4
Beáta Hock
This contribution takes the Cold War as a conceptual frame for exploring transnational artistic exchanges between the 1950s and early 1990s. More particularly, the chapter outlines the transnational strategies of both counter-cultural artists and of official cultural diplomacy in socialist Hungary. A globally informed Cold War framework is capable of rectifing certain narrative conventions that became naturalized in the course of recent years as state socialism has been gradually historicized. A set of dominant topics and narrative conventions emerged during this process of historicization to chronicle and remember communist art and culture in socialist Eastern Europe. These topics include the political control over the practice and the institutions of cultural production, the veneration of dissident “unofficial” artists, and the denigration of “official” art marked by the style of socialist realism. Methodologically, the historiographies of socialist cultural production have tended to be nationally framed, even when individual countries are considered pars pro toto as parts of a bigger entity: the “region” or the “Eastern bloc”. This approach tends to consider socialist Eastern Europe as being isolated from parallel developments at other geographical locations, thus elevating its research object beyond comparison. This sort of treatment obscures the degree and ways in which Eastern Europe in this period was deeply entangled with the world around it. The truly international and intercontinental reach of cultural exchanges among the “friendly states” of the socialist world have been, until recently, underrated, if not altogether ignored, in favour of comparisons with the more dominant Euro-Atlantic cultural arena.
Three research agendas feed into this study: contributing to the recently emerging study field of Cold War cultures, reclaiming the unofficial art of socialist Eastern Europe, and engaging seriously with the so-called official, state-supported cultural production under socialist times. The subject area of the cultural Cold War is perhaps the most established among these agendas, and exploring the unofficial art of socialist Eastern Europe can now also look back at two or three decades of research work. Most recent of them all is the scholarly engagement with the so-called official, state-supported cultural production under socialist times. These broad topics have several connecting points and partially overlap; nevertheless, they seem to constitute distinct research areas and are relatively seldom “thought together” – this is what the present chapter sets out to do. Transcending the strict division between the “official” and “unofficial” in the cultural arena will have bearing on understanding individual national art worlds – in the present chapter, the Hungarian art scene – as imbricated fields rather than fields clearly divisible along specific politics.
My study investigates the dynamics and the shifting geographical orientation of international exchanges initiated by both cultural diplomacy and individual artists. I will pursue the former type of relations through taking the example of Műcsarnok (“Kunsthalle”), one of Budapest’s foremost venue to showcase current art while connections built between individual artists will be presented through the “world wide web” of Mail Art practice. As i1 am charting a chronological line from the 1950s to the beginning of the 1990s, i will reflect at every turn the variety of rationales – artistic, diplomatic, and political – at stake in these interactions.
1 Cold War Cultures and their Geopolitics
The cultural dimensions of the Cold War came relatively late to complement more-traditional areas of Cold War studies: diplomacy, military affairs, and economics. Authors exploring the cultural Cold War have acknowledged that “cold warriors” on both sides of the Iron Curtain deployed culture as a powerful instrument in both international relations and diplomacy. Like Cold War studies at large, the explorations into the cultural aspects of the geopolitical tensions perpetuated for a long while a perception of the Cold War as a bipolar rather than a multiplayer global conflict. This also meant that whereas cultural diplomacy and exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States (or certain Western European countries) have received considerable scholarly attention, relatively little work has been undertaken, until most recently, on other countries of the Eastern Bloc.2
Another facet of this incomplete picture is that the government-sponsored cultural production of state socialist Eastern Europe has also been neglected for a decade or two, following the political system change of 1989. Both in the public imagination and in academic discourses, a narrow set of narrative constructs has been used to account for the cultural politics of the socialist decades. The crudest formulations have viewed the artistic output of the pre-1989 period as well-designed manipulation by the communist propaganda and ideology, which incapacitated art through censorship structures and the isolation ensured by the Iron Curtain.
As a result of this context, the majority of studies and publications produced in the 1990s, right after the political changes, focused on recapitulating the events and actors of the unofficial or semiofficial cultural sphere. This cultural underground in state socialist societies was referred to by various names: “counter-culture”, “avant-garde”, “neo-avant-garde”, or operations “in a grey zone” became umbrella terms to signify artistic activity that did not submit to official party directives. Whereas socialist realism, the official style to which artists were required to conform, represented an idealized realistic art with an aesthetically dull visual language, the (neo-)avant-garde favoured formal experimentation and a non-representational abstract idiom. Since members of the counter-cultural scene turned away from authorized public activity and instead relied on a parallel set of communicational channels, they saw themselves as operating in a second, or parallel, public sphere, and this self-presentation was all too-readily accepted in research.
The strong post-1989 focus on the semiofficial cultural arena was a reaction to the fact that these activities had to go largely undocumented during state socialist times and were therefore missing from the existing cultural historiography of individual countries. However, this focus came with strong limitations. Only recently did curatorial and academic projects start to revisit the state-supported sphere of artistic life. As one of the first steps towards considering state-commissioned official culture and underground art within a shared historical-political domain, the exhibition 1971 – Párhuzamos különidők (1971 – Parallel nonsynchronism) juxtaposed artists and artworks from both contexts in an effort to reconstruct the complex relationship between state power and artistic practice in the thaw period under Nikita Khrushchev.3 Except for the one-year lens, my endeavour here is similar: “reading together” these two spheres of cultural life that have been contemplated as separate, if not mutually exclusive, for too long a time.
