme 1970–1973 [Illegal Avant-garde, the Balatonboglár Chapel Studio of György Galántai 1970–1973], eds. Júlia Klaniczay and Edit Sasvári  (Artpool–Balassi, Budapest, 2003): 138.

László Beke, Miklós Erdély, György Jovánovics, Péter Legéndy, János Major, Gyula Pauer, and Tamás Szentjóby – exhibition and actions

Author: Dóra Hegyi - Zsuzsa László
Keywords: artist run space, avant-garde, collaboration, conceptual art, environment / installation, irony, non-conformist art, semi-public event, site-specificity

Date: 24 June 1973

Participants: László Beke (1944), Miklós Erdély (1928-1986), György Jovánovics(1939), Péter Legéndy (1948), János Major (1936-2008), Gyula Pauer (1941), Tamás Szentjóby (1944)

Location: Chapel Studio of György Galántai, Balatonboglár

This exhibition – presented two months before the Chapel Studio was occupied and closed by the police – did not have any title and was completed spontaneously with works and actions during two weeks. The works exhibited were used as props for theatrical performances in the next few weeks.

Documents:

Miklós Erdély: What is avantgardism? (1973)

Tamás St. Auby – interview (1998)

György Jovánovics – interview (1998)

Source: Törvénytelen avantgárd. Galántai György balatonboglári kápolnaműterme 1970–1973 [Illegal Avant-garde, the Balatonboglár Chapel Studio of György Galántai 1970–1973], eds. Júlia Klaniczay and Edit Sasvári  (Artpool–Balassi, Budapest, 2003): 150-5.

…Time I… and …Time II… – cosmological probes, futurological prognoses / discussion forums and conceptual interventions

Author: Daniel Grúň
Keywords: artist-publication, conceptual art, site-specificity

Date: June 1973

Participants: Ján Zavarský (b. 1948), Rudolf Sikora (b. 1946), Miloš Laky (1948–1975), Július Koller (b. 1939), Stano Filko (b. 1937) with Peter Bartoš (b. 1938), Michal Kern (1938–1994), Tomáš Štrauss (1931–2013)

Location: Moravský Kras / Moravian Karst and Studio of Rudolf Sikora, Bratislava, Czechoslovakia

Cosmological visions, meditations on the future of civilization, the implementation of information from the natural sciences, and inquiries into cosmic communications were of great importance for Bratislava-based conceptual artists. Using the medium of offset print, the artists also utilized visual signs, photography, diagrams, scientific ideas, codes, and numerals. In the beginning of 1970s, Rudolf Sikora became acquainted with a samizdat translation titled Limits to Growth, which was edited by Dennis L. Meadows. It was the first publication of its kind to highlight the effects of rapid population growth and limited natural resources. It was Sikora who brought together artists and theoreticians, organized closed discussion forums, and took responsibility for printing large posters of their collective that was composed as a somewhat pseudoscientific cosmological probe and future prognoses. The joint project was spurred by the upcoming congress of speleologists in Brno, and composed as a collection of conceptual interventions in the caves of Moravian Karst.

Rusovce – cross generation friendly meeting by lake (another of the many attempts to be invisible)

Author: Daniel Grúň
Keywords: collective practices, educational event, ephemaral works, performance for photo camera, photography, processuality, semi-public event, site-specificity

Date: 4-7 August 1978

Participants and organizers: Peter Bartoš (b. 1938), Ľubomír Ďurček (b. 1948), Stano Filko (b. 1937), Vladimír Havrilla (b. 1943), Juraj Mihálik (b. ), Ladislav Snopko (b. 1949)

Location: Rusovce, Bratislava, Czechoslovakia

By a lake in Bratislava, participants created mini events and ephemeral artworks out of materials found at the location, including pebbles, stones, plastic, etc. The event was initiated by Ľubomír Ďurček, a conceptual artist, performer, filmmaker, and author of experimental texts and books. The entire event was documented in a series of black-and-white photographs taken by participants.

In comments made Ďurček about the event, he points said that situations created did not necessarily correspond to reality.

