Networking The Bloc

Networking the Bloc
Networking
the Bloc
Experimental Art in
Eastern Europe, 1965–1981
Klara Kemp-Welch
The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2018 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any
electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information
storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book was set in Arnhem Pro and Univers by The MIT Press. Printed and bound
in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kemp-Welch, Klara, author.

Title: Networking the Bloc : experimental art in Eastern Europe 1965-1981 /
Klara Kemp-Welch.
Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018001229 | ISBN 9780262038300 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Arts—Europe, Eastern—Experimental methods. |
Artists—Social networks—Europe, Eastern—History—20th century.
Classification: LCC NX542 .K46 2018 | DDC 700.947—dc23 LC record available
at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018001229
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments | ix
Introduction: A Useless Game | 1
Part I Mobilization | 13
1 Una Cosa Nostra | 17

2 Keeping Together | 41
3 Communication at a Distance | 63
4 NET: An Open Proposition | 97
5 Aktuelle Kunst in Osteuropa | 125
Part II Points of Passage | 143
6 Émigré Encounters in Cologne | 147

7 Hungarians at Galeria Foksal | 173
8 International Meetings at Balatonboglár | 193
9 Edinburgh Arts | 223
10 An American Vision | 263
Part III Convergences | 279
11 Alternative Spaces and Experimental Poets | 283

12 The Students’ Club Circuit | 309
13 International Artists’ Meetings | 337
14 Prague-Milan / Venice-Moscow / Moscow-Prague | 369
Conclusion: Networking the Bloc | 407
Notes | 415
Index | 461
For Nadia
Acknowledgments
The research, writing, and publishing of this book were made possible by
fellowships from the Philip Leverhulme Trust, the Igor Zabel Association
for Culture and Theory, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and
a grant from the Courtauld Institute of Art. My thanks to those who took
the time to read my applications for agreeing to fund them.
This project would not have been possible without a lot of network-
ing. I wish to thank the following people for generously sharing with
me their personal archives, thoughts, and memories, especially those A c k
who agreed to be interviewed: Gábor Altorjay, Peter Bartoš, László Beke,
Wiesław Borowski, János Brendel, Shirley Cameron, Richard Demarco,
Ješa Denegri, Klaus Groh, Júlia Klaniczay, Gyula Konkoly, Helena Kontova,
Jarosław Kozłowski, Zofia Kulik, Przemysław Kwiek, Roland Miller, Géza
Perneczky, Marko Pogačnik, Jean-Marc Poinsot, Rudolf Sikora, Milena A c k
Slavická, Támas Szentjóby, Balint Szombathy, and Endre Tót.

For generously providing the images that bring the narrative alive,
I wish to thank the following individuals: Peter Bartoš, László Beke,
Bettina Bereś, Shirley Cameron, Peter Dabac, Richard Demarco, Braco
Dimitrijević, Henryk Gajewski, György Galántai, Tibor Gáyor, Klaus Groh,
Milan Knížák, Jiří H. Kocman, Gyula Konkoly, Helena Kontova, Želimir
Koščević, Andrzej Kostołowski, Jiří Kovanda, Jarosław Kozłowski, Zofia
Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek, Wanda Lacramp, Katalin Ladik, László
Lakner, Dóra Maurer, Karel Miler, Jan Mlčoch, Géza Perneczky, Viktor Pivo-
varov, Jean-Marc Poinsot, Giancarlo Politi, Hanna Ptaszkowska, Tomasz
Sikorski, Milena Slavická, Petr Štembera, Jacek Maria Stokłosa, Támas
Szentjóby, Endre Tót, Goran Trbuljak, Jiří Valoch, and Jana Želibská.
I am also very grateful for image permissions granted by the follow-
ing institutions: the Archives de la Critique d’Art at INHA, Artpool Art
Research Centre, Chimera-Project Gallery, the Richard Demarco Euro-
pean Art Foundation, Demarco Digital Archive University of Dundee,
The Croatian Academy of Sciences, the Foksal Gallery Foundation, the
Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia–Archivio Storico delle Arti Contem-
poranee, Forschungstelle Osteuropa Bremen, Galeria Foksal, Galerija
Gregor Podnar, Galeria Studio, the Marinko Sudac Collection, Moravian
Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Památník Národního
Písemnictví—Literární Archiv, the Slovak National Gallery, the Stu-
dents’ Cultural Centre in Belgrade, the University of California Press,
and Galeria Vintage.
I am truly grateful to all those who helped by reading parts of the
manuscript and providing valuable feedback: Jo Applin, Hana Buddeus,
Richard Demarco, Andrea Euringer-Bátorová, Klaus Groh, Júlia Kla-
niczay, Jarosław Kozłowski, Zofia Kulik, Katarina Lichvárová, Pavlína
Morganová, Margarita Tupitsyn, and Sarah Wilson. For translations of
various materials and transcription of interviews, I thank Małgorzata
Miśniakiewicz, Marko Ilić, Gergely Kovács, Julia Secklehner, and Katarina
Lichvárová. Thanks to Julia Secklehner, Wiktor Komorowski, Gergely
Kovács, and Karin Kyburz for their support with image permissions.
For their help with editing and copyediting the manuscript, thanks to
Charles Hebbert, Tony Kemp-Welch, and Sarah Wilson.
I am extremely grateful to Roger Conover at the MIT Press for be-
lieving in this project and for accepting the manuscript for publication.
I am full of admiration for the efficiency, enthusiasm, and professional-
ism of everyone at the Press and feel honored to have had the opportu-
nity to work with such a great team. Victoria Hindley made the whole
process remarkably straightforward, and working with the designer,
Emily Gutheinz, has been very rewarding. It has been a pleasure to
work with Matthew Abbate, whose editorial support has been enor-
mously helpful.
Support from family, friends, and colleagues has been essential
and much appreciated. Thanks to: Jo Applin, Alixe Bovey, Bella Camp-
bell, Karel Císař, Briony Fer, Dorotea Fotivec, Jacopo Galimberti, Zana
x Acknowledgments
Gilbert, Beata Hock, Catherine Ingrams, Sarah James, Ivana Janković,
Sarah Jones-Morris, Ed Krčma, Emese Kürti, Pip Lustgarten, Molly Mul-
ready, Luiza Nader, Marlon, Nadia, and Neil Pearson, Basia Piwowarska,
Marie Rakušanová, Robin Schuldenfrei, Alina Serban, Wenny Teo, Ta-
mara Trodd, and Sarah Wilson.
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction:
A Useless Game
“Planet Earth has never been as tiny as it is now,” announces the nar-
rator of “Chain-Links,” a short story by Frigyes Karinthy: “Now my
thoughts can circle the globe in minutes.” One of his friends concurs
and wagers that, if those present select “anyone, anywhere at all,” he
will prove, “using no more than five individuals,” that he can “con-
tact the selected individual using nothing except the network of per-
sonal acquaintances.”1 The friends play this “useless game” and are
surprised to find the hypothesis to be true. Popularized as the “six de-
grees of separation,” the Hungarian author’s “small world” theory has
been tested by many a social scientist over the years. If it has never
captured the imagination of art historians in the same way, this may
be because many people take it as a given that the art world is a “small
world.” This book sets out to test Karinthy’s hypothesis in the context Introduction:
of late Cold War artistic circles.
In official terms, the Cold War world was divided into three “blocs”:
Eastern, Western, and nonaligned. The metaphor of the descent of an
Iron Curtain across Europe continued to dominate the political imagi-
Introduction:
nation throughout the Khrushchev-era “thaw” and the superpower
détente of the 1970s. One consequence of this view, in art history, has
been the assumption that there was not one art world but many, and
that these were largely unconnected, running in parallel at best. This
in turn has led to the production of art history along the lines of po-
litical power blocs, and/or of nation-states—as a countermeasure. The
main aim of Networking the Bloc is to offer an account of the late Social-
ist period that transcends such limits. In so doing, I seek to address
the question of how isolated artists in Soviet bloc countries actually
were from counterparts around the world, as well as from their fellow
artists within the bloc. Given the potential scope of such an inquiry, I
have necessarily imposed certain limits. My center of gravity has been
East Central Europe, and my time frame is concentrated on develop-
ments from the run-up to the Prague Spring in the second half of the
1960s through to the end of the 1970s. At that point, the forms of experi-
mental art with which I am concerned began to wane and other trends
emerged, against the backdrop of increased opposition to authoritar-
ian rule across ever wider sections of society.
Artists’ experiences of connectivity within each Soviet bloc coun-
try varied. While some artists I interviewed were frankly offended at
the suggestion that they may have been isolated and were at pains to
explain how well aware they had always been of everything of interest,
others stressed how cut-off they felt. The artist and historian of the net-
work Géza Perneczky, for instance, claimed: “The best artists of Eastern
Europe resembled the shipwrecked who make desperate attempts to
contact the outside world with their bottled messages.”2 He explained
that isolation had been the “main engine” for the birth of the alterna-
tive network in the region.3 Where the flow of information was to some
extent limited, it was often perceived as being all the more precious.
The late Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski, likewise, recollected
that this was a period when “everyone sought contacts abroad, trying
to ignore the reality of international borders and political divisions.”4
Experimental art flowed around obstacles: much of the information
exchanged appeared meaningless to censors employed by the postal
exchange service.
The authorities tended to view “all private efforts taking place
outside the official bureaucratic channels” with “suspicion, especially
those operating within the international arena.”5 Piotrowski argues
that this was in part political pragmatism: “The Communist regimes,
aware of significant differences in the economic as well as the political
situation among the Socialist countries, feared that unrestrained ac-
cess to information about those differences could affect the stability of
the system as a whole.”6 The invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968
2 Introduction: A Useless Game

was a symptom of such thinking: the authorities feared a trickle-down
effect. Despite the removal of Alexander Dubček from his position as
First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia the following
year, and repressive measures designed to bring about the “normaliza-
tion” of the social sphere—enforcing allegiance to Moscow by military
occupation—autonomous cultural production and unofficial interna-
tional relations could not be entirely eliminated.
Václav Havel defined the “parallel culture” as “a culture which
for various reasons will not, cannot or may not reach out to the pub-
lic through the media which fall under state control.”7 In view of the
fact that the state controlled “all publishing houses, presses, exhibi-
tion halls, theatres and concert halls, scholarly institutes and so on,”
he explained that this culture could “only make use of what is left—
typewriters, private studios, apartments, barns, etc.” Ultimately, then,
any definition of parallel culture was of a “trivial” nature, for these cir-
cumstances revealed “nothing directly about its quality, aesthetics or
eventual ideology”; the key question was simply one of distribution.8
Distribution will also serve as my key reference point here.
Basing his remarks on his experience of the art world in the capi-
talist bloc at this time, Lawrence Alloway commented that “art is now
part of a communications network of great efficiency.” He referred to
the term “art world” as merely a catchall: “a sum of persons, objects,
resources, messages, and ideas … monuments and parties, aesthetics
and openings, Avalanche and Art in America.”9 Alloway explained that it
was a “system” by which people were “looped together in a new and un-
settling connectivity.” The system he sought to characterize consisted
of a decentralized network of artists, art historians, critics, gallerists,
and dealers, driven by a convergence between “intellectual interest
and high profits.”10 Ultimately, Alloway’s art world, like Havel’s “par-
allel culture,” was an organization whose main “output” was distribu-
tion, “both literally and in mediated form as text and reproduction.”11
He noted grimly that “withdrawing from the art world” appeared to be
the only cure for what he called the “alienation by distribution effect.”12
This study explores the “art world” and its meaning from another
angle: looking at the branch of this world that saw in distribution a
Introduction: A Useless Game 3

means to overcome alienation. The Hungarian art historian László
Beke has characterized the Eastern European art of this period as
“flexible and elastic, ironic, humorous and ambiguous, nonprofes-
sional, communicable, always ready to become a social activity of a
group of young people or even an alternative movement.”13 It is this
social dimension, central to much of the experimental art of the pe-
riod, that I seek to reveal: discovering the often mundane detail of
how art-related activities happened and tracing the encounters that
formed the web of connections that made ideas circulate and things
happen. In so doing, I seek to reveal how the art world worked in a
nonmarket context and how it related to wider Cold War-era ques-
tions of people versus power.
I am specifically interested in exploring how different sorts of ar-
tistic encounters related to dissident sociologist György Konrád’s ques-
tion “How can we strengthen the horizontal human relationships of
civil society against the vertical human relationships of military soci-
ety?”14 One of the most important functions of the artistic underground
was existential: it brought people together within a new creative frame-
work. Though Konrád was of the opinion that “democracy and inde-
pendence, here and now, are not possible for us” and that “the basic
framework of political and economic power cannot be reformed,” he
maintained that this did not mean that there was no alternative to the
status quo.15 On the contrary, there was.
The aim, he said, should be “to attempt the near impossible: even
if our nation and our institutions have no autonomy, to try to work out
our own.”16 He explained, “We have to do without democratic political
institutions, and so we do without them. Whether or not we give a name
to our friendly get-togethers is unimportant. If they have no name, they
can’t be banned. We have no Solidarity,17 but we can still have solidarity,
which can’t be suspended. Friendship cannot be outlawed. Our orga-
nizations are networks of sympathy; we have no headquarters and no
leaders, so it is harder to touch us.”18 Only a united Europe, Konrád ar-
gued, could bring “some sort of spiritual order between East and West”
and replace the binary world order with polycentrism.19 If, as Konrád
maintained, “reflection, introspection and cultural criticism of the