For this enquiry, i tapped material stored in the Artpool Art Research Center and in the institutional archives of the Műcsarnok, both located in Budapest. The holdings of the Műcsarnok store records on mainstream (as in state-administered) exhibitions and events organized by a governmental institution. The holdings of Artpool document the marginal practices of the artistic avant-garde in Hungary and, broader, in Eastern Europe and worldwide, thanks to the vital networking activity of many representatives of the avant-garde. It is important to keep in mind that i assign the adjectives mainstream and marginal to these two types of practices from the perspective of their visibility or accessibility for a general public during the socialist decades and not from a judgemental perspective concerning their status in art historical narratives today.
As i indicated above, the history of the neo-avant-garde has come to dominate the art historical canon of Eastern Europe’s recent art history, whereas official art under socialism has been generally regarded as uninteresting, politically tainted, and therefore unworthy of mention. I side with colleagues who do not share the opinion that whatever happened under the auspices of official cultural politics was altogether uninteresting;4 neither do i recoil at the idea of political themes infiltrating art practice. Both official and mainstream art under socialism – its products, institutions, and events – can also be regarded as a reservoir of valuable records for cultural and social history. And for better or worse, as we will witness, mainstream and marginal channels were becoming closer and closer towards the end of the period.
New economic and political dependencies were taking shape after World War II, introducing new directions for international exchanges in various walks of social life. This reorientation is relevant for at least two reasons: it reflected the emerging and starkly divided new post-war world order and, decades later, came to impact an art historical discourse that was growing increasingly critical of its own Western- and Euro-centred traditions. The explosion of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements in the Third World in the 1950s and 1960s meant that a host of decolonizing and newly independent states were forging political alliances and economic partnerships worldwide. While the two competing superpowers made conscious attempts to draw these countries into their own sphere of influence, non-aligned (or not yet so) Asian, African, and Latin American states used their strategic positions to maintain good relations with both competing political camps and, in the meanwhile, were able to select from what was on offer on the global economic, ideological, and cultural market. The term aid shopping illustrates this most important resource acquisition strategy of developing countries.5
While the Second World had a lot less to offer in terms of economic assistance than the developed capitalist West – with its foreign development aid or good quality products – the Soviet bloc fared relatively well on the ideological market thanks to the Soviet Union’s non-involvement in the overseas colonization of earlier centuries. Wealth, which the West often displayed as an indicator of the superiority of the capitalist system, was often considered by leaders from around the Third World as an indicator of inequality rather than freedom, the spoils of stealing and the colonial atrocities in the imperial past. The imperialism of the United States also appeared to many to be replacing European colonial powers as the repressor of movements for national liberation in the Third World.6
Culture was deployed as a diplomatic tool to initiate and keep up “harmless” relations across the blocs, especially when relations were to be built with not necessarily friendly states or when capacities to offer material assistance were lacking. For example, in the early 1970s, Egypt’s new president, Anwar Sadat (1970–1981), broke ties with the country’s long-time ally and aid giver, the Soviet Union, and expelled Soviet military from the country, pretty much interrupting political relations with other Eastern bloc countries as well. In such a situation, national cultural institutions and smaller cultural exchange agencies often remained the only and last field of contact between states, not so much in the hope of advantageous joint cultural enterprises but for the sake of maintaining a minimum of diplomatic ties.7 Moreover, artistic and diplomatic objectives overlapped within these endeavours and jointly defined the concrete geographies of cultural connections.
2 The Dynamics of Official Exchanges
The archival records of the Kunsthalle on exhibitions that Hungary organized or sent abroad reveal a variegated set of undertakings. Beside shows with outspokenly propaganda purposes, there were also commercially oriented exhibitions, or shows featuring artists whose works were not willingly displayed at home. Some of the exhibitions were indeed hardly more than mere diplomatic gestures, which, however, followed a fairly conscious intention of cultural exchange.
Caricature or cartoons and folk art were especially deployed as propaganda tools. For example, caricatures sent on show to China in 1955 spoke to a set of ideologically laden topics. Individual pieces laid bare the military aggression and neo-colonialism pursued by “imperial forces” in the Far East behind a sham veil of pacifism: the United States’s neglect of its working-class population or the anti-communist propaganda and alleged “fake news” spread by the Voice of America (the US-sponsored international broadcaster). The official report accompanying this exhibition introduces a new subgenre growing out of the propagandistic slant: the affirmative or friendly caricature that praises rather than attacks.8 The same report also explains, however, that “a good satirical drawing has always been oppositional and progressive”;9 accordingly, the collection also included self-critical pieces, most typically cartoons mocking bureaucracy or how bureaucracy slows down socialist production.