Conceptual Games

Author: Dovile Tumpytė
Keywords: collective practices, environment / installation, experimental sculpture, performative practices, private venue, site-specificity

Date: Autumn 1978

Participants: Kazimiera (Kazė) Zimblytė (1933 – 1999), Gediminas Karalius (1942), Petras Mazūras (1949), and Vladas Vildžiūnas (1932)

Organizers: Vladas Vildžiūnas and Marija Ladigaitė (1931)

Location: Vladas Vildžiūnas and Marija Ladigaitė’s studio and the Jeruzalė sculpture garden, Vilnius

In the late 1970s, the house and the studio of the graphic artist Marija Ladigaitė and the sculptor Vladas Vildžiūnas, as well as the adjacent sculpture garden they had founded in the Vilnius suburb of Jeruzalė (Lithuanian for “Jerusalem”), were popular meeting spots for art and culture personalities, who enjoyed the experimental atmosphere of the place. Ladigaitė and Vildžiūnas hosted informal get-togethers and discussions, during which the guests shared the latest news about the trends in Western modern art and new sculpture-casting technologies, exchanged books, and discussed the exhibitions on display in the studio. The core of the Jeruzalė garden consisted of young sculptors who were interested in avant-garde art trends and flocked around the Vildžiūnas couple; on various occasions, representatives of other spheres of culture visited as well. Several actions, known to their participants and viewers as “Conceptual Games,” were organized in the Jeruzalė garden in 1978. During one event, the textile artist Kazimiera (Kazė) Zimblytė and the sculptors Gediminas Karalius, Petras Mazūras, and Vildžiūnas created site-specific installations and presented them to their friends. “Kazė wrapped the old garden in strips of rice paper, Mazūras inflated a giant intestine, Karalius welded an impromptu constructivist figure, while Vladas weaved rope webs in the crotches of the trees,” recalls Ladigaitė.[1] The processes that took place in the Jeruzalė sculpture garden provided an impetus for the emergence of new artistic forms and ideas—primarily in sculpture—but also in other art fields.

U.F.O. Gallery – Ganek Gallery

Author: Daniel Grúň
Keywords: absurdity, artist as curator, conceptual art, institutional critique, site-specificity

Date: 1980–83

Participants and organizers: Július Koller (b. 1939), Igor Gazdík (b. 1943), Peter Meluzin, Pavol Breier (b. 1953), Milan Adamčiak (b. 1946), Rudolf Sikora (b. 1946), Dezider Tóth (b. 1947), Juraj Meliš (b. 1942)

Location: In the residential apartments of Július Koller, Milan Adamčiak, and Igor Gazdík, Bratislava-Dúbravka, Czechoslovakia

The fictional gallery project U.F.O. Gallery—Gallery Ganek was initiated by Július Koller in 1971. It functioned as a visual and physical symbol of the connection between the Earth and the cosmos, and acted as medium to communicate with unknown civilizations. The gallery’s high location at Malý Ganek—an almost three-hundred-meter mountain peak with a  northwest wall that attracted climbers—symbolized the encounter between the earthly and the cosmic. Participants collectively drafted the statute for the project and discussed potential exhibitions. In 1980, Koller declared Gallery Ganek to be part of Universal-Cultural Futurological Operation (U.F.O.). An organizational and advisory committee came into being on September 18, 1981, and on March 24, 1982, the commission approved the program and statutory principles. Subsequently a text was produced—the constitution for the gallery which was named ”U.F.O. Gallery—Ganek Gallery, High Tatras (U.F.O.G.),” and signed by Koller, Igor Gazdík (commissioner), and commission members Milan Adamčiak, Pavol Breier, Peter Meluzin, and Rudolf Sikora. In the introduction of the U.F.O. Gallery statute, exhibition activities in the physical Ganek Gallery were ruled out; rather, it was a symbolic location used to communicate a variety of alternative forms of expressions (i.e., images, concepts, signals, etc.) with unknown civilizations on Earth and with the universe beyond. The rules of the gallery statute have a discursive quality. It was based on the assumption that the statute of a socialist institution reflects what the institution is about.