most intensive kind” were central to the business of “peacemaking,”
then experimental art from the Soviet bloc served, I want to argue, as a
testing ground for these procedures in social terms.
When Václav Havel lamented the “destruction of ‘the story’ by ‘real
socialism,’” listing an exhausting series of bureaucratic constraints
on everyday life, he cautioned that “the process of surrendering one-
self begins with small matters”—individuals’ day-to-day decision
to “renounce something of their own potential story.”20 Life in “post-
totalitarian” Central Europe was to Havel like the life of a political pris-
oner with asthma forced to remain in a cell with smokers. Though he
is scarcely able to breathe, his case has no chance of being reported in-
ternationally because—as Havel put it—“asthma is not a story.”21 I hope
that the many projects, proposals, and activities gathered together in
this study do, after all, amount to “a story,” or rather, a collection of
interconnecting stories. In retelling some of these, I seek to help guard
against their historical annihilation.22
At the end of the 1970s, the Czech artist and art historian Jaroslav
Anděl questioned whether it still mattered that an artist and his art
were of a particular country or nation: “is such a question relevant these
days, when, according to McLuhan’s theories, so popular in the sixties,
the world is turning into a global village?” He speculated: “If this is not
the case with our world yet, it seems to be the case with art. The con-
temporary artist seems to be a resident of a global art village with no
borders: works of art in cognitive spirit appear everywhere, and it hap-
pens that some artists living far apart seem sometimes to be more akin
… than others living in the same town.”23 This “spirit” was perhaps best
captured by Lippard’s landmark 1973 publication Six Years: The Demate-
rialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. The critic and curator had
first sought to define the idea of dematerialization in 1968, when she
and Robert Chandler wrote that this art was “all over the place in style
and content, but materially quite specific”; it was, they wrote “work in
which the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary, light-
weight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or ‘dematerialized.’”24
The artists they were concerned with “gloried in speeding past the cum-
bersome established process of museum-sponsored exhibitions and

catalogues by means of mail art, rapidly edited and published books
of art, and other small-is-better strategies.”25 While “dematerialization”
proved to be a misnomer, in view of the continued dependence of ex-
perimental art of the sort presented in Lippard’s volume on materials
such as paper, analog photography, and physical encounters of the live
art variety, her definition of the work as “all over the place” has stood
the test of time.
It is in this spirit, too, that I use the term “experimental” in this
study. I prefer this term to “conceptualist,” in acknowledgment of the
problems identified in relation to the late 1990s strategy for a more
global approach to art history—as proposed within the framework of
the Queens Museum of Art exhibition “Global Conceptualism” (1999).
As others have argued, the shift of name from “conceptual art” to “con-
ceptualism,” designed to acknowledge a diversity of global positions
while proposing a shared terminological platform, took as its root a
specifically Anglo-American term, potentially implying thereby that its
expanded “ism” form owed a debt to the conceptual art of Art and Lan-
guage or Joseph Kosuth. “Experimental,” to my knowledge, has no such
specific connotations, and designates an attitude rather than any iden-
tifiable movement or style.
Lippard’s chronological survey presents four pages of contribu-
tions from two Socialist countries, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. The
Czechoslovak component comprised an extract from an essay by Petr
Štembera accompanied by a photograph of his actions, entitled Hand-
pieces: Daily Activities, Typewriting (1971–1972) (figure 0.1). These were
slotted in between a bibliographical reference to a Germano Celant es-
say on conceptual art of May 1970 and information concerning the exhi-
bition “Idea Structures” at Camden Arts Centre in London in summer
1970. The book’s chronological structure made these juxtapositions
entirely casually, as though it were natural that an artist from “normal-
ized” Czechoslovakia should publish an essay in a Puerto Rican journal
and have it reprinted in New York.26 The Yugoslav material, meanwhile,
was spliced between a reference to a text by Charles Harrison of Febru-
ary 1970 and a note explaining that the group Art & Project were plan-
ning to move their activities to Tokyo (“since the ‘gallery’ is usually the

Bulletin, they function as easily in Japan as in Holland”).27 Here Lip-
pard included a description of a collaborative piece by the group OHO,
designed to coincide with Kynaston McShine’s 1970 MoMA “Informa-
tion” show and the 4th Yugoslav Triennial in Belgrade; a photograph
of Milenko Matanović’s String Bending Wheat (1970) (figure 0.2); and
an illustration and description of Marko Pogačnik’s Medial Systems.
Pogačnik recounts that their inclusion in Lippard’s book was a result
of personal networks: in 1969 “David Nez and Milenko [Matanović]
visited [the] United States, when David was going home. … Lucy was
immediately interested when we sent her materials. She had a kind
of collection—collecting as much as possible so she could write this
book.” Besides publishing a selection of their materials, she intro-
duced the OHO group members to other artists, among them Walter
De Maria.28
When De Maria visited the group at Kranj in Yugoslavia, soon after,
Pogačnik recalls that he tried to give them career advice on how to get
on in the art world: “We had long discussions. He was trying to con-
vince us to go into the art scene. He was giving us instructions how we
could become one of the best groups in the world and how to achieve
this. And there were two sides. One side—let’s go—and the other—let
us go a step forward and make a community and connect different as-
pects of culture to transform concepts into living reality.”29 Though this
caused a rift, the group chose the second option, forming the Šempas
Family and living and working as a commune. The artists were as skep-
tical of the appeal of the Western art world as they were of the socialist
modernism promoted under Tito. Though OHO were the only ones to
attempt self-sufficiency and to try to abandon money altogether, the
vast majority of the artists included here were not drawn to the com-
mercial Western art world as such; they have generally remained on its
margins today, just as they existed on the margins of the “real socialism”
of the 1960s and 1970s.
In this book, I examine experimental artists’ networks in the So-
viet bloc in three phases. The first of these corresponds more or less
with Lippard’s six years, running from the mid-1960s to 1972; I call it
the period of the “mobilization” of the network. The second relates to

Figure 0.1
Page layout from Lucy Lippard, ed., Six
Years: The Dematerialization of the Art
Object from 1966 to 1972 (first published
New York: Praeger, 1973; this edition
Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997). Petr Štembera, Handpieces: Daily
Activities, Typewritng, 1971–1972.
Courtesy of the artist and the University
of California Press.

Figure 0.2
Page layout from Lucy Lippard, ed., Six
Years: The Dematerialization of the Art
Object from 1966 to 1972 (first published
New York: Praeger, 1973; this edition
Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997). Milenko Matanović, String Bending
Wheat, 1970. Courtesy of the University
of California Press.

the period 1972–1975 and is framed by a series of “points of passage”
through which experimental artistic propositions were channeled. The
book’s final part concerns experimental artistic “convergences” of the
period 1975–1979, in the aftermath of the signing of the Helsinki agree-
ments and in the run-up to the formation of the Solidarity movement
in Poland, when priorities changed and the experimental activities that
had characterized the previous decade shifted in the face of a new set
of sociocultural concerns.
Conceptually, my study has been inspired by Bruno Latour’s idea
of “reassembling the social,” though I have none of the sociological
qualifications required to make any claim to have worked according
to the tenets of his actor-network theory. As I selected the stories I
wanted to tell and the protagonists to include in each, I empathized
with Latour’s decision to replace the placeholder “actor” with the term
“actor-network” as a way to convey the degree to which this entity is
“the moving target of a vast array of entities swarming towards it.”30 I
found he was right to say that “any course of action will rarely consist
of human-to-human connections … or of object-object connections,
but will probably zigzag from one to the other.”31 It has become in-
creasingly clear to me as I write that the many letters, photographs,
and publications exchanged between experimental artists were akin to
“connectors” and were instrumental in the production of a social field:
artistic propositions were what Latour calls “the cables, the means of
transportation, the vehicles linking places together”—they were a way
of “launching tiny bridges to overcome the gaps created by disparate
frames of reference.” Working on a period within living memory but
still subject to a great deal of misunderstanding, I felt it was important
“to retrace” what Latour called “the many different worlds actors were
elaborating for each other.”32
Latour described the actor-network as “made to act by a large star-
shaped web of mediators flowing in and out of it,” a structure “made to
exist by its many ties” such that “attachments are first, actors are sec-
ond.”33 Community, then, is presented as a consequence of object-based
associations, rather than their cause. So, like the narrator in Karinthy’s
short story,

I am embarrassed to admit—since it would look foolish—that I often catch
myself playing our well-connected game not only with human beings, but also
objects as well. … It’s a useless game, of course, but I think I’m addicted to it,
like a gambler. … The strange mind game that clatters in me all the time goes
like this: how can I link, with three, four, or at most five links of the chain, triv-
ial, everyday things of life. How can I link one phenomenon to another? How
can I join the relative and the ephemeral with steady, permanent things—how
can I tie up the part with the whole?34

Part I
Mobilization
A series of creative initiatives led by artists, art historians, and critics

from the mid-1960s helped mobilize a network that spanned the East-
West divide and by the early 1970s was connecting like-minded artists
around the Soviet bloc. Pioneering dialogues originated in Czechoslo-
vakia and Poland, for these were the most open of the Soviet satellite
countries in international terms in the years before the Prague Spring
of 1968. They blossomed partly thanks to enthusiastic support from col-
leagues in France, West Germany, and the United States, among others.
Although the general mobilization outlined in this first part of the
book was collaborative in character, personal encounters remained at
its heart. Cultural actors from both sides of the Iron Curtain worked
together in developing the projects outlined. My focus is on the dia-
logues and projects themselves rather than on the individuals who
helped to bring them about, for each of the initiatives that brought
about the collective mobilization relied for its realization on a network
of contributors.
Dialogue between young artists and established critics played a
crucial role in the initial development of the experimental network in
the region. As Henry Meyric Hughes has argued, new cultural politics
gave critics “the possibility to intervene actively in the artistic process
by taking an ethical position and contributing to the creation of new
individual and collective values.”1 In some cases the inverse was true,
and it was the desire to bypass existing organizing structures for the
dissemination of art that galvanized the situation, leading clusters of
artists to get together to arrange the direct distribution of their ideas.
This part of the book focuses on five pioneering examples of mo-
bilization: a friendship, an artistic credo, an exhibition project, a con-
ceptual proposition, and a book. Each of these significantly enhanced
future creative exchanges across the Soviet bloc; initially developed
on a local basis, these all eventually drew in artists from neighboring
countries.
The first chapter opens with a trip made by the Slovak artist Alex
Mlynárčik to Paris in 1964 and explores the creative consequences of
his encounter there with the French critic Pierre Restany, the architect
of Nouveau Réalisme: the title of the chapter, “Una Cosa Nostra,” refers
to the special bond that developed between them, which raised the in-
ternational profile of Czechoslovak art and contributed to the import
of up-to-date critical information on external art world developments.
The following chapter examines the Prague critic Jindřich Chalupecký’s
enthusiastic international promotion of the young artist Milan Knížák,
which brought him to the attention of key figures associated with in-
ternational happenings and Fluxus, such as Allan Kaprow and George
Maciunas, which led to the Czech artist’s appointment by the latter
Part as head of Fluxus East. If this
I was an honor Knížák did not appear to
take terribly seriously, in symbolic terms at least it marked the recog-
nition of the Eastern Europe experimental circuit in alternative West-
ern artistic circles. The young French art historian Jean-Marc Poinsot’s
inauguration of a Section des Envois at the Paris Biennale des Jeunes
M o b i l i z a t i o n
in 1971 is the third case study: the event represented a watershed mo-
ment for Eastern European artists, since it enabled them to send in
small-scale projects for exhibition without the means or permissions
to attend in person. This postal section of the exhibition had the ad-
ditional merit of legitimizing, within the framework of a major bien-
nial, the value of experimental projects on paper, distributed directly
for the price of a stamp. The conceptual project NET, developed the
same year in Poznań by Jarosław Kozłowski and Andrzej Kostołowski as
a means to “exchange concepts, propositions, projects and other forms
of documentation” and the subject of the fourth chapter, delivered a
groundbreaking definition of the approach to creative networking that
artists from around the world had begun to undertake. It served to
14 Part I
schematize in the most democratic manner possible the existence of
an international platform for artists to get in touch with one another
within the framework of a new, decentralized network. My account
of the mobilization of the network in the Soviet bloc closes with the
story of the publication in 1972 of the first survey of experimental art in
Eastern Europe: Aktuelle Kunst in Osteuropa, edited by Klaus Groh but
compiled with the help of artists and networkers from across Eastern
Europe. The distribution of the book to the participating artists served
to cement the network that had been set in motion across the region,
paving the way to a second wave of relationships and exchanges across
the bloc, many of which no longer required a Western detour but could
now occur directly on an East-East basis.
Mobilization 15
1
Una Cosa Nostra
The influential UNESCO-affiliated International Association of Art Crit-