The appropriation of folkloric traditions for the fine arts has served various purposes over time in history. The most obvious reason in periods of nation-building might be nationalism and the aspiration to endow national specificity to contemporaneously produced art. The early twentieth century and the post–World War I decades certainly represented such an era for many emerging East-Central European states, whose intellectuals and artists often harked back to vernacular culture. However, the historical avant-garde of the same period and its successor, the mid-century neo-avant-garde, had different motivations when deploying folk motives. Especially the representatives of surrealist or surrealism-inspired trends drew on Sigmund Freud’s propositions to explore the unknown and the unconscious through folklore and non-European traditions that were purportedly located at the origins of human culture at large. Any such remnant of “bourgeois pseudosciences”, such as psychology and psychoanalysis, were esteemed by part of the traditional intelligentsia for their sustained links to European culture in early totalitarian countries, in which these disciplines were regarded as unnecessary and even unwanted.10
Folk art was not indifferent to socialist cultural politicians either, and its uses can be read in various ways. The official line referred to the revitalization of folk traditions, which purportedly vanished or faded away under the capitalist conditions of the interwar period, while, at the same time, folkloric traditions also came in handy for desecularizing and virtually repaganizing religious holidays inherited from previous regimes. Hungary’s national holiday, 20 August, is a case in point here: originally commemorating the death and deeds of Stephen I (975–1038), who founded the state and consolidated Christianity in his country, the date was made a Catholic feast in the fourteenth century by successive kings. The communist leadership could not possibly cancel this holiday because of its long heritage but could turn it into a feast celebrating the harvest and new bread and, simultaneously, the new Soviet-style constitution.
Official discourses emphasized both the distinctly international nature of the cultural encounters they initiated and, at the same time, insisted on the local-national particularity of what they put on display. Many press communications reiterated the Stalinist phrase of the era, proudly stating that the art they exhibited was “socialist in content and national in form”. The insistence on “national form” is often criticized today because the national is immediately linked to nationalism, especially in the light of the conservative-nationalist forces that have gained ground in Eastern Europe from the 1990s on. But the issue is more complex if one considers East European art history from a global perspective, taking into account the dual challenge of nationalization and transnationalization. Small Eastern European small nations recurrently faced the task of positioning themselves in a global network of politics, trade, and cultural entanglements. Possessing only limited degrees of self-governance, culture and the arts have historically played an important role in the international self-positioning of Eastern European nations, sometimes even more important than direct political claims-making.
The early 1950s, too, was a period in which states encountered an irreversibly globalizing world. Official documents disclose a genuine enthusiasm regarding this context, and they consciously utilize the concepts of cultural contact or cultural translation. Calling attention to the staggering number of artists and countries participating at any event with an international scope is a recurrent highlight in these reports. “Forty-two countries from four continents” were, for instance, represented in Ravenna at the Dante Small Sculpture Biennale.
Regarding the orientation and international reach of the Kunsthalle’s outgoing exhibitions, the following dynamics can be observed: in the 1950s and 1960s, the Kunsthalle most frequently sent exhibitions to Eastern European and Asian brotherly countries – the latter including China, Korea, Mongolia, and India. From the mid-1950s on, exhibitions were also sent to Western European and extra-European non-socialist countries – among others, to Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, and France and, beyond the continent, to the United States and Japan. Towards the end of the 1970s, the proportion of transcontinental and Eastern European target countries decreased, whereas the frequency of exhibitions organized in Western Europe explicitly grew. What happened in these years that orientated art exhbitions back towards the traditional art centres of “old” Europe?
The death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 loosened the tight official doctrine on cultural matters across the Socialist bloc. In the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, however, Hungary saw another wave of tight control. At the same time, the country needed to polish its international image after the violently crushed uprising, and the question of how to relate to Western exiles, including those who left in 1956, remained a constant dilemma. During the 1960s, domestic cultural policy underwent a gradual relaxation; socialist realism no longer exclusively dominated the art scene, and the Budapest art world was opening up to Western Europe.
These factors combined and culminated in inventing a peculiar kind of exhibition: in 1969 and 1970, the Műcsarnok brought home the work of exiled Hungarian artists who had integrated into the Western context and who, at the same time, openly declared loyalty to the Hungarian government in their new home countries, often countries with a strong political left (such as Italy or France). Inasmuch as they worked within the abstract artistic idiom, showcasing their work was meant to signal that Hungarian cultural policy was now open to a plurality of styles, although home-based artists could still not hope to display similar works in the major exhibition venues of the country. An additional goal of these homecoming exhibitions was to link the concepts of modernism and, again, nationality.11
A case in point is the sculptor Amerigo Tot (1909 Fehérvárcsurgó, Hungary – 1984 Rome), who went through an abstract period but who, for the most part, created works in a traditional artistic idiom, both of which appeared to be an asset for the Hungarian cultural authorities. It is safe to assume that his name would not ring a bell today to any broad and well-cultured audience in Hungary, Italy (his second home of choice), or elsewhere internationally. At any rate, the exhibition held at the Mücsarnok in 1969 aimed to construct him for local museum-goers as a world-famous Hungarian-born artist.
Another example is Victor Vasarely (1906 Pécs, Hungary – 1997 Paris), who may sound more familiar: Vasarely is generally credited as the inventor and key figure of the short-lived op art (short for optical art) movement. Op art was a new form of abstraction playing with the ways in which the eye processes lines, forms, and colours. Vasarely was also given a prestigious solo exhibition as part of the official state programme. His homecoming show at the Műcsarnok in October 1969 attracted 88,500 visitors and received a lot of press coverage.
