Texts

Tamás Szentjóby: Exclusion exercise – Punishment-preventive autotherapy (1969-72)

Direct Week

I. You can ask anything from the self-sentenced
and
II. You can ask the following:
– Are all  life-schemes that exclude even one other
human being immoral?
– Can one form a community with another person
without being completely free oneself?
– Is culture’s real purpose to make one conscious of
the fact that one’s fate is identical to history?
– Is it the most important thing to discover and realise what is needed in life?
– Those who bear the unbearable, do they know nothing about life? – Know nothing about that interdependence that is contained in life: – Can he bear himself without us, is everything hopeless without us?
– Can the blockade of the present be broken only by
a new type of behaviour?
– Is the realisation of the future in the present an
acceleration of our lives?
– Because historical time applies to the totality and
not to the individual, would you try to live the facts
of the present and your future desolation simultaneously?
– Is this all to manifest difference and therefore there to activate a potentially different?
– Can the changeable also be unfinished? Is
the unfinished to be changed? Is unchange:
suffering? Is incompleteness: suffering?
– Do you hope that you can make us conscious of interdependence by demonstrating
that we are all at each other’s mercy?
– Is there punishment in your action?
– Is there action in your punishment?
– Is action a sin? Is punishment a sin?
– Is sin action?
– Is action punishment?
– What is a sin?
– Is sin that action that causes suffering?
– Is sin that action that causes no change?
– Is there anything at all that you can call an
action that would not produce a change, and
whose existence is not aimed at reducing suffering?
– Are you punishing yourself because by self-punishment taking the punishment of self-punishmen t  you release the punisher from
the punishment that is not action: that is sin?
– Do you feel particularly exposed because
you cannot see to whom you are talking?


Source:  Artpool Letter 5 (1983, Summer): 12.

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): 130.

On the website of Artpool Art Research Center