ics (AICA) held its first meeting in a Soviet satellite country in 1960, in
the Polish cities of Warsaw and Kraków (figure 1.1).1 The theme of this
7th Congress—“Modern Art as an International Phenomenon”—was a
significant choice for a number of reasons.2 Firstly, Poland was home to
the first international collection of modern art in Europe, the a.r. (revo-
lutionary artists) Collection, donated by the constructivist Władysław
Strzemiński to the workers’ city of Łódź in 1932.3 Secondly, the orga-
nizer of the congress was the trailblazing Juliusz Starzyński—famously
responsible for Poland’s showcasing of so-called “afigurative” works
within the framework of the otherwise entirely socialist realist “Art of
Socialist Countries” exhibition in Moscow in 1958.4 The congress could
have offered fertile ground for a nuanced confrontation of Western and
Eastern debates on abstraction and realism. However, Mathilde Arnoux
has argued that these did not occur, and that 1960 marked “the end
of the abstraction/figuration dichotomy that had dictated the artistic
identities of the opposing blocs.”5
One of the participants in the September 1960 congress was the
French critic Pierre Restany. His manifesto of Nouveau Réalisme was to
appear later that year: it sought to convey a sociological, post-Duchamp-
ian “real” that “opposed the realism of the communists.”6 Attempts on
the part of communist-leaning critics to embrace abstraction seemed
as anachronistic to Restany as socialist realism.7 Instead, he conceived
of art as a “zone of free exchange.”8 The importance of AICA as a forum
for “international cooperation and dialogue” was also not lost on him.9
1
Nostra
Figure 1.1
Program of the 7th AICA Congress, Warsaw,
1960. Courtesy of INHA-Collection Archives
de la critique d’art, Rennes.
18 Chapter 1
AICA was particularly significant in these years insofar as it kept open
“channels of communication between visual arts professionals, at an
altitude that always stayed below the reach of the political radar of all
ideological control towers.”10 Reporting on the congress, Restany noted
that “today’s art, liberated from all traditional economic servitudes, of-
fers the individual being a means of communicating with the universe,
with the other.”11
In addition to visiting the major museums, guests at the congress
were invited to new galleries such as the Krzywe Koło gallery in Warsaw
headed by the artist Marian Bogusz, and the Krzysztofory in Kraków,
which revolved to a great extent around the artist and theater direc-
tor Tadeusz Kantor.12 But it seems that Restany was not moved by what
he encountered. He noted Poland’s enthusiastic embrace of Western
ideas in tones that made it clear he considered artists’ interest in lyrical
abstraction and tachisme to be backward. He was not much taken by
the Polish capital either and reported: “the Muscovite-style Palace of
Culture (a gift from the Russians) and the housing developments in the
suburbs, which are still new but on the verge of collapse … inconsisten-
cies in town planning … make Warsaw one of the most depressing cities
in the world, [and] reflect the intellectual uncertainties of the nation.”13
This might have been the end of the story of Restany and Eastern Eu-
rope, had the congress participants not been invited to take a four-day
post-congress tour to Czechoslovakia.14 The delegates left the Polish
mountain town of Zakopane on 14 September to visit the painter Ludo-
mir Fulla across the border in Žilina, spending the next day in Brno and
visiting the wine-making region of Kounice in Moravia, and then went
on to Prague. The tour included visits to Czechoslovak art historical
sites and collections and a meeting with contemporary artists centered
around a studio exhibition.
Absorbed in the process of challenging the School of Paris and the
hegemony of lyrical abstraction, Restany had already managed the coup
of Yves Klein’s exhibition of monochromes at the Galerie Apollinaire
in Milan, and was involved in the promotion of his stable of artists. If
Restany conceived of his first trip east of the Iron Curtain in relation
to his wider project of searching for alternatives to the tired language
Una Cosa Nostra 19

of the modernist informel, he was particularly inspired by what he saw
in Prague. He met the poet Jiří Kolář and the painter Jan Kotík and
was reportedly very taken with the work of the young Aleš Veselý, to
the surprise of the more established Czechoslovak artists. The French
critic was in search of something new and authentic—an alternative
to what he later labeled “conformist modernism.”15 In an interview re-
corded while in Prague, Restany said: “I thought that perhaps, in isola-
tion, you [chez vous] wouldn’t have to feel obliged to do the same things
that we do [chez nous] in the West.”16 He was most interested in the work
of younger artists because they had not had direct experience of inter-
war art and were confronting the postwar world with fresh eyes, finding
their own response to its challenges. Restany admitted: “I was expect-
ing elementary gestures from them—clumsy perhaps, but quite precise,
clear and total.” Only Veselý fulfilled his expectations.17 Summing up
his impressions of young Czech artists, he concluded that “the picture
is finished, the different domains of plastic arts are going to appropri-
ate objects from reality.”18
The critic informed his Prague audience about current trends in
Western art, referring especially to the “compressions” being made by
the sculptor César. Restany declared that what was needed was “total
freedom” and that the only options available were now “either to go
backward, without taking any risk, or to throw oneself forward toward
a total adventure,” by which he meant that artists should strive to “ap-
propriate realities with different methods and in different ways.”19 He
explicitly declared his commitment to dialogue with Eastern Europe
in 1961, writing that “if we are to believe in the future of the West, this
future will not be made without Prague.”20 In the decades that followed,
Restany would consistently use his networks “to help Czechoslovak
and Polish artists … to exhibit in Paris, at the Biennale des Jeunes and
in private galleries.”21 Henry Meyric Hughes has argued that what really
mattered was
the confidence with which he inspired a new generation of artists in the fact
that there was a potential audience for their works, and that they were not nec-
essarily condemned, as their predecessors had been, to isolation, compromise,
20 Chapter 1
or internal emigration. A Western critic and exhibition curator with contacts
and coming from what was, until the middle of the sixties, still considered in
Eastern Europe to be the global capital of art had a real, firsthand interest in
their work and took the trouble to analyze the social and cultural context that
they depended on.22
The close friendship between Restany and the artist Alex Mlynárčik
(born 1934) was an important case in point. Mlynárčik traveled to Paris
for a week in April 1964, armed with Restany’s phone number provided
by a Czech critic who had made Restany’s acquaintance there in 1960.
Though he tried to call numerous times, he did not find him at home.
Instead, the Slovak artist came across him by chance while stopping by
the Galerie Lara Vincy on the Rue de Seine to pick up some free docu-
mentation. Pierre Restany’s biographer, Henry Périer, offers the follow-
ing dramatic account of the encounter: “Three people are sitting there
drinking Russian vodka: an elderly woman, a woman and a young man.
[He] approaches and asks in Russian whether he can have a catalogue.
The man turns to him and says: ‘you are Monsieur Mlynárčik from
Bratislava. I am Pierre Restany.’”23 These words, Périer reports, filled
the artist with a “frisson of joy and hope.”24
Restany gave Mlynárčik access to his archive, and was soon helping
him to network in the Parisian scene.25 Mlynárčik’s letters to Restany
refer to the miraculous nature of their first meeting: “It was unexpected,
by chance, that I met you, and what a friendly understanding on your
part. I belong to those who are at the beginning of their journey, and I
cannot expect that you would remember this meeting. Your problems
are so diverse, they concern men who have been favored by destiny.”26
Restany put him in touch with the Galerie Raymonde Cazenave, where
he held his early exhibitions, and offered logistical support in bringing
Mlynárčik to Paris. The Slovak artist asked him to write a private invita-
tion—rather than from his gallery—for his second visit to Paris, to ease
his visa application.
Mlynárčik’s trajectory as an artist had not been straightforward,
and he was cautious about navigating state bureaucracy. When he was
sixteen, he and a friend had made an unsuccessful attempt to emigrate
Una Cosa Nostra 21

by crossing the border to Austria. Mlynárčik later explained that the
move had not been politically motivated but was because he wanted to
see the world: in particular, he had wanted to go to Thailand, inspired
in part by an uncle who had been a great traveler and had lived in To-
kyo and Bangkok. Arrested by Austrian police seventy kilometers after
crossing the border, he spent a year in prison in Czechoslovakia.27 On
his release he had to apply to the art academy three times before being
accepted.28 In late 1965, Mlynárčik wrote to Restany:
Our conversations together are short … these are very precious moments for
me. I believe that today everyone is carefully following and watching your
work, which in many respects announces progressive evolutionary tenden-
cies. Often we make comparisons of certain tendencies and one is suddenly
surprised at how our own efforts are in accordance with general efforts. The
few moments which I spent last year in your presence were for me a series of
discoveries and the sanctioning of many experiments. … I value your disinter-
ested interest enormously.29
The friendship with Restany gave him confidence to pursue his own
path. If the ossification of art had different roots in the Czechoslovak
context from those of the scenario with which Restany was grappling
in Paris, the solutions to both potentially had much in common. At the
time, Mlynárčik was studying Soviet art of the early 1920s. He recalled
being drawn to Mayakovsky’s ambition to produce an “art for the street”
and to the work of Khlebnikov, Malevich, and others. He saw Soviet
developments in art historical rather than political terms, comparing
such proposals to those of Duchamp in the first instance, but also argu-
ing that Nouveau Réalisme, pop art, and happenings were the inheri-
tors of these avant-gardes.
Above all, Mlynárčik was exasperated by the hypocrisy of the offi-
cial approach to painting in the Soviet bloc and by its claims to “real-
ism.” He reasoned that “The leitmotif of ‘socialist’ and ‘anti-capitalist’
culture was ‘art for the people, art for the worker.’ Unfortunately, this
theory and the practice springing from it had nothing to do with art
22 Chapter 1
for the ‘worker.’ Communist painters produced still lifes with facto-
ries in the background … it was time to find an entirely new solution
to the question of art versus society.”30 This thinking was the basis for
the “Happsoc” manifesto, in which Mlynárčik, together with the art-
ist Stano Filko and the critic Zita Kostrová, “exhibited Bratislava as a
‘found society,’”31 which took the form of a conceptual declaration that
this was a nominalist event rather than a performative one. They de-
clared that Bratislava, along with everything and everyone in it, would
become a work of art between 2 and 8 May 1965. Each day would be a
new “reality.” That these dates were framed by the state holiday Labor
Day on 1 May and the anniversary of Liberation by the Red Army on 9
May suggested the maverick insertion of an unofficial version of reality
between two key features of the state calendar. The manifesto accom-
panying the declaration, entitled “Theory of Anonymity,” explained that
theirs was “an action stimulating the receptiveness to and multifaceted
enjoyment of reality, released from the stream of everyday existence …
usher[ing] in the recognition of the immensity and breadth of mutu-
ally dependent relationships … stand[ing] for gentle and all-inclusive
commitment … a process that uses objectivity to stimulate a subjective
way of looking at things.”32 The authors made no distinction between
subjects and objects. Under the heading “objects,” they listed women,
men, dogs, houses, washing machines, and so on, offering a vision of a
comfortably consumerist society in which a high proportion of people
owned fridges and electric cookers and in which, remarkably, there was
only one more male inhabitant than there were TV antennae.
Mlynárčik later recalled that at the time they felt that what they
were doing was part of a wider shift in art. The preeminent gallerist
and critic Jindrich Chalupecký even referred to Happsoc as a “Slovak
branch of Nouveau Réalisme.”33 Mlynárčik, for his part, called Chalu-
pecký his “Prague Restany.”34 While Restany was not explicitly seeking
to turn Nouveau Réalisme into a pan-European movement, he was
undoubtedly keen to make new links with artists from the Soviet bloc
countries.35 Mlynárčik, however, was rather dismissive of work in the
region: “Hungarian, Polish, and earlier Czech art did not interest me,
because with a few exceptions they did not bring new discoveries.”36 His
Una Cosa Nostra 23