Both these events and their cultural-political backgrounds were recently reconstructed through exhibitions taking place in contemporary art spaces. Tot’s affair with the Hungarian cultural authorities was revisited in Budapest’s Ludwig Museum while Vasarely’s case was on view in various venues, from Madrid, Budapest, and Leipzig to Paris, Vienna, and Zurich.12 The latter endeavour was an artistic research project by contemporary artist Andreas Fogarasi (1977), who centred the reconstruction on an anecdotal moment. Fogarasi took his audience back to 1969 – to the opening of Vasarely’s 1969 exhibition when ministers and cultural politicians had filled the Műcsarnok to welcome a leading figure of non-figurative art. János Major (1934–2008), a Budapest-based fellow artist, had also visited this memorable opening in 1969. He had prepared a small note for the occasion and was holding it ready in his pocket. Whenever he saw an acquaintance of his in the crowd, he took this message out of his pocket, cast a glance around to make sure that the uninitiated were not watching, and held it up: “Vasarely go home!” Major himself was a member of the neo-avant-garde, and his one-person protest was, among other things, a reaction to the double standard that cultural authorities deployed towards Western-based or domestic artists working with abstract forms of expression at the time.13
About a year later, artist and art historian Géza Perneczky (1936) used a very similar method to disseminate his first self-made artist booklets: he visited opening events at the Műcsarnok to distribute this samizdat among his fellow artists.14 This simple gesture pointed towards finding and establishing alternative routes of connecting and circulating material, despite the restrictions on communication channels in place.
3 Mail Art: Creativity through the Post
While cultural diplomacy and exhibition exchange were channels used to create official cultural connections, mail art was of extraordinary importance for non-mainstream artists having only limited access to cross-border exchanges. Mail art emerged globally in the 1960s and was, in fact, the subversive appropriation of a worldwide communication system: the post. It involved sending small-scale, inexpensive, and predominantly concept-based art objects through the international postal system, which easily allowed the sending of entire two-dimensional exhibitions around the globe at insignificant costs. The mail art network functioned independently of both the exclusive distribution channels of the Western-dominated art world and the censorship measures in the Second World or in the Global South – even if lots of correspondence never arrived. As Jorge Glusberg (1932–2012), the motor of the Argentinian mail art network, expressed in a text accompanying the exhibition Hacia un perfil del arte latinoamericano (Towards a Latin American profile of art) in 1972, mail art enabled the overcoming of certain conditions that made participation, let alone competition, in the global art world and art market largely impossible for artists working outside First World centres. Today, the captivating ways in which mail art anticipated the “world wide web” and its network-building are increasingly studied.15 Here i will only underscore three aspects of the “eternal network” that are relevant for my argument: the first is the breathtaking scope of the network; the second is the kind of marginality and oppositional character defining the movement at certain locations and periods; and the third is the collapse of the mail art “know-how” into mainstream institutional practices.
Mail art is generally seen as a “movement” – inasmuch as we can call it a movement – that emerged from the United States, where, in the early 1960s, Ray Johnson (1927–1995) and his circle founded the New York Correspondence School. However, as Hungarian art historians have shown, some Hungarian artists started to set up clandestine channels of communication even before mail art appeared as a recognizable genre in the country. Expresszió önmanipuláló szétfolyóirat (Expression: A self-manipulating spreadsheet)16 was launched by Árpád Ajtony (1944–2013) and Béla Hap (1944) in 1971 and became a samizdat publication circulating within the underground art scene. Recipients of a journal issue were to reproduce it according to editorial principles reprinted in the introduction of each issue: one had a free choice to keep or delete parts of the original content and add their own material. This new “remixed” journal was to be mimeographed in five copies, and the copies had to be distributed to further individuals, two out of whom should not belong to the compiler’s close circle of friends.
In this way, upon receipt of an Expresszió issue, one became the journal’s reader and editor simultaneously. The goal was to create channels of communication and distribute relevant information (theoretical texts by international authors, translations, and one’s own textual or visual output) while bypassing existing institutions of cultural life.17 Already at this point, the post was of great importance for disseminating works or exchanging information inside the country. Pál Bial links this activity to the irrepressible need of interacting within a society where publicly available forums were both restricted and controlled, whereas Géza Perneczky highlights how conceptual art inspired this “correspondence culture”, of which marginality and a non-official character were indeed defining characteristics.18 And marginal they were indeed. The activities of Artpool (the art archive i have been consulting) go back to the 1970s when Artpool emerged as a major hub of mail art connections. While they were fairly visible within the global correspondence network in this capacity, they apparently went unnoticed for most residents of Budapest. After a visit to Budapest in 1989, Wally Darnell, a networker based in the United States and Saudi Arabia, wrote a postcard to Artpool: “I tried to contact you when I was in Bp in July. Nobody knew of Artpool.”19 Similarly, G. Gutièrrez Marx (1945) added to her 1979 call for contributions:
Poetry is our utopian marginal resistance. […] All of these actions will be carried into effect without any official support, neither authorization, nor propaganda of any kind. Documents and information will only circulate inside our marginal network.20
Perneczky also points to freshly forming contacts with some personalities of the West German, British, Argentinian, and Polish art scenes; the latter came up, as early as in 1972, with an address list and information forum, the NET, established by artists Jarosław Kozłowski (1945) and Andrzej Kostołowski (1940).21 Alongside contacts with the North Atlantic “centres”, a range of periphery-periphery connections developed, including communication between Eastern European countries. These connections are not at all self-evident because, for centuries, the art critical gaze had been fixed on the West alone, and thus the neighbouring countries in Eastern Europe did not necessarily know much about each other’s art scene. This imbalance is captured in the often-repeated remark that a mail art networker based in, say, Prague might have had more knowledge about what was going on in the world at large than in another city of their own country.