Čierne diery / Black Holes – situational drama

Author: Daniel Grúň
Keywords: collective practices, industrial venue, occupied venue, participatory practices, performative practices, site-specificity

Date: 1983–84

Location: Water treatment plant, Vrakuňa near Bratislava, Czechoslovakia

Participants and organizers: Peter Meluzin (b. 1947), Július Koller (1939-2007), Róbert Cyprich (1951-1996), Rudolf Sikora (b. 1946), Dušan Hanák (b. 1938), Radislav Matuštík (1929-2006)

In the early 1980s, Peter Meluzin found a number of different of locations in the urban socialist periphery for his situational actions and dramas. Venues included a gym, a water purification plant, and a bus stop. Meluzin was one of the founders of the Terén action group which was active between 1982–87. (Artprospekt P.O.P.: Ladislav Pagáč/Viktor Oravec/Milan Pagáč, Róbert Cyprich, Ľubomír Ďurček, Michal Kern, Július Koller, Vladimír Kordoš, Matej Krén, Radislav Matuštík, Peter Meluzin, Dezider Tóth, and Jana Želibská). As part of the Terén group, he staged several events between 1983–84 for a limited circle of Bratislava artists in found environments. He used locations such as the partially constructed concrete building that was part of a water treatment plant in the Bratislava suburb of Vrakuňa. By improving and perfecting original scripts for the play and adaptation of the events to the state of completion of this edifice, he created two situational dramas titled Black Holes (Čierne diery / Schwarzes Loch) and Sitting Bull. In the inhuman and desolate spaces of the building, Meluzin staged the drama for participants; the drama presented reflected people’s everyday lives. Participants were left feeling helpless, isolated, and controlled. Meluzin’s events were constructed through participation, often feeling like “out-of-town trips,” similar to events organized by the Moscow Collective Actions Group.

Document: Peter Meluzín: Comments on Black Holes

Concrete-sculpture symposium

Author: Dovile Tumpytė
Keywords: abstract art, experimental sculpture, site-specificity, symposium

Date: Autumn 1984–Spring 1985

Participants: Ksenija Jaroševaitė (1953), Kęstutis Musteikis (1956), Naglis Nasvytis (1957), Mindaugas Navakas (1952), Vladas Urbanavičius (1951), Mindaugas Šnipas (1960) (sculptors), and Vytautas Jakubauskas (1954) (exposition designer).

Initiator: Mindaugas Navakas

Organizers: LSSR (Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic) Artists’ Union’s young sculptors section and the Construction Parts Factory

Location: Grounds of the Construction Parts Factory, between the Vilnius-Trakai highway and the railway.

Organized on the outskirts of Vilnius, the concrete-sculpture symposium was initiated by the young sculptor Mindaugas Navakas, who was concerned with sculpture’s relationship with the environment and sought to overcome the closed nature of its form. The young members of the sculptors section of the LSSR Artists’ Union and the architect Vytautas Jakubauskas supported his initiative. Cheap industrial material—concrete—was used to create the sculptures. The artists built the sculptures in situ, taking into account the specifics of the place—the brutal industrial environment—which they saw as an advantage and a challenge for their work. Navakas’s innovative approach later influenced the formation of the notion of the “expanded field of sculpture” in Lithuania.

Deposition by Josip Vaništa

Author: Ivana Bago
Keywords: conceptual art, outdoor event, painting, site-specificity