attitude was typical of those artists so intent on making their names
that they were more interested in networking with Western art world
figures than in making links with peers in neighboring countries. The
only artists working along similar lines in Central and Eastern Europe
at that time whom Mlynárčik acknowledged were Milan Knížák in
Prague, Lev Nusberg in the USSR, and Wolf Vostell in West Germany.
Remarkably, given the slow pace of the thaw in the USSR, there
were three pioneering shows of “Moscow Kinetic Art” in Prague be-
tween summer 1965 and summer 1966. These were curated by Dušan
Konečný, who had been a student in Moscow in the 1950s and traveled
there regularly, in 1964 meeting Lev Nusberg (co-founder of the Mos-
cow group of kinetic artists Dvizhenie in 1962).37 As Vít Havránek has
pointed out, the exhibitions consisted of drawings and graphics rather
than more experimental work, so that “despite this promising estab-
lishment of contacts,” no “three-dimensional object[s] or photographs
of kinetic performances” were included.38 Limited information about
the development of kinetic art in the USSR circulated in the art press.
Nusberg’s manifesto was published in Výtvarná práce in 1967, a year
after it appeared in Studio International, proclaiming, “The stars have
come nearer. Then let ART draw people together through the breath of
the stars!”39 Nusberg was to remain in regular contact with his Czech
colleagues, maintaining a particularly lively correspondence with Cha-
lupecký, whom he introduced to his colleagues in Moscow when the
latter visited.
When he recorded his impressions from his second trip to Prague
in 1966, Restany noted that the older generation whom he had met in
1960 now had the status of “modern masters” and a new generation
had emerged. In addition to singling out Jan Kotík and Milan Knížák,
he mentioned Nusberg and the Dvizhenie exhibitions of 1965. A steady
stream of Czechoslovak visitors were now visiting Nusberg’s studio in
Moscow, including Miroslav Lamač, Jiři Padrta, Jindřich Chalupecký,
and Jan Ságl.40 When Padrta traveled to the USSR for three weeks in
1969 with his wife, he wrote to Restany enthusiastically that they had
returned with a huge amount of material, among others relating to the
group of kinetic artists who, he wrote, “have a slightly crazy evolution
24 Chapter 1
but very interesting in terms of … architecture.”41 Restany replied en-
thusiastically that if the photos were good enough they could make a
big splash in the Italian journal Domus, for which he wrote. He also
offered to show the materials to critic Michel Ragon. Padrta replied
that Russian materials were quite sensational but that unfortunately
the young artists he had met were quite “avide de dollars.”42 Restany
and Padrta’s correspondence was extensive and included a regular ex-
change of information about the activities and travels of both critics. On
17 May 1966, for instance, Padrta wrote to Restany that he was planning
an exhibition of the Zero group in Prague for 1967, and was just back
from organizing a series of exhibitions of the visual poet Jiří Kolář in
Hannover and Essen.43 Restany sent personal invitations to Padrta and
others when they needed to travel to France, and served as the Paris
correspondent for two key Czechoslovak art journals: Výtvarná práce
(the journal of the Czech Union of Fine Artists) and Výtvarná umĕníe
(the journal of the Union of Slovak Fine Artists).
Mlynárčik and Restany’s first major public coup would take place
on the occasion of the 11th AICA Congress, held in Prague and Bratislava
in 1966: it would be remembered more for Mlynárčik’s unauthorized
collateral event than for its official program.44 Mlynárčik had been an-
gry that the organizers had replaced an exhibition of contemporary art,
scheduled to coincide with the congress in Bratislava, with the work
of naive painters, while exporting the former to the Moravian city of
Brno, where it was unlikely that the foreign visitors would venture.45
Mlynárčik boycotted the Brno exhibition and arranged his own, in the
men’s public toilets in the center of Bratislava. “Taking advantage of
his position as an assistant at the Academy of Fine Arts, he went to
the police dressed in a suit explaining that he wanted to carry out a
survey and a sociological test. Not wishing there to be any provocation,
he asked the chief of police to provide officers to prevent there being
any disorder. He knew his country and knew that money can arrange
everything.”46 Knowing which three hotels the foreign visitors were
staying at, Mlynárčik delivered a private invitation to each guest for the
opening of his show on Hurbanovo Square to coincide exactly with the
official opening: “Restany convinced the majority of his colleagues to
Una Cosa Nostra 25

go to Mlynárčik’s event. He and Ragon cut the official cord and gave a
speech. The two men then had a discussion in the toilets,”47 where the
artist had installed seven mirrors as homages to Saint Anthony, Hie-
ronymus Bosch, Gabriel Chevallier, Godot, Michelangelo Pistoletto,
Stano Filko and, finally, to CO(NH2)2 (urea). He invited people to leave
comments in a golden visitors’ book hanging from the wall.48 After the
event, Mlynárčik was interrogated by police and became persona non
grata, increasingly marginalized on the local scene, though Chalupecký
sought to defend him.
Chalupecký had been appointed head commissar of the Václav
Špála Gallery in Prague in 1965.49 For the younger generation, he served
as an important “connection to the historical avant-garde,” as someone
who had been actively associated with Czech surrealism in the 1940s and
as the man who introduced a discourse on Duchamp to Czechoslova-
kia.50 He was well placed to promote new strands of international coop-
eration even after the global surrealist moment had begun to wane and
artists had begun to pass from painting to new experimental forms.51
He had opportunities to travel in an official capacity and made use
of these to make contacts around Europe and beyond, bringing news
and exhibitions of international art and experimental artists to Prague.
Chalupecký’s commitment to the new art and, arguably, his ability to
historicize it and to put its case compellingly to skeptical critics un-
doubtedly played a key part in its ability to flourish in Czechoslovakia.
Under his directorship, the gallery had exhibitions of many estab-
lished and emerging Czechoslovak artists, as well as significant foreign
shows, notably of Austrian sculptors in October 1965, narrative figura-
tion in June 1966, Gutai in September 1967, and Duchamp in March-April
1969.52 The Duchamp retrospective had been planned before the artist’s
death in October 1968.53 The exhibition consisted of a wide variety of
works from the dealer Arturo Schwarz, who ran a gallery at his home in
Milan from 1961 to 1975 and would later support Czechoslovak artists by
smuggling artworks out of the country. Schwarz loaned Chalupecký 20
of the limited-edition authorized copies of the readymades produced
with Duchamp’s permission, as well as a number of rotorelief experi-
ments, two works in plastic, about 30 graphic works and drawings, and
26 Chapter 1
a selection of documents. The impact of the show cannot be overesti-
mated; it was probably the single most significant foreign exhibition of
the period, on the eve of the so-called “normalization” implemented
by the Soviet-backed regime following the removal from power of the
reform-minded Dubček. Chalupecký was removed from his post at the
gallery and blacklisted.
In June 1967, Chalupecký published an influential article, “Art, In-
sanity, and Crime,” in which he sought to defend avant-garde manifes-
tations against charges of obscenity and to tackle head-on a tendency,
which he saw as relevant “all over the world,” to react to experimental
art with “indignation … ridicule or condescension.” He made a case for
what he called “deliberate conscious creation” over “mere immorality”
or “anti-social behavior,” reminding readers that Jaroslav Hašek’s good
soldier Švejk had been one such “provocateur.” Artists, he argued, were
driven by an “urgent inner necessity” to overcome the chasm between
real life and the artificiality of art as a form of “false consolation,” by
acts of what he called “artistic creation in the very midst of living re-
ality.” Mlynárčik’s Permanent Manifestation II of 1966, he said, should
be read as a descendent of Duchamp’s 1917 urinal: “Art must dare all
and must move especially into places which are forbidden to it, into
darkness, filth, crime, despair, humiliation.”54 He argued that art had to
seek a “new foundation for giving form to life itself” with “conscious-
ness and rigour.” The article was a response to a scathing critique of
Mlynárčik’s installation published in the Bratislava daily Prace, which,
as Chalupecký had explained, had asked rhetorically: “should not the
psychological condition of these people be investigated? … Is this a
matter of incipient schizophrenia? … Should we publish such people?
… Is some sexual deviation involved?,” and had drawn the conclusion
that “This phenomenon … is imported exclusively, it would seem, from
the West.” Chalupecký argued that Mlynárčik’s manifestation was de-
signed to force viewers into “a new reaction to the world, to a new ges-
ture of self-consciousness,” or, as Mlynárčik himself put it, to “a faithful
interpretation of man’s existence encircled by objective reality.”55
Chalupecký was not alone in pushing for greater openness to ex-
perimental ideas at the time: reform was also being initiated by the
Una Cosa Nostra 27

Czechoslovak Communist Party leadership, under Dubček, and perco-
lating down throughout society. The Prague Spring reached its apogee
with the abolition of press censorship and travel restrictions. The ex-
citement was tinged with apprehension, however. At the end of April
1968, Chalupecký received a letter from Guy Debord and René Viénet,
who wrote: “We are very interested in the current developments in your
country. As you can imagine, we hope that the democratization will be
total and radical. We tend to believe that the current conditions can-
not last long: either the process of liberation will go much further, or
else there will be a return in force of bureaucracy” (figure 1.2).56 A letter
from Padrta to Restany also captured the extraordinary pace of change
of those times: he joked that all the “old rats” were “leaving their holes”
and shouting “long live freedom!”57
Mlynárčik’s friendship with Restany had continued to blossom,
and he was to find himself in Paris in May 1968. He described the events
in Paris as a giant game in which the Place de la Sorbonne had replaced
the Place de la Bastille and all sorts of new Dantons and Robespierres
paraded around Boulevard Saint-Michel playing their part in organiz-
ing the collection and dispatch of cobblestones. The event came to an
end, he wrote, when Charles de Gaulle cried “Enough!”58 Having lived
for 20 years under socialism, he explained that he found it hard to see
the whole event as anything other than a French revolutionary “life
game.” He noted wryly that Jean-Jacques Lebel behaved as though he
“had been everywhere, knew everything, and gave everyone advice,” but
when Mlynárčik suggested that he might like to visit Slovakia to see
what socialist reality looked like, Lebel told him that his place was “in
Paris on the barricades.” For Czechoslovaks, the artist explained, social-
ism was a matter of “survival.”59 What was most important for him was
the graffiti he saw at the Sorbonne: it confirmed his ideas about graf-
fiti as a form of “powerful social expression” in everyday reality.60 The
events of May seemed to him at the time to be a sign of hope in a future
that would be “brighter, more free and more dignified.”61
In early 1968, Restany became involved in preparations for a new inter-
national biennale in Bratislava, Danuvius, modeled on the Paris Biennale
28 Chapter 1
Figure 1.2
Letter from Guy Debord and René Viénet
to Jindřich Chalupecký, 27 April 1968.
Courtesy of Památník národního
písemnictví—literární archiv, Prague.
Una Cosa Nostra 29

and focusing like the latter on participants under the age of 35. It was in-
tended as an East-West exchange of sorts, to be held on alternate years
with its Western counterpart. The chief curator, Lubor Kara, drew on
Restany’s international contacts in making his plans, writing in Febru-
ary of that year to ask for contact details for Christo, James Rosenquist,
and Michelangelo Pistoletto, among others.62 A month before the event
was scheduled to open, however, the political landscape of Czechoslo-
vakia was transformed. On 21 August hundreds of thousands of Soviet
and Warsaw Pact soldiers in armored tanks crossed the Czechoslovak
border and occupied the capital. Czechoslovaks undertook numerous
spontaneous acts of nonviolent resistance against the invaders and two
short general strikes were coordinated, but the reform movement was
effectively crushed.63
The day after the invasion, Mlynárčik and the Swedish artist Erik
Dietman, who was staying with him in Bratislava at the time, issued a
call for artists to make Danuvius 1968 a forum to protest against this
and all violence, asking that artists “cover [their] works with black … to
make of them a mute accusation against brutal force,” proposing that
rather than paintings, only the artists’ names should appear. They as-
sessed the stakes of the biennale in global terms: “We had thought that
this event would be all the more brilliant in that it would take place in
a country enamored of freedom and in which the arts were, from this
point onward, developing with no constraint. The brutal coup, unfore-
seen and entirely incredible, which we have just undergone, singularly
turned our plans upside down. But nothing can shake our hope, our
will to live in a better world, in a world without war, without terror, with-
out the arbitrary.”64 Mlynárčik and a number of other artists boycot-
ted the exhibition, which opened, six weeks later than scheduled, on
18 October.65 The artist wrote to Restany that he felt betrayed by Kara,
suggesting that the latter was using the event to rehabilitate himself
in the eyes of the public.66 Restany did not attend the opening either,
but when he arrived in Bratislava in November he observed: “A material
result like this obtained in such circumstances, under military occupa-
tion and in the uncertainty of the politics of tomorrow, constitutes a
miracle of suppleness and tenacity.”67
30 Chapter 1
Mlynárčik continued to create opportunities for socially oriented
manifestations and alternative experiences of reality.68 In 1970, for
instance, his contribution to the Parisian Salon de Mai was a project
called The Message. He explained to Restany in a letter that he had sent
each of 13 international artists a “stratospheric balloon” with a diam-
eter of 4–5 meters and had asked them each to blow it up, to attach a
message, and to launch it into the air to produce what he described
as “13 Messages, 13 Greetings of human freedom, internationalism and
idealism, a Game, a ‘sacrifice’ of ideas.”69 He himself sent up one such
balloon, together with his friend the artist Miloš Urbásek, on 22 May in
the Tatra Mountains (figure 1.3).
Several of Mlynárčik’s most spectacular events revolved around the
poetics of the local (though in each case visitors from abroad were in-
vited to participate in the festivities). The inspiration for If All the Trains
in the World … (12 June 1971) would later be sketched out by the artist as
follows: “I was driving through the most idyllic countryside—chimneys
smoking, snow everywhere. It made me recall all kinds of fairy tales.
And suddenly the smallest, tiniest train appeared from the woods look-
ing like a toy, puffing happily as it passed through the valley. What an
amazing experience!” He explained that he wanted the local people
to understand how special this experience had been for him and how
“since the train’s route was being discontinued I decided to let its last
journey be dedicated to those who lived alongside it all its life and to let
it be a beautiful and unique experience.” The photographs of the event
demonstrate that he succeeded, for they are full of smiling participants
(figures 1.4, 1.5). Mlynárčik describes having created “the dream train,
pink and gold, and overflowing with music, food and drink,” as though,
at last, fortune had arrived in this forgotten corner of the countryside.70
Foreigners present included Erik Dietman and Lev Nusberg as well as
artists from Restany’s circle such as Antoni Miralda and Dorothée Selz.
Miralda and Selz prepared food in a restaurant coach painted pink,
Róbert Cyprich loaded the postal wagon with carrier pigeons, and Nus-
berg staged a fireworks display as the grand finale. The event formed a
new stage in Mlynárčik’s reinvention of the avant-garde “art into life”
project.71
Una Cosa Nostra 31