Ever-expanding mailing lists and so-called exhibition catalogues have been the means to keep mail art alive and kicking. Every participant received the simple photocopied documentation of the shows and, thereby, also the mailing addresses of all contributors. Certainly, both the mailing lists and the catalogues were more valuable if they featured a long and variegated list of participants. A publication from 1979 of a certain Japanese Freedom Research Centre lists connections with Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Poland. The archival material suggests that contacts with Asian countries were relatively slow to develop (Japan was an exception), whereas relations between Eastern European and Latin American mail artists were thriving, leading to festivals of Polish and Hungarian vanguard art in Buenos Aires in 1971 and 1973 respectively.22
4 Travelling Political Topics
The question arises: what sort of an impact did global interconnectedness and communication have on artists in the Eastern bloc? The 1970s were marked by hot wars in the Cold War, the continuing process of decolonization, the beginnings of transnational terrorism, the threat of the atomic bomb as part of the nuclear arms race, environmental degradation in the wake of post-war industrialization, and the zenith of a host of civil rights movements from the Black Panthers to feminism to gay liberation. The fact that these topics hardly surface in the works of underground artists – who were subsequently also often referred to as politically critical, oppositional, or subversive – can be explained by a number of factors.
György Konrád (1933–2019) introduced the term anti-politics to capture Eastern European dissident thinkers’ political attitude during state socialism.23 The term describes a method of dealing with reality that shuns confrontation. This thesis is transferable to the sphere of art, recognizing that the relationship between art and political dissent is never a seamless one anyway: artists often find the way to engage with political circumstances through non-political means.24 Since the communications of the state virtually owned the topics of peace, disarmament, and anti-imperialist struggle in Vietnam and other parts of the Third World, many artists in the “second public sphere”, i.e., the unofficial cultural arena, found it difficult to relate positively to these issues without compromising their fundamental rejection of the communist establishment.
Without denying the value of anti-politics as a strategy of resorting to non-overtly political “small deeds” in a repressive political climate, it is important to note that another much-smaller niche of the non-official intellectual and cultural sphere has adopted more-solidly political attitudes than just “reticence as dissidence”. The recent exhibition Left Performance Histories,25 held in Berlin in 2018, made the slightest of gestures towards exploring to what degree and how East European artists generally related to political topics of global relevance throughout the 1960s–1980s. The exhibition set out to track down those pockets of the East European cultural scene in which the critique of actually existing socialism did not exclude a degree of identification with communist-affiliated platforms for anti-colonial internationalism. As the exhibition demonstrated, several artists mingled with radical social groups, but it varied from case to case whether or not they also addressed these topics in their artistic work. The Dresden mail art group and the multidisciplinary Orfeo Group in Budapest were among the most vocally political and left-leaning artistic communities.26
Because Eastern European quasi-activists tapped transcontinental networks of political radicalism, they often found inspiration in extra-European models (like Mao’s China) and expressed solidarity with the anti-colonial or independence struggles of developing countries (the Vietnam War, the Algerian or the Palestinian cause, or the revolutions in Latin America)27 as well as the civil rights movements of racial minorities in the Western world. Many of these issues were also taken up in the correspondence art arriving from Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Cuba, and the United States and, in later years, from individual Eastern European artists. Viewed through these pieces of mail art, the oppressive aspects of power wielding within both Cold War–era political blocs became visible. East German artist and publisher Lutz Wohlrab (1959) voiced the view that the shared experience of state repression, ideological pressure, and a degree of imposed isolation experienced by artists in both South America and the Eastern bloc created imaginary alliances between them.28 On a similar note, Wohlrab makes a distinction between the kinds of critiques voiced within the mail art communities of divided Germany: while West German mail artists often attacked the art market and the art establishment, East German artist-networkers addressed issues of politics proper. Beside the atomic bomb and world peace, topics circulating in the worldwide mail art community included the US embargo against Cuba and Nicaragua; the treatment of indigenous populations; the denunciation of multinational capitalism and US imperialism; and, most centrally, the torture, disappearance, and violence inflicted by Latin American governments. In later years, even glasnost and perestroika were touched upon, and the conviction that the “artist is at the service of the community or society” kept resurfacing.