Date: 1986

Concept by: Josip Vaništa

Participation: Marijan Jevšovar, Radoslav Putar, Josip Vaništa

During the 1960s, Josip Vaništa created a series of paintings in which a thick, horizontal, monochrome line was set against a monochrome background. The paintings were part of his experiments towards formal and narrative reduction, which characterized his individual work, as well as the work of the Zagreb-based Gorgona group (1959-66) of which he was a founding member. ¹ Twenty-two years after the group’s regular activities ended, joined by two other Gorgona members, Vaništa performed Deposition, an action in which his 1968 painting, Black Line on Silver Background, was left in the snowy forest landscape near Zagreb. Performed during the era of the “return of painting” in the 1980s, Vaništa’s action seemed to rather return painting to its end. In fact, by staging a crossing between the black line horizontally cutting through the glimmering, silver background of the canvas, and the upright, elongated bodies of the black tree trunks interrupting the white, glimmering purity of the snow, Deposition was a pronouncement of a whole series of deaths. The death, not merely of art, but consequently also that of nature, or rather, the vanishing of the line that had served to separate, and thus keep them alive. Another cross was planted by the 1968-1986 inversion, marking the birth and the death of Vaništa’s painting, and commemorating the very death of time, or a special kind of time, which, in the 1960s, was still able to dream about its artistic and political future, while in 1980s it was merely able to acknowledge its futile deposits. The 1980s were the time when Vaništa marked the death of Gorgona, through his Postgorgona samizdats, nostalgic documents of the history and myth of the group and a forever lost spiritual community. ² Deposition was, above all, a peculiar kind of exhibition of all these deaths, meticulously arranging its ghosts as the objects to be displayed for a yet unknown audience of the snowy forest. It is this act of exhibiting which nonetheless keeps a certain anticipatory time alive, and with it, the persistence of the Gorgonic engineering of the impossible, like in Đuro Seder’s “Collective work” exhibition scenarios, with which this chronology began.

Guide for the chronology (Ivana Bago: Something to think about: values and valeurs of visibility in Zagreb from 1961 to 1986)

On Kalektarnaya – exhibition

Author: "pARTisan"/ Olga Kopenkina
Keywords: censorship, environment / installation, irony, non-conformist art, political reflection, site-specificity

Date: September–November 1987

Participants: Aliaksej Zhdanau, Todar Kopsha, Artur Klinau, Andrej Pliasanau, Vital Razhkou

Organizer: Forma, the alternative artists collective

Location: Minskgramadzanproject Institute, Kalektarnaya street, Minsk

This exhibition introduced a non-conformist approach to space organization. It stirred up an official criticism, which resulted in several attempts to close down the show. A telegram asking for support was sent to Raisa Gorbacheva (the wife of the head of the USSR government). It read: “Dear Mrs. Raisa Gorbacheva! The first exhibition of young painters was opened in Minsk but the authorities are trying to shut it down. Please, protect our cultural endeavors!”

Document: Nataliya TATUR: Exhibition on Kalektarnaya, 4—Fragments From the Book of Remembrance (2004)

Source: Volha Archipava. Belarusian Avant-garde of the 1980s. ‘pARTisan’s Collection’ series. Minsk 2012. http://partisanmag.by/

The Art Holiday. Narva-88 – seminar on non-official art

Author: "pARTisan"/ Olga Kopenkina
Keywords: collective practices, educational event, festival, international network, outdoor event, performance, site-specificity

Participants: Artists from Belarus, Russia, Georgia, Armenia, and Kyrgyzstan. Belarusian artists Andrej Bialou, Aliaksander Zabauchyk, Ihar Kashkurevich, Yauhen Kirylau, Artur Klinau, Uladzimir Lapo, Valer Martynchyk, Viktar Piatrou, Vital Razhkou, Ludmila Rusava, and  Dzmitry Yarmilau.

Organizer: Department of Culture of Narva Gorispolkom (the city’s Executive Committee) of Estonian SSR, and curator Ninel Ziterava

Location: Narva, Estonia

The USSR seminar on non-official art that took place in in Narva, Estonia, was titled “The Art Holiday. Narva-88,” and was organized by the Department of Culture of Narva Gorispolkom (the city’s Executive Committee) of Estonian SSR and curator Ninel Ziterava. Participants included artists from Belarus, Russia, Georgia, Armenia, and Kyrgyzstan. The seminar included individual performances by artists, spontaneous collaborations between artists to make outdoor installations, site-specific sculptures, and other forms of visual art. It was first time that Belarusian avant-garde artists had participated in a large art festival in the Soviet Union—this was made possible thanks to Perestroika, a political movement for reformation. During the festival, Belarusian artists who usually felt isolated from those artists working in other Soviet countries, were able to introduce their artwork to their peers from other parts of the USSR, to make connections, and to become part of the larger network of non-official, avant-garde artists. Some fruitful, international collaborations between artists formed at this historic festival stayed viable for many years after.

Source: http://partisanmag.by/