Figure 1.3
Alex Mlynárčik, Le Message (Participation
of Miloš Urbásek), Salon de Mai, Paris,
1970. Photo: Alex Mlynárčik. Courtesy of
INHA-Collection Archives de la critique
d’art, Rennes.
32 Chapter 1
Figures 1.4 and 1.5
Alex Mlynárčik, If All the Trains in the World …,
1972. Photo: Miloš Vančo. Courtesy of the
Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava.
Una Cosa Nostra 33

In April 1972, he conceptualized his commitment to international
activity along new lines, writing to Restany that he and his friend
Róbert Cyprich had founded an “international group” which would be
an “image of friendship,” a “family,” a “Cosa Nostra”—an international
alternative art world mafia: homely yet secret; shady, perhaps, but per-
formatively so. Adding a further layer of his personal history to the met-
aphor, Mlynárčik invited Restany to be an honorary member of what
he called the “Club Inter Bratislava,” suggesting some sort of affilia-
tion with the official sports club Inter Bratislava. Further emphasizing
their ambition to achieve trappings that would parallel official status,
he wrote that they hoped in future to publish an information bulletin
and an “illuminated codex ‘Cosa Nostra.’”72
At this time, Mlynárčik was developing his idea of “life play” as a
form of activity—a sort of “painting life” in which he hoped “to create
situations which made the public capable of realizing its own creative
contributions.” One of the most memorable of these was Eva’s Wed-
ding,73 held on 27 September 1972 in Žilina, an event based on L’udovít
Fulla’s naïve 1946 painting Village Wedding. Mlynárčik enlisted the par-
ticipation of a young electrician and his bride to transform their wed-
ding into an extravagant folkloric celebration, full of international
guests and ancient Slovak customs, with unexpected modern twists,
such as the hiring of a helicopter to shower congratulatory leaflets on
the town square. Chalupecký, who was the best man, later explained
that the artist had saved money from state-funded commissions for
“decorative projects” to pay for the event, which “cost a small fortune.”74
After the ceremony, the party retired to a restaurant, where Restany
presented the couple with gifts of original artworks from around the
Figures 1.6 and 1.7

Alex Mlynárčik, Eva’s Wedding, 1972.
Photo: Miloš Vančo. Courtesy of the
Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava.
34 Chapter 1
Una Cosa Nostra 35
world by the likes of Niki de Saint Phalle. Mlynárčik recollected: “Pierre
was in seventh heaven. He ran about in all directions very excitedly and
invited the policemen from Žilina to the Venice Biennale … that was
what Restany was like” (figure 1.6, 1.7).75 Mlynárčik wrote to his friend:
“I am sure that the new School of Bratislava, which you have indirectly
created, has its essential importance in joyous optimism. Perhaps we
can corrupt the hegemony of this fat and skeptical goulash which has
taken root in us.”76 After the wedding, Mlynárčik took Restany to the
hamlet of Krištofícko, and it was there that the artist conceived his idea
of setting up an “independent republic.” This was realized in 1974 in
the form of Argilla, a project defined by Restany as a “Monarchy of the
Imagination” with all the trappings of a political state, from foreign
ambassadors to Restany as the President of the National Assembly and
the Galerie Lara Vincy in Paris as its press agency.77
Mlynárčik wrote to thank Restany for the joy that his participation
in the wedding had brought and in particular for “the strength which
your presence with us and your human participation in my ideas gave
me.”78 He complained that the wedding was interpreted by so-called
“real artists” as shocking and that he had been accused of insulting Slo-
vak culture, etc. He wrote that the action had been intended for normal
people—workers and peasants—full of gestures for them, noting with
delight that there had been several longer articles about the action in
factory newspapers.79
Mlynárčik was expelled from the Union of Artists in the autumn of
1972. Although his letters to Restany describe an increasingly repressive
situation, he was working intensively on another major international
event: Inter-Étrennes. Unlike the majority of his colleagues, he con-
tinued to travel: while visiting Documenta 5 in Kassel, he met Liliane
Vincy and discussed a collaboration between Restany and the Club In-
ter Bratislava.80 The idea was to turn the inside of the Galerie Lara Vincy
into a station with a range of activities, including two tombolas (raffles).
He asked Liliane to invite key networkers of the day such as László Beke
from Hungary, Jorge Glusberg from Argentina, Thomas Messer (direc-
tor of the Guggenheim in New York), Arturo Schwarz, and Lev Nus-
berg.81 Advertising a “tombola sale gift of your dreams,” Inter-Étrennes
36 Chapter 1
opened at the Galerie Lara Vincy in early December 1972 and involved a
great number of artists offering multiples they had produced as Christ-
mas gifts, which were sold off to the audience by Restany for the modest
sum of 10 francs each.82
Unable to travel to Paris himself at the time, Mlynárčik wrote to par-
ticipants congratulating them on having managed “to express a simple
and pure human gesture. Through our action we demonstrated in a cer-
tain sense the friendly relations of artists founded on an international
basis and dependent on good will. 88 artists from all over the world
participated in this action.” He noted its sociological value, saying that
it “represents one of the current attempts at the social application of
art which tries once again to attract the public to creative participation
… a more human and progressive art.”83 Mlynárčik’s difficult position
in normalized Czechoslovakia made him all the more convinced of the
need for solidarity. Writing to Restany he affirmed his enthusiasm for
“LA FAMILLE!,” saying “Thank God it exists!!!” He wrote that he hoped
Inter-Étrennes had contributed to the creation of a certain artistic spirit:
“I am convinced that we have done a good job, with some good ideas.
There are situations that one cannot write about precisely. These are
gestures, contacts—it’s a struggle. If one works a lot, in the end one
creates an atmosphere, a tendency, and a small epoch. For all this one
needs friendship, help, mutual reciprocity. Already at this moment we
belong to the epoch, which we are forming together. We are no longer
individuals.”84
Mlynárčik’s friendship with Restany was one of the earliest in-
stances of a mutually invigorating unofficial, noncommercial East-West
exchange. Each helped the other in finding the authentic experience
he was looking for: Mlynárčik wanted to escape the provincialism of
Bratislava and, later, to have a way to forge relationships outside the
repressive post-1968 cultural climate; and Restany wanted to find new
territories to experience and to find alternatives to the outdated hege-
mony of the Paris school in an effort to find a European answer to the
challenge from American postwar art. Beke later characterized Resta-
ny’s approach to art as being a form of diplomacy by other means: “he
was one of the first who just after the Second World War picked up the
Una Cosa Nostra 37

idea of the united Europe. A United Europe against the United Nations;
Nouveaux Réalistes against American pop art.”85 Restany’s integrity
was respected by Hungarian colleagues: Beke recollected the painter
Vera Molnár saying that Restany had “talked about the Hungarians in
Paris,” saying that “when they were young in ’56, Restany was working
in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris, [on] the Quai d’Orsay, and
when the Revolution was killed by Russian troops, he came in a black
suit to mourn us with flowers expressing his sympathy because of the
fallen revolution.”86 Irrespective of whether this memory is entirely ac-
curate, the anecdote reflects how far the generation around whom the
stories in this book coalesce developed a respect for Restany. He was a
Gaullist and not perceived as left-wing. His colleagues in the Soviet bloc
saw him as someone with a unique moral grasp of issues confronting
the inhabitants of the Soviet bloc.87
Restany complained bitterly about Nouveau Réalisme being side-
lined by the French commissioner for Venice in 1964, and he suffered
the trauma of Rauschenberg’s scooping of the International Grand
Prize at the Biennale—an honor reserved for French recipients on al-
most every previous occasion. That Rauschenberg was so young only
added insult to injury, and his triumph symbolically pinpoints the shift
of the art world’s epicenter from Paris to New York.88 But Rauschenberg
was not the only American experimental artist making his name in Eu-
rope at the time: the Biennale of 1964 set in motion a train of events
leading to the arrival of John Cage and the Merce Cunningham Dance
Company in Prague, soon to be followed by the Fluxus artists.89
38 Chapter 1
2
Keeping Together
Among the artists representing Czechoslovakia in Venice in 1964 was

painter Jan Kotík. While they were there Kotík and his wife saw the
Merce Cunningham Dance Company perform, and they engineered an
official invitation to Prague for the company, sponsored by the authori-
ties. (The U.S. Embassy in Prague reportedly “issued a pronouncement
that the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and the artists connected
to it did not represent official American culture.”)1 The Company, with
John Cage, David Tudor, and Robert Rauschenberg, stayed in Prague
from 21 to 23 September 1964 before flying to the Czech city of Ostrava
and on to Warsaw. The visitors were accompanied on the last leg of the
trip by the Kotíks’ son Petr Kotík, a young flutist and composer, who
coincidentally had been studying in Vienna and had played with Cage
and Tudor for the Company in June that year.2 In Ostrava, they were re-
portedly greeted with a “customary casualness” and “participated in a
debate at the Theater of Music organized by the musicologist Vladimir Chapter
Lébl.”3 The 1964 performances at the Congress Hall in Prague were at-
tended by 2,000 people, although this may have been more a result of
their clever billing as an “American ballet in the style of the West Side
Story” than a reflection of the Prague audience’s enthusiasm for experi-
Keeping
mental music.4 There was clearly little understanding of who the visi-
tors were, for the assemblage of found objects created by Rauschenberg
for the set was “thrown out directly after the performance.”5 In Prague,
one of the members of the audience was the young Milan Knížák.
Like Mlynárčik and others at that time, Knížák had developed a
relationship to reality that was well beyond the Cold War schema of
a division between autonomous abstraction and socialist realism’s
claims to represent “reality in its revolutionary development.” Knížák
declared that he was in favor of a total approach: “It’s not necessary
to slice up reality. All reality is at your disposal.”6 His account of how
he came to engage in experimental activities in public space in Prague
was low-key, however: “An unsuitable small flat forced me to paint and
assemble my paintings and objects in the street in front of the house
I lived in. Chance passers-by witnessed the process of the birth and
demise of a work.”7 He later sought to avoid being cast too much in the
guise of an anti-establishment figure, arguing that his methods were
a manifestation of the limited means available for experimentation at
the time, rather than any ascetic reflection of a desire to avoid the “es-
tablishment” at all costs: “If I had had the opportunity in the Sixties
to utilise the media and television … galleries and museums, I would
certainly have used everything; but the situation was completely differ-
ent.”8 Knížák insisted on the originality of experimental developments
in Czechoslovakia: “Here, this activity had no grandfathers; no connec-
tions; no names; no titles. It … fell from the sky. Better—it was spread
all over, grew out of the people around it. … It was necessary. There was
no purpose in making art. It was just a way of communicating. A way
to learn and teach—how to push people to listen, to think, to exist. To
exist right. Straight.”9 He emphasized that his activities were a way of
life: “I don’t consider these things to be results, but only means—only
a kind of bridge between the one who talks and the one who listens.”10
Knížák claimed that he had not been aware of the parallels between
his own experiments and international developments: “You must re-
alise that I was very isolated; I was surrounded only by friends who
knew even less than I did, and what arose around me in Prague was
spontaneous.”11 In 1964, together with Jan and Vít Mach, Soňa Švecová,
and Jan Trtílek, Knížák founded the group Aktual Art (Aktuální umĕní),
whose aim it was “to teach a person to live.”12 The “Manifesto of Ak-
tual Art” (1963–1964) proclaimed the need for “TOTAL COMMITMENT!”
(figure 2.1). The manifesto read like an appeal against commodity cul-
ture—despite being issued from within a communist situation. It fo-
cused on transforming subject-object relations and overcoming the
42 Chapter 2
Figure 2.1
Milan Knížák, 1st Manifestation of Aktual
Art, 1964. Courtesy of the artist.
reification of life: “man is drowning in the enormous abundance of