5 The Mail Art Know-How Goes Mainstream
In 1984, the Young Artists’ Club (Fiatal Müvészek Klubja, FMK), Budapest’s legendary hang-out for underground artists and oppositional intelligentsia, hosted the mail art exhibition Magyarország a tiéd lehet! Nemzetközi Magyarország (Hungary can be yours! International Hungary). The show was organized by György Galántai (1941), one of the most active mail artists and organizers of non-authorized art events within the Hungarian scene. The exhibition (originally conceived of as material solicited for the “Hungary” issue of the international mail art magazine Commonpress) had the frivolous goal to provide an alternative country image through pieces sent by 46 Hungarians and 58 other artists from 18 countries, responding to Galántai’s call. The show was only open for a couple of hours, after which authorities closed it down, claiming that the works on display “mock and attack our state and our social order as well as the state security organs”.29
Galántai’s exhibition has since been reconstructed several times inside and outside Hungary, and the same venue, the FMK, could frictionlessly showcase other less “politically problematic, destructively critic[al]” international survey exhibitions in the subsequent years: the neutrally titled Experimental Art in 1985 and Art of Today in 1986. A further edition under the latter title was planned for the spring of 1990, to be on view in the Buda Castle, a considerably more representational venue than the shabby downtown villa harbouring the FMK. This time, the call for contributions was sent out by FMK’s director, who proudly referred to the previous international shows housed by her institution, in which several hundred artists from nearly 50 countries participated. The archival material reveals how, from the late 1980s on, the appropriation of the mail art method and the very mailing lists appear to serve as common tools for institutions eager to enter the emerging global contemporary art world from post-socialist Eastern Europe (e.g. the National Museum of Warsaw) through rural Brazil and New Caledonia to Egypt or the United Arab Emirates. Quasi-anonymous correspondence came to be the vehicle not only of making contact or gathering information but also of acquiring artworks for the respective institutions’ collections.
In 1989, Paulo Herkenhoff (1949), chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, requested material to be donated to their newly established Department of Photography. The museum’s international collection was reportedly modest while funds were very restricted due to a fire in 1978 and the severe economic conditions in Brazil, hence the solicitation of artworks, possibly of valuable ones and donated as gifts. Replacing the earlier handwritten or mimeographed posts, similar requests to send catalogues or video works as well as regular calls for participation in various art shows started to arrive from, for example, the Ministry of Culture, the Amácio Mazzaropi Cultural Workshop, the Federal Public Service, or the Federal University of Santa Catarina, on ever more professionally designed letterheads.30
The occasions on which the engagement of the mail art community was solicited also started to be increasingly representational. In 1981, contributions were requested for a show called Letters to Kobe – part of the Portopia ’81 Festival, which officially opened Port Island (an artificial 523 ha island near the Japanese city of Kobe). The call was signed by the president of the Kobe Port Island Expo Association and the mayor of Kobe, and the organizers explicitly wanted the “display [to be] based on the new form of artistic expression ‘Mail Art’”, and they set “The Sea” as the common theme of the exhibition.31 The whole project was meant to create “a new cultural city on the sea”, harking back to the idea of “civilisation interchanged through the intermediary of the sea”.
When arranging for the 1990 edition of the “Sacred Run for Land and Life”, Dennis Banks (1937–2017), founder of the American Indian Movement and a hero of the Wounded Knee incident in South Dakota in 1973, also deployed the communication channels of mail art. Adopting the concept and practice of running, a part of the traditional Native American way of life to connect with Mother Earth through one’s body, mind, and spirit, Banks carried out a sacred run from Hiroshima to Hokkaido in 1988 and was “planning a run around Europe for the purpose of cultural exchange”.32 He planned to start the run in East Germany with subsequent stops in Warsaw, Cracow, Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Kiel, Trier, Nancy, Marseille, and Paris. In this case, however, artworks were no longer asked for; Banks turned to mail artists for “support and help” of various kind, from joining the run to practical assistance.
The Uruguayan visual poet and networker Clemente Padín (1939) contributed the essay “Latinoamerican mail-art: A definition” to a publication by the Chilean/Venezuelan artist Dámaso Ogaz, in which he wrote that mail art had become, by 1989, institutionalized, verging on social integration.33 As the above examples show, this was mail art’s faith not only in Latin America: mail art was drawing very near to being co-opted worldwide and occasionally functioned as a vehicle of what we would call today gentrification.
6 Conclusion
Globalization has become a household term in contemporary politics, journalism, and everyday conversations since the mid-1980s, although the phenomenon itself had already been around for centuries. Rather than alleging that cross-border or longer-distance connections and movements were the novelty of the last decade of the twentieth century, the intensity and geographical reach of cultural exchanges charted in this chapter testify to the presence of such interconnections throughout the post–World War II period. While i fully endorse the relevance of a longue durée perspective pointing out that globalization has been taking place for hundreds of years already, my focus in the present text has been on the late twentieth century, recognizing the repercussions of the global past in my protagonists’ present. My narrative ends in the early 1990s when the art world witnessed processes of convergence and homogenization as an outcome of the global spread of a Western-style concept of art with related artistic and curatorial practices. The term the global contemporary reflects the ubiquitousness, indeed-compelling presence, of the same set of artistic tendencies and emerging infrastructure across all continents. The “rise of new art worlds” in every pocket of a multipolar world was underpinned by the perception that art making is, and has always been, a universal human activity. It was not until the early mid-2000s that a reverse process of fragmentation started upon recognition that art has not always been a factor common to human societies and that modern art and contemporary art are themselves irredeemably Western-biased notions. After this point, a politics of difference was preferred, which widened the definition of art towards localized inflections and away from previously dominating Western definitions.
My mapping of cultural connections initiated by Hungarian institutional bodies and East European individual artists has showed that all these actors found great satisfaction in the internationality of the post-war decades. As part of an interiorized backwardness complex and as a function of the long-standing hierarchies of the art historical canon, the orientation of East European artists and intellectuals had been traditionally fixated on West European centres. The political and cultural diplomatic principle of socialist internationalism advocated in countries of the Soviet bloc apparently led to a short detour in this historically conditioned cultural affinity. Countries of the bloc were drawn into a newly configured set of cultural diplomatic relations and influences, also engaging the so-called friendly states beyond Europe. While this may have been an imposed rather than a freely chosen reorientation, it, by all means, inserted Eastern Europe and its cultural products into an international distribution structure as the outgoing and incoming shows of Budapest’s Kunsthalle attest.
The multidirectional channels of the worldwide correspondence network of mail art took shape independently of such top-down strategies; however, this does not mean that mail art networking remained entirely unaffected by their underlying ideals. Critically minded artists addressed the hot political topics of a Cold War through their artworks and circulated these across continents and ideological divides, managing to reach fellow artists in remote pockets of the world, with whom an actual physical encounter would not have been possible. Mail art communication empowered artists in the world’s peripheries and connected them without any necessary reliance on any traditional authorizing centre or regime. Although an alternative channel of global exchanges opened up to artist-networkers, their activities may have remained invisible locally for both the mainstream cultural arena of their domestic environment and their totalitarian governments or dictatorships, whose leading politicians deluded themselves into believing that they had successfully controlled the cross-border movement of information and ideas.
In the opening section of this chapter, i advocated adopting a global and transnational approach to replace the methodological nationalism and the isolationist treatment still predominating narratives on cultural life in the Eastern bloc. In closing my study, i wish to acknowledge the relative lack of unbiased primary research on this subject and to add that recent explorations into how the cultural Cold War played out in communist Europe do have the quality and substance to act as groundwork, even in cases where they only offer nationally framed narratives. Nevertheless, investigations that retain a national focus in order to retrieve singular empirical material but, at the same time, situate their analysis in a transnational framework of references should set a desirable direction for future research.
Notes
1
The usage of the lowercase “i” pronoun signifies my reservations about a unique convention in the English language. English capitalizes and, thus, prioritizes the first-person singular, which comes across as a remarkably self-centred disposition conveyed by the current lingua franca and, as such, may deserve to be denaturalized. My usage continues T.R.O.Y.’s practice in his essay, “The New World Disorder – A global network of direct democracy and community currency”, submitted for the Utopian World Championship 2001, organized by SOC, a Stockholm-based non-profit organization for artistic and social experiments. The text is available from http://utopianwc.com/entries/entry.asp?ID=28&usrid=248 (accessed 20 May 2019).
2
Publications making the first forays into this subject area include M. Siefert, “East European Cold War Culture(s): Alterities, Commonalities, and Film Industries”, in A. Vowinckel, M. M. Payk, and T. Lindenberger (eds.), Cold War Cultures: Perspectives on Eastern & Western Societies, New York: Berghahn Books, 2012, pp. 23–54; B. Hock (ed.), Doing Culture under State-Socialism: Actors, Events, and Interconnections, Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2014 (thematic issue of Comparativ 7 [2014] 4); S. Hornyik: “Deconstructing Dreamworlds: Foreword to the Long Sixties Research Project”, Acta Historiae Artium 56 (2015) 1, pp. 323–332.
3
Exhibition on view in Kiscell-Municipal Gallery, Budapest, October 2018–March 2019. Catalogue: D. Hegyi et al. (eds.), Párhuzamos különidők/Parallel Nonsynchronism, Budapest: BTM Kiscelli Múzeum-Fővárosi Képtár/tranzit.hu, 2019.
4
Whereas the broader – and especially social science – literature on global socialism has already assumed a less ideologically biased and less antagonistic attitude towards the period of state-socialism, a similar approach is still a novelty within the field of art history.
5
D. C. Engerman, “The Second World’s Third World”, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 12 (2011) 1, pp. 183–211.
6
Q. Slobodian, “What Does Democracy Look Like? (And Why Would Anyone Want to Buy It?) Third World Demands and West German Responses at 1960s World Youth Festivals”, in: Vowinckel, Payk, and Lindenberger (eds.), Cold War Cultures, pp. 254–275.
7
B. Triebel, “Inhalte und Ziele von Kulturpolitik am Beispiel der Tschechoslowakei/Slowakei in Afrika und Asien”, paper presented at the XII. International Summer School of the Research Academy Leipzig: The Socialist Camp and the Third World, Leipzig, 17 September 2014. See also B. Triebel, “Eine vielstimmige Imagepflege: Die tschechoslowakische Kulturaußenpolitik gegenüber Staaten in Afrika, Asien und Lateinamerika während der Normalisierungszeit”, Bohemia 53 (2013) 2, pp. 379–407.
8
Műcsarnok Archives Budapest, Kína karikatúra-kiállítás, 1955 folder.
9
Here, and successively, translations are by the author unless otherwise indicated. Note that in Cold War phraseology, “progressive” was used to refer to socialist values, aspiring for non-capitalist social development, whereas in current art historical jargon, “progressive art” denotes abstract avant-garde tendencies: the kind of creative style refused by official socialist cultural politics.