products of the 20th century,” they wrote, cautioning that these objects
“exist to serve him, and not he to serve them.”13 This, Knížák explained,
was the “indefinable but burning belief” that became the “cornerstone
of the activity of a group which grew to be a small, illegal movement in
Czechoslovakia: the Aktual movement.”14
The activities carried out by the group included the distribution
of paper gliders to passersby one Sunday in the streets of the city as
well as what Knížák calls “wonderful games in the woods.”15 One of
these was The Aktual Walk: Demonstration for All the Senses. Participants
Keeping Together 43
were instructed to bring with them an object of some sort from home
and were locked in a perfume-filled house for five minutes. They then
walked past a series of strange situations in the street, such as a man ly-
ing on his back playing double bass, and lined up in the square with their
objects, while Knížák paraded up and down (figure 2.2). All this was con-
ceived as a prelude to a “second” part of the event that would continue
for a further two weeks and would be “different for each participant. Ev-
erything that happens to him during this period is a second part of this
demonstration.”16 In another action along similar lines, “Jan Mach, who
was in the army at that time, sent lots of packages full of many different
things to unknown people, chosen at random from the phone book.”17 If
the activities of the group were geared toward the local audience, and if
Knížák stressed their independence of foreign influence, a critic such as
Jindřich Chalupecký could not fail to see the link with experimental de-
velopments abroad. As Knížák recalled, “Mr. Chalupecký came up with
information once things were already under way.”18
In his landmark collection of essays on Czechoslovak artists enti-
tled Na hranicích umĕní (On the borders of art) Chalupecký wrote that
“Knížák … had not even heard of Kaprow; and after I told him, follow-
ing the first action-walk, that what he was doing was a form of hap-
pening, he was rather astonished … at that time nothing was known
about happenings: Knížák had only heard the word once on the radio,
accompanied by a negative commentary.” Chalupecký shared publica-
tions with the young artist and sent photos of his works to Kaprow. He
remembered that Kaprow replied: “I can’t express how excited I was by
the scenarios and photographs of happenings of Milan Knížák that you
sent me,” writing that “these are works of absolute beauty, and I was
very happy to learn that they were born independently of mine. Hap-
penings have the same marvelous property as mushrooms: they spring
up everywhere … !”19 Kaprow was working on his book Assemblages, En-
vironments and Happenings at the time and devoted a section to Knížák
(figure 2.3).20
Chalupecký also introduced Knížák and his friends to Fluxus artists.
Contact with Eastern Europe had been initiated by the Danish Fluxus
artists Eric and Tony Andersen, who toured Poland, Czechoslovakia,
44 Chapter 2
Figure 2.2
Milan Knížák, The Aktual Walk—
Demonstration for All Senses, 1964.
Courtesy of the artist.
Keeping Together 45
46 Chapter 2
Figure 2.3
Page layout from Allan Kaprow,
Assemblages, Environments and
Happenings (New York: H. N. Abrams,
1966). Courtesy of Milan Knížák.
Hungary, and the USSR in 1964 in a Renault 4 converted into a mobile

library “with books, multiples and tapes.” “Chairman” Maciunas had
not been involved in planning this first Fluxus tour and condemned
the Andersen brothers for “travelling all over East Europe without any
authorization from Fluxus committee and performing very compro-
mising pieces (and totally wrong ones for East Europe).” In 1964, he an-
nounced the expulsion of Eric Andersen, Addi Kopcke, Tomas Schmit,
and Emmett Williams from Fluxus, referring to them as “imposters.”21
The materials gifted to artists in the USSR as part of the tour proved
to be the ones that resonated most strongly in Prague, in the round-
about way that was so typical of those times. Petra Stegmann mentions
a letter written by Chalupecký on his return to Prague from a trip to
Leningrad addressed to Willem de Ridder’s European Mail Order Ware-
house (a European Fluxus headquarters of sorts at that time) in which
he wrote: “By chance, at the painter Gurvič’s in Leningrad, I saw ma-
terials published by the Fluxus movement. They are of great interest
to us, and I would be endlessly grateful to you if you could send us
an example as well.”22 Chalupecký added that “We have a group ‘Actual
Art’ that pursues similar goals and whom I would like to show it to.”23
Knížák later explained: “I did not make any decision as to whether I
would cooperate with Fluxus; George Maciunas wrote me a letter, then
later sent me a great many Fluxus publications, boxes and films, and
simply included me in Fluxus.”24
George Maciunas had emigrated as a child from Lithuania but re-
mained a supporter of the USSR. He became alienated from Lithuanian
émigré circles in the United States early on, changing his name, report-
edly in response to their rejection of a proposal he had made to deliver
Keeping Together 47
a lecture on “Realism in Music” in the name of “the collective of the
magazine Fluxus” (having originally intended Fluxus to be an avant-
garde magazine).25 His earliest contact with experimental Soviet bloc
figures had been with the Hungarian ’56er György Ligeti, with Svjato-
slav Leotevic Krutiakov in the USSR, and with Kolář, whom the Polish
musicologist Józef Patkowski (the head of the Polish Radio Experi-
mental Studio) had put him in touch with. Patkowski met Maciunas
at the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music in the
summer of 1962 and arranged for some musical scores sent to him by
Maciunas to be performed in Warsaw.26 They also began planning an
East European Fluxus Yearbox, sharing materials with Kolář in Prague
and Edison Denisov in Moscow, though this never came to fruition.27
Maciunas envisaged Fluxus as a successor to the Soviet avant-garde
magazine LEF, and notoriously wrote to Nikita Khrushchev in the early
1960s to seek his “esteemed auspices” for “projects we are embarking
upon with the prime objective of promoting fusion between the revolu-
tionary-realist society of the USSR and the revolutionary-realist artists
of the world.”28 Thoroughly embracing Marxist-Leninist newspeak, his
letter on behalf of the “important cadres of new concretist art” asked
for support in publishing a periodical, designed to express “our desire
for purging the sickness of the bourgeois world” and for organizing a
“world-wide concretist art and music festival” that would tour for 3–4
months “throughout USSR (in most European and Siberian Republics).”
He asked for “political leadership” and for permission “to establish
the directive and operational headquarters for all FLUXUS activities
(publications and concert-exhibits) anywhere within the USSR.” He
signed off “Hoping our plans will receive favorable consideration, we
remain yours very respectfully.” Maciunas found little support for such
projects among other Fluxus artists.29 Needless to say, there is also no
evidence that the plans found favor with Khrushchev, whose conserva-
tive approach to art was made clear during his notorious outburst at
the MOSSKH (Moscow Section of the Artists’ Union) exhibition at the
Manezh in Moscow in 1962, during which he pronounced that the ab-
stract sculptures of Ernst Neizvestnyi were “degenerate,” and banned
much of the work on display.30
48 Chapter 2
Independently of Maciunas, Andersen, Kopcke, and Schmit visited
the city theater studio Reduta, where their performances were billed
as marking “the first presentation of the most radical forms of the
avant-garde in any Eastern European country.”31 Later, in October, a full-
blown Fluxus festival was organized. Maciunas wrote to Chalupecký to
say that he could not come to Prague for the festival in October, but that
Jeff Berner and Ben Vautier were coming.32 Apparently Berner and Serge
Oldenbourg had been invited also by Knížák, while Alison Knowles and
Dick Higgins were invited independently by Chalupecký.33 Stegmann
recounts that “events in Prague in October were informed by tensions:
Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles had fallen into disgrace with the foun-
dation of Higgins’s Something Else Press in 1963; Maciunas considered
it to be a rival operation to his own publishing activities and thus what
looked like a joint Fluxus festival was in fact two events, occurring at
the same time,” and Maciunas wrote bitterly to Chalupecký that Dick
Higgins’s sole purpose in coming to Prague for the event in October
1966 had been to “sabotage fluxfest.”34 For their part, it seems that Ben
Vautier and Milan Knížák both ignored Maciunas’s “Proposed Program
for a Fluxfest in Prague (1966)” and organized their own Fluxus Concert
in Prague that year. Chalupecký, with his contacts and influence, played
a key role in pulling it off.35
In a letter to Maciunas, Ben Vautier recalled that he had left for
Prague in his “Car Fluxus” with Oldenbourg and “$100 in his pocket,
reaching the city on 12 October.” He wrote “very Sad country No lights
Bad roads etc.—Arrived in Prague went to Knížák’s house Marvellous
Street Nový Svět—Marvellous fellow very clear—and simple.”36 He
added that they immediately “did a street piece,” where Oldenbourg
and he put a table and chairs on the car and ate outside Knížák’s house.
The car had a wooden roof that served as a stage.37 For Knížák, the high-
light of the KoncertFluxu was the final Public Amusement by Vautier,
in which a large plastic tube was inflated and participants made their
way down the hill and into the town with the inflatable snake.38 The
event culminated in scandal after the others had left. Oldenbourg, after
a night of drunken performances, “gave his passport to a Slovak soldier,
who successfully fled to the West with it, which led to Oldenbourg’s
Keeping Together 49
14-month incarceration and Knížák’s temporary arrest.”39 It was
Knížák’s second arrest that week.40 Maciunas sought to distance Fluxus
from Oldenbourg as he was worried that his plans to seek the approval
of the Socialist authorities would be hampered by the association. He
wrote to Knížák: “I’m afraid we are going to have to kick him out for
this kind of rightist behaviour.”41
Looking back in later years, Knížák noted:
Fluxus is just a bunch of people who are all different, but they have some-
thing in common … they are connected with action, with something that
starts immediately and ends and is not too serious. Maybe it is serious but
it doesn’t look too serious. In the early 60s there were about 20 artists in
the whole world that worked on those subjects. I grew up with these people,
even though I was here and they were there. When somebody found some-
body else, then everybody was happy. In the beginning we didn’t know about
each other. When they found out I was here, they sent me materials and
published my stuff, it was so nice, you can’t imagine. I was so happy. I felt
very isolated in Czechoslovakia. Everybody was laughing at my work, they
thought it was very bad.42
A strong sense of community existed: “We are all basically the same.
Most artists are searching for humanity, they are looking for something
that connects people.”43 What he said echoed claims made by Restany.
In an essay on Czechoslovak art for Domus, Restany would argue that
the work of Kolář, Bĕla Kolářová, and the happenings of Milan Knížák
represented the possibility of a “new humanism.”44 Knížák’s member-
ship in this community was officially enshrined when he was appointed
as director of Fluxus East. It was an honor bestowed upon him unex-
pectedly, perhaps matched only by Allen Ginsberg being crowned King
of the Prague May Day Parade of 1965, after which he was thrown out
of the country as an “American homosexual narcotic hippie—a poor
model for Czechoslovakian youth.”45
Despite his new title, there is little evidence of Knížák making con-
tact with artists in neighboring countries—even when he traveled to
Poland in 1963 and in 1966. He recalled:
50 Chapter 2
I crossed the border at a time when passports only permitted one to enter
the first 15 km into Polish territory. I hitchhiked to Warsaw illegally, to see
an exhibition by Van Gogh. I probably found out about the exhibition from a
Czechoslovak art journal. It was amusing because at the time I had long hair
and nobody in Poland wore their hair that way and I felt that many people
were watching me carefully. The second time I went to Poland legally in 1966,
to see the sea, because I had never seen it before. I hitchhiked to Gdańsk and
I kept being stopped by the military police. I remember I stayed in residence
halls in Kraków, but I didn’t make any contacts on the trip.46
Knížák explained that at the time he had been “a completely for-