10
M. Kovai, Lélektan és politika. Pszichotudományok a magyarországi államszocializmusban 1945–1970 [Psychology and politics: The psycho-sciences under state Socialism in Hungary], Budapest: Károli Gáspár Református Egyetem/L’Harmattan Kiadó, 2016, pp. 220–259; É. Forgács, “Efforts for a European Integration of the Arts and the Art Discourse 1945–1948”, in: M. Dmitrieva, B. Hock, and A. Kempe (eds.), Universal – International – Global. Art Historiographies of Socialist Eastern Europe, Cologne: Böhlau, 2021.
11
E. Sasvári, “Cultural Repatriation as Political Strategy – Victor Vasarely and Kádár-Era Hungary”, in: F. Zólyom (ed.), Vasarely Go Home, Leipzig: GfZK, 2014, p. 67; L. Bódi, “Domesticated Modernism: The Role of Western Emigre Artists in the Cultural Politics of the Kadar Era”, in: E. Sasvári, S. Hornyik, and H. Turai (eds.) Art in Hungary 1956–1980: Doublespeak and Beyond, London: Thames & Hudson, 2018, pp. 179–192.
12
See Amerigo Tot – Parallel Constructions, Ludwig Museum Budapest, October 2009–January 2010, curated by J. Mélyi and A. Fogarasi; Vasarely Go Home (documentary film and exhibition), 2011, on view in various venues.
13
For further anecdotal and analytical detail, see Zólyom, Vasarely.
14
G. Perneczky, Hogy van avantgarde ha nincsen – vagy fordítva [How come there is an avant-garde if there is none – or the other way round], vol. II, Cologne: Edition Soft Geometry, 1983, p. 146.
15
After source books, such as M. Crane and M. Stofflet (eds.), Correspondence Art: Source Book for the Network of International Postal Art Activity, San Francisco: Contemporary Arts Press, 1984, an early annotated bibliography also contained a couple of essays: J. Held Jr., Mail Art: An Annotated Bibliography, London: Scarecrow Press, 1991. The first academic publication to explore the histories, aesthetics, and directions of mail art was C. Welch (ed.), Eternal Network. A Mail Art Anthology, Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1995.
16
“A self-manipulating diffusive journal” could be another attempt to translate the highly inventive title.
17
For more on Expresszió, consult P. Bial, Kísérlet a magyarországi mail art történetének felvázolására és kelet-közép-európai kontextusba helyezésére [An attempt to outline the history of mail art in Hungary and place it in the context of Central and Eastern Europe], MA thesis, Eötvös Lóránd University Budapest, 2003.
18
Perneczky, Hogy van avantgarde ha nincsen.
19
Artpool Archives, “Saudi Arabia” folder, postcard.
20
Artpool Archives, “Argentina” folder.
21
NET has also received growing scholarly attention in recent years, see, for example the related chapter in K. Kemp-Welch: Networking the Bloc: Experimental Art in Eastern Europe, 1965–1981, Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 97–124, or K. Röder, “Ray Johnson and the Mail Art Scene in Eastern Europe”, Kunsttext.de/Ostblick 3 (2014), https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/bitstream/handle/18452/8217/roeder.pdf (accessed 14 July 2018).
22
Connections between the two purportedly marginal art scenes are explored in a journal thematic issue: K. Kemp-Welch and C. Freire (eds.), Artists’ Networks in Latin America and Eastern Europe (ARTMargins 1 [2012] 2–3), Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012.
23
G. Konrád, Antipolitics: An Essay, San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1984.
24
This is the line of argumentation Klara Kemp-Welch follows in her book Antipolitics in Central European Art: Reticence as Dissidence Under Post-Totalitarian Rule 1956–1989, London: I. B. Tauris, 2014.
25
On view in the neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK), Berlin, February 2018–March 2019. Curators: J. Bodor, A. Czirak, A. Hackel, B. Hock, A. Mircev, and A. Richter.
26
On the Dresden Group, see https://www.jugendopposition.de/node/145325?guid=193 and https://www.dhm.de/archiv/ausstellungen/boheme/katalog_zentren/dresden/dresd71.htm (accessed 11 December 2019), and on Orfeo M. Szarvas, “Orfeo’ s Maoist Utopia”, MA thesis, Budapest, Central European University, 2016.
27
See J. Mark, R. Gildea, and N. Pas, “European Radicals and the Third World: Imagined Solidarities and Radical Networks 1958–73”, Cultural and Social History 8 (2011), pp. 449–471.
28
A more recent attempt to explain East European–South American affinities is provided here: C. Cytlak, “Transculturation, Cultural Transfer, and the Colonial Matrix of Power on the Cold War Margins: East European Art Seen from Latin America”, in: B. Hock and A. Allas (eds.), Globalizing East European Art Histories: Past and Present, New York: Routledge, 2018, pp. 162–174.
29
Secret agent’s report submitted to the III/III-4-b-Sub-department of the Ministry of Interior, 30 January 1984; https://www.artpool.hu/Commonpress51/report.html (accessed 16 July 2018).
30
Artpool Archives, “Brasil” folder.
31
Artpool Archives, “Letters to Kobe” exhibition, Japan folder.
32
Artpool Archives, Mayumi Handa/Japan folder.
33
C. Padín, “Latinoamerican Mail-Art: A Definition”, in: D. Ogaz (ed.), Co(reo)arte, Montevideo: sin, 1989.