gotten, young guy, living in Prague. I mean, no power, no nothing, and
then I became the director of Fluxus East … it was fun … but it means
and it meant nothing, of course.”47 It seemed that Knížák did not take
his appointment terribly seriously: “George Maciunas sent me a quan-
tity of instructions (how and what was to be carried out), as he prob-
ably did to each of the more prominent members of Fluxus, but my
work was elsewhere and I did not set too much store by this. I was just
happy that elsewhere in the world there exist people who think the way
I do.”48 His position was ultimately incompatible with Maciunas’s revo-
lutionary fervor. He would later recall: “I was more involved in chang-
ing everyday life than in making revolutions because a revolution is
changing nothing. It just takes the power from one side and puts it on
the other side.”49 Knížák insisted that his activities were not mere art
world games but were a “necessary” form of activity. Thus, when Cha-
lupecký published an article on happenings concerning Kaprow, Cage,
and Vostell for the journal Výtvarná práce in 1967, Knížák published a
response in which he strategically distanced himself from his Western
counterparts. “Thank God for the so-called Iron Curtain,” he quipped:
“This thorough isolation prevented us from degenerating so tragically
and to such an extreme as the rest of Europe … in our country action
activity isn’t experiment art, but necessary activity … the simple supply
of missing things, a prescription of needed vitamins.”50
Unlike Knížák, Vostell was delighted by Chalupecký’s text. The West
German artist and author of the magazine dé-coll/age (named after a
Keeping Together 51
famous postwar French review devoted to aviation) wrote to him in 1967
saying that a friend had showed him “an excellent article on happen-
ings in your country which was written by yourself,” asking whether he
could have a copy of it and re-publish parts of it in the next dé-coll/age
(6).51 A correspondence ensued and Vostell regularly sent Chalupecký
copies of his magazine and all sorts of hand-painted postcards with
greetings (figure 2.4).
Vostell’s contact with Eastern Europe at the time may well have been
initiated by the Hungarian artist Gábor Altorjay, who, in collaboration
with Támas Szentjóby, had orchestrated the first Hungarian happening
in 1966, subsequently emigrating in response to persistent harassment
by secret police.52 At the end of 1966, Altorjay launched his own samiz-
dat publication, entitled Laura?, a name reportedly given a question
mark by the artist in anticipation of the satisfaction it would give him,
when he was questioned about the publication by the secret police, to
be able to reply, innocently, Laura?53 Amy Brouillette, who interviewed
the artist, recounts how he “traded a set of silver candle holders, a fam-
ily heirloom, for an old typewriter from his neighbour, a German Erika
model which had not been sampled by the authorities.”54 He then typed
all manner of commentary and information concerning Hungarian and
international (not necessarily art-related) events, on one- or two-meter-
long rolls of paper and distributed them to a close circle of friends in
the form of scrolls.55 Laura? also blurred fact and fiction by introduc-
ing what Altorjay called “news from the future,” i.e., happenings that
had not yet happened. The first issue of 1966, for instance, reported on
Miklós Erdély’s arrival in Paris in 1974. Altorjay may have been inspired
by Argentine colleagues here, for he also republished the documentation
of the Happening para un jabalí difunto by Eduardo Costa, Raúl Escari,
Figure 2.4
Wolf Vostell, postcard to Jindřich
Chalupecký. Courtesy of Památník
národního písemnictví—literární
archiv, Prague.
52 Chapter 2
Keeping Together 53
and Roberto Jacoby—a happening that never took place but was
reported in an illustrated article in El Mundo (Buenos Aires, 21 August
1966)—a strategic example of their friend Oscar Masotta’s pioneering
recommendation that “After Pop, We Dematerialize!” (1967).56 In the
same spirit of international enterprise, Altorjay proposed 15 Actions for
Marta Minujín in 1967; Minujín was arguably the most significant hap-
pening artist in Latin America at the time and a collaborator of Vostell’s.
Although Laura? lasted less than a year and each of the five issues
only ever existed in three or four copies, it was a resounding success.
Brouillette argues that it should be considered not so much a publica-
tion as “a ‘happening’ that broke social and political taboos, not only
those on publishing itself but on the internal, psychic constraints of
‘self-censorship’. It was as much an act of psychic disobedience as it was
a test of the internal collective, who successfully managed to circulate
the publication undetected, before burning every copy.”57 Besides his
contacts with Vostell, Altorjay was well placed to disseminate informa-
tion to colleagues on international events. He reportedly taught him-
self English, French, German, and Polish while enrolled in a seminary
(a move that exempted him from military service). His regular visits
to Poland yielded significant experiences and contacts (in contrast to
Knížák’s visits), notably an encounter with Tadeusz Kantor at the time
he was developing new forms of Happening Theater, as he sometimes
called it.58 Altorjay’s information about Western developments, how-
ever, was largely gleaned from the “flood of materials” that he began
to receive from Dick Higgins, after reading Higgins’s essay on interme-
dia.59 Altorjay wrote to Something Else Press in New York and they en-
tered into a lively correspondence.
Knížák met Higgins when the latter came to Prague; a few years
later, when he saw Higgins again in New York in 1968, he recorded in his
“Travel Book”: “Dick is already a classic at 30.”60 He also entered into a
correspondence with intermedia artist Ken Friedman, a young man pi-
oneering a new course on the subject of intermedia in San Francisco.61
Knížák and Friedman wrote to each another about the possibility of
organizing an annual series of parallel actions in Prague and San Fran-
cisco under the heading Keeping Together Manifestation (figure 2.5).62
54 Chapter 2
In one letter Knížák wrote to Friedman in English: “I love you for your
activity. We must keep together more places on the globe! To want to
live—otherwise. To live otherwise. I’m shaking with your hands for bas-
ing of Aktual USA. Right Idea!”63 As part of the proposed collaboration
they hatched a plan for making the whole world “a big dining-room”—
a Keeping Together Ceremony.64 Instructions were typed in German
for a table and chairs to be put outside the house and for passersby to
be invited to share a meal (echoing Vautier and Oldenbourg’s piece of
1966 when the pair dined outside Knížák’s place). As Tomáš Pospiszyl
notes: “they found a common vocabulary almost immediately … the
constraints imposed by physical distance and political circumstance
only seemed to strengthen their ties.”65 Knížák’s correspondence, with
Friedman and others, was lent a certain feverishness by its chaotic pre-
sentation. His mailings often consisted of large, hastily scrawled mes-
sages in biro, usually in capital letters and often covering the blank
page diagonally, either as a supplement to typed text or alone. There
were frequent crossings out and errors, as if Knížák was deliberately
cultivating the look of immediacy. This disregard for the way his com-
munications looked would be in line with his “total commitment” to
his activities as “necessary” everyday ways to live “a little otherwise,” as
he put it.66 It might also be seen as an expression of resistance to the
aestheticization and reification of the documentation of conceptual
and mail art.67 Knížák wrote to Friedman saying that the intention was
that “in Prague, New York, San Francisco and other places we will once
again gather to prove and demonstrate the right of human beings to
live completely and fully human lives.”68 His thinking was very much in
tune with Friedman’s. Friedman was also engaged in theorizing a form
of globalism that could embrace what he described as the idea of “a
single world, a world in which the boundaries of political states are not
identical with the boundaries of nature or culture.”69
Although Knížák had wanted to go to the United States for several
years, he was denied a visa. Paradoxically, Morganová recounts that he
received one “as a consequence of the occupation,” and was finally let
out in October 1968. She argues that his trip made him realize again
“the extent to which art was separated from life, how it only existed
Keeping Together 55
Figure 2.5
Milan Knížák, Keeping Together Day, 1st
Spring Sunday 1968. Courtesy of the artist.
56 Chapter 2
within the circle of a very small group of people.”70 She proposes that he
turned to rituals as a response to this realization.71 Knížák participated
in a Fluxus West show in San Diego and carried out performances in a
range of settings while touring the US. In Pathways of Fire in Los Angeles,
for instance, he proposed that fuel be constantly added to just one side
of a fire in such a way that the fire moved from the “hilltops” down into
the valley (unsurprisingly the action was forbidden by the State Depart-
ment).72 In spring 1969, he was also able to visit Friedman (who had a
VW microbus he referred to as a Fluxmobile). Knížák recorded mixed
feelings of delight and disappointment in a “travel book” about his tour
of the US, where he met key figures of the experimental scene, “peo-
ple who have names,” he later wrote, such as John Cage, Dick Higgins,
Jackson Mac Low, La Monte Young, Yoko Ono, and others, but he said
that “Allan Kaprow towers like the Empire State Building above all these
people.”73 At times, his enthusiasm is palpable: “And the clothes! (I’ve al-
ready bought boots with little bells on them and a Stetson. And a golden
poncho),”74 while at others he appears to be underwhelmed, lamenting,
for instance, after an evening spent at the New School, that “I found
it a little embarrassing. It’s a fact that in general now there’s a kind of
ebb tide, a sort of slowing down. … But why for God’s sake does the
avant-garde become academic so quickly … ?”75 He found certain affini-
ties between California and Eastern Europe: “people, and mainly young
people, get together in houses where they play, sing, talk, smoke mari-
juana, drop acid or mescaline and screw. And all of this—these house
parties—is a very typical thing for Europe, especially Eastern Europe …
but of course in California it struck me as being much more natural
… we went to one house and lay around for three hours and drank the
owner’s beer before he himself finally showed up.”76 While abroad he
experienced a disconnection from the situation in Czechoslovakia. In
one entry in the travel book he writes: “In Bohemia, Honza Palach has
just burned himself. The situation there gets stranger and stranger and
a lot of people have committed themselves to a lot of things and I feel
that all that is behind me, has dropped away from me like leaves off a
tree. I find it strange. Being committed has always seemed important
to me. I had always been somewhere on the pinnacle of desperate and
Keeping Together 57
almost pointless commitment and now all I want to do is lose myself in
the intricate and bubbling labyrinth of the world.”77
By 1970, Knížák’s activities were becoming well known internation-
ally and were included in Harald Szeemann’s “Happening & Fluxus”
exhibition of that year. The show, which opened in Bern and traveled
to Cologne, Stuttgart, Amsterdam, and Berlin, consisted of materials
gathered together by the collector Hans Sohm. It included documents
on works by Knížák and Aktual, beginning with Knížák’s early pieces
Street Demonstration, Nový svĕt, Prague, 1963 and Demonstration of All
Senses, Prague, 1964. Other significant Central European happenings
were also documented: St. Filko + A. Mlynárčik, Happsoc II and Creation
Days, Bratislava, 13–25 December 1965, Altorjay and Szentjóby’s Happen-
ing az ebed (in memoriam Batu Khan), 1966 (listed under Altorjay’s name
only), and Tadeusz Kantor’s La lettre, Galeria Foksal, Warsaw, 27 January
1967. Szeemann was well known in Eastern Europe by this stage. As the
Hungarian artist Gábor Attalai later explained, his generation “treated
Harald Szeemann as a god at the time, because he revealed a world in
which limits ceased and art could turn toward a domain in which there
was no longer any need for material.”78 In a letter sometime around
New Year 1971, Szeemann wrote to Chalupecký as part of his prepara-
tions for Documenta 5, asking for information about Knížák and other
artists but explaining that “after the Happening & Fluxus story” a Docu-
menta devoted to Eastern European art was not on the cards.79 Otto
Muehl’s Manopsychotic Ballet, which included simulations of rape and
defecation, and Hermann Nitsch’s ceremonies, with their ritual slaugh-
ter of live animals, had resulted in difficulties for the organizer and the
banning of Muehl and Nitsch from performing in Austria.80 In view of
the incomparably tamer nature of any East European artistic proposi-
tions at that time, and the implausibility that these might stir up moral
outrage in the less conservative German context, one can only conclude
that Szeemann did not wish to stir up political trouble by foreground-
ing artists from socialist countries.
When he returned to Prague in 1970, Knížák recalled that his peers
had certain expectations that he would become more politically vocal,
58 Chapter 2
based on his reputation as an outsider. He explained that he was unpre-
pared to fulfill these:
In the ’60s I was young and a kind of a king of Czechoslovakian youth; they
liked me. I was strong, hard and wild. When I came back from the States in
1970, they wanted me to stand in front of the opposition, the so-called un-
derground of those times. I refused, because I already know that to become
a political leader is not good. … I found and made a position in the 70s being
enemy of all: of the government and the opposition … the opposition is not
the opposite … being on the other side means the same, just a different color.
The ends are very similar.81
Instead, he moved to a village near Mariánské láznĕ and continued

to carry out and to document his collective activities there. The move
was in some respects parallel to that taken by the Slovene group OHO at
around the same time. Like OHO, Knížák wanted to avoid both the art
world, which he had experienced firsthand while in the United States,
and local pressure to contribute to the formation of some sort of politi-
cal “opposition.”82 The Czechoslovak cultural situation was deteriorat-
ing rapidly with the advance of normalization, and saw the removal of
Chalupecký from his post in 1970. Not only had Chalupecký played a
key part in propelling Knížák into the international art circuit; he also
worked tirelessly to create a new model for thinking about Czechoslovak
art as a whole. In the longer term, Jiří Ševčík and Jana Ševčíková rightly
stress the importance of Chalupecký’s writing on Duchamp. They argue
that Chalupecký’s samizdat book on Duchamp, published openly only
posthumously, was considered “by local literary criticism to be one of
the most tragic books about [Czech] art.”83 In view of Czechoslovak real-
ities, they argue that Chalupecký interpreted Duchamp’s prophecy that
“the great artist of tomorrow will go underground” as “a resignation of
public activity and a descent to anonymity.”84
Despite having left Prague, Knížák continued to receive invitations
to exhibit and publish abroad, suffering consequences for the interna-
tional circulation of his work. He informed the editor Wolfgang Feelisch,
Keeping Together 59
who had published a book documenting his activities under the title
Zeremonien, that he had been arrested. Knížák wrote to his friend say-
ing “please, help me. Pleas, [sic] my friend,” asking Feelisch to organize
people to write about it in papers and magazines all over the world, as
well as asking lawyers and the “society for human rights” to supervise
his next trial. Knížák reasoned: “If I will go to jail, all Czech art will
with me, all artfreedom [sic] will be jailed, tooooo.”85 In another letter,
he asked that Feelisch contact Vostell, Kaprow, Maciunas, Ayo, Vautier,
Restany, Friedman, and others. He admitted that it might seem “very
stupid to do all these things but they can KEEP me OUT of a jail. Best
would be to send a protest of most avant-garde famous world artist and
art magazine etc. to Czechoslovakian government. But this is probably
too phantastic and too overblown.”86
If Knížák’s messages were alarmist in tone, there is no doubt that he
was persecuted by the authorities for his activities from the outset, and
monitored all the more closely with the arrival of normalization. The
materials contained in the Zeremonien publication and others that were
seized from the German collector Hans Sohm by Czechoslovak border
guards in May 1972 had led to Knížák’s arrest. The materials were im-
pounded on the pretext that they were “intended to discredit the image
of Czechoslovakia abroad” and that their content was “pornographic.”87
Following Knížák’s letter to Feelisch, an “Action on behalf of Milan
Knížák” was organized by Sohm, who recorded in detail his treatment
at the hands of border officials and police.88 This was then taken up
by Feelisch of Vice-Versand (Remscheld) and Dietrich Albrecht of Re-
flection Press (Stuttgart) and later mimeographed by the Beau Geste
Press.89 The authors urged recipients: “PRINT FOLLOWING TEXT AND
SEND IT TO EVERYONE AROUND THE WORLD,” saying “the freedom
of contemporary art and artists all over the world is at stake.” The cir-
cular warned that Knížák had been “sentenced to two years’ impris-
onment by a court in Prague” and asked “all friends and collectors of
contemporary art” to contribute petitions, collect signatures, and write
personal letters to the “President of the Czechoslovakian Socialistic Re-
public” to secure his release.90 Letters by the artist and a statement by
Sohm were reproduced and included in the 7-page dispatch. This was
60 Chapter 2
“sent out with all the Press’s correspondence, reaching hundreds of their
collaborators and eventually contributing to the reduction of his custo-
dial sentence to parole.”91 Zana Gilbert points to the paradox that “this
capacity to reproduce and distribute information was both the reason
for Knížák’s arrest and, later, the means of obtaining his freedom,”92
highlighting how participation in the international network entailed
both a degree of risk and the offer of a promise of support.
Perhaps seeking to distance himself from the affair in the eyes
of the authorities, Alex Mlynárčik wrote to Restany, who had heard
of Knížák’s arrest through the network, that it had all been “a bit of
a publicity stunt. He was not, and is not in prison!”93 Both Knížák’s
case and Mlynárčik’s response to it reveal the degree to which there was
an inevitable performativity in relaying accounts of unofficial artistic
life and its consequences to the West. The case signals a growing con-
sciousness on the part of artists that their international contacts could
be deployed to political ends and that an art world scandal could be a
means to lobby local regimes to deliver human rights.94 Knížák appears
to have had little interest in pursuing contacts and forging friendships
with like-minded peers in other Soviet satellite countries, however.
Having started out with maverick post-surrealist events on the streets
of Prague in the early ’60s, by the early ’70s he had become an interna-
tionally renowned artist whose case was taken by many as speaking to
the situation of the experimental artist in the Soviet bloc more widely.
Keeping Together 61
3
Communication
at a Distance
Jean-Marc Poinsot first became interested in envois (items sent in the

mail) as a 22-year-old student embarking on a master’s dissertation at
Nanterre, spending his time with the group of artists associated with
the Galerie Sonnabend in Paris.1 The idea to do something relating to
this overlooked category of artistic production developed out of discus-
sions with his peers.2 “I had come across a certain number of envois, by
Le Gac and Boltanski, and there was a small group at that time with
whom I spent time at parties and discussions, which also included Ca-
dere. … It seemed to me to be curious that nobody spoke of these envois
and … I had the idea to gather them together. … I spoke to Cadere say-
ing that … we should do something … we were waiting for the Metro
coming back from an opening.”3 Poinsot’s initial aim was simply to
“make these things public.”4 The form this dissemination was to take
was the result of conversations with artistic colleagues. When he heard
about the project, Wolf Vostell suggested producing a book. Poinsot
wrote to the Fluxus artist Ben Vautier (known as Ben) in Nice that he
was aware of some of his envois, asking whether he might send him
some examples for his book, along with the addresses of other artists
working in this way: “In short, I’m soliciting all the help you can pro- Chapter
vide on this topic, because envois are only to be found in the possession
of their recipients and, as they are not visible in magazines, galleries, or
museums, I am obliged to return to their source.”5 Poinsot understood
that a project of this sort could only be realized by way of a collective
Communic
effort. Jochen Gerz was another source of contacts, as were other Paris-
based émigré artists.
Poinsot drew on his art world contacts, including Harald Szeemann,
whom he asked to distribute copies of a circular invitation to anyone
he thought would be interested.6 He then wrote to artists explaining
that each person would have about five pages for their contribution.
The result was an avalanche of mail: “It was magical. Every morning I
went to my mailbox and there were works by new artists … it was great.
… Things arrived and I integrated them.”7 He was surprised by the range
of envois he received: “There were things that were very unexpected and
that I accepted, which is to say that I let myself be carried along by the
network that had been established at that time.”8
While gathering materials in this way, Poinsot became involved
in a parallel project, as part of the VII Biennale de Paris to be held 24
September–1 November 1971 at the Parc Floral de Vincennes. Like the
planned book, this was the result of a particular set of friendships
and circumstances. A few months before the opening of the Biennale,
its commissioner, Georges Boudaille, had “found himself without a
team.”9 As Poinsot’s friend Alfred Pacquement happened to be working
next door to the offices of the Biennale, he became involved in discus-
sions and was put in charge of co-organizing a section of the Biennale
devoted to conceptual art. He suggested that Poinsot be invited to col-
laborate too; Poinsot proposed doing something relating to envois and
to the use of the post and telecommunications for the distribution of
artwork.10
Boudaille had visited Eastern Europe and published a series of crit-
ical essays on Hungarian, Romanian, and Yugoslav art over the course
of 1970–1971 in Les lettres françaises.11 He put his young colleague in
touch with a number of East European artists who became involved
in the project, and sent out official invitations to those selected for
participation, announcing “an important section devoted to what are
henceforth called envois.” Poinsot sent letters to the contributors to
his book, too, soliciting their interest in the new project: “following
on from your participation in my book I would like you to take part in
an exhibition along the same lines which I am organizing at the Bien-
nale.”12 He worked on the two projects together: each offered a means to
fulfill his ambition to render public this new mode of creative activity.
64 Chapter 3
Poinsot recalled: “I brought together all the artists who were recom-
mended to me for whom I had sufficient work. … In the end the list was
quite long.”13
He selected 40 artists for the book, arranging them alphabetically
(figure 3.1). The result was Mail art. Communication à distance. Concept,
published in November 1971 in Paris by CEDIC in a print run of 1,500. In
an introduction to the book headed “Exposition,” Poinsot noted: “Since
Figure 3.1
Jean-Marc Poinsot, ed., Mail art.
Communication à distance. Concept
(Paris: Éditions CEDIC, 1972). Courtesy
of Jean-Marc Poinsot.
Communication at a Distance 65
1968 several exhibitions have been organized with rules such as a limi-
tation to a written participation that would be sent to the organizer.” He
cited Seth Siegelaub’s “One Month” of March 1969 and Pierre Restany’s
1970 exhibition at the Bonino Gallery in New York, “Art Concept from Eu-
rope,” and explained that the point of view represented by such an ap-
proach “depends on the belief that conceptualized art can be sent by the
most easy way for an exhibition, i.e. by mail.” This said, Poinsot made it
clear that he saw his own project as going a step further. He argued against
“the birth of a new academicism” and pointed out that “it is not quite cer-
tain that conceptual art does not imply any concern for form,” and that
for this reason the publication would consist only of contributions from
participants “who have already used mail with aesthetic purpose.”14
The book opened with a series of reflections by critic Jean Clair (Gé-
rard Régnier) on the nature of the mail. Jean Clair noted that a Musée
de la Poste had recently been opened in Amboise, cementing the transi-
tion of the mail from commodity form to art object while recalling the
history of the letter as a once flourishing literary form. He pointed out
that the ascent of the postal system—its increased efficiency—paradox-
ically entailed a decline in the letter as literary genre, for the increasing
speed of transmissions “robbed it of its nobility.” It was a “dead” form,
albeit one that certain writers continued to choose to resurrect, aware
of the artificiality of the gesture.15 The shift from art to anti-art, from
work to absence of work—echoed in the supplanting of material by
immaterial means, and of the post by telecommunications—paradoxi-
cally engendered a desire on the part of artists to “return to an artisanal,
traditional, material use of the postal institution.”16
The Hungarians Gyula Konkoly and Endre Tót and Czechoslovak
Petr Štembera were included in the book. An explanatory note pref-
aced Konkoly’s contribution: “G. Konkoly was exiled from Hungary,
where he was not able to pursue his artistic activities. After his exile,
everything which concerned him (property, relatives, friends) was sus-
pect to the government. His correspondence was suspected. The work
which we have reproduced here is connected to this particular situ-
ation.”17 The piece, entitled 4 Examples of the Violation of the Secret of
Letters, 1971, consists of reproductions of two opened envelopes and
66 Chapter 3
two letters received by Konkoly (one addressed to him in Paris, the
other addressed to Budapest and redirected to Paris). By including the
opened envelopes, Konkoly reflected on the probability that these had
already been opened by the Hungarian censors prior to their arrival.
The first letter was from his mother. She had sent him three poems
that he wrote as a boy of 11, saying she hoped that he would enjoy read-
ing them. The first was an ode to the scorched Hungarian plains, the
second a poem entitled “The Communist Party’s Struggle for the Pio-
neers” claiming that if one were to search the entire world, one would
not find anywhere “a life as beautiful / as ours in Hungary.” Each verse
ended with the refrain “And all this is ours / And we owe it to the Com-
munist Party,” save the last, which concluded: “Now I will try to answer
the questions: / Why do we live so well / It is because we are struggling
for peace / And Comrade RÁKOSI is with us. / And all this we owe to
the Communist Party / And to the great Soviet Union.” The third poem
was a tragic description of the feelings of five poor young boys stand-
ing outside a bakery in the cold looking on with tears in their eyes at
the inaccessible fresh bread and croissants within. The selection of-
fered a remarkable cross section of emotions, all comparing the exile
into which Konkoly had recently plunged to his childhood in Stalinist
Hungary under Mátyás Rákosi. The trio of poems echoed thematically
the ideological principles guiding Stalinist socialist realism: partiinost’,
ideinnost’, klassovost’, and narodnost’ (party-mindedness, idea-minded-
ness, class-mindedness, and people-mindedness), hinting at a love for
Hungary and a sense of injustice that could potentially have been con-
strued as anti-Soviet. The second letter was from an organization called
the International Association for the Freedom of Culture, in which the
director thanked Konkoly for submitting his dossier but explained that
unfortunately the organization was no longer able to offer stipends to
refugees as the fund for these had dried up (figure 3.2).18
The selection expressed Konkoly’s emotional and material situa-
tion as a refugee. The intimate nature of both letters—one demonstrat-
ing the close bond between mother and son and the pain of separation
from family, the other evidence of the rejection of the artist’s request
for assistance from a French cultural fund for refugees—made their
Figure 3.2
Gyula Konkoly, Violation of Letters no. 4,
1971. Courtesy of the artist.
68 Chapter 3
violation by the censors all the more painful. The artist had defected
from Hungary in 1970, having asked himself the question “What is bet-
ter: being a famous person in Hungary or a waiter in Nice?” He initially
traveled to Venice, then Rome (where he made contact with the artists
associated with Galleria L’Attico, such as Jannis Kounellis and Mario
Merz), passing through Nice (where his wife had relatives) to Paris, ini-
tially finding employment with other Hungarians as a house painter.
The emotive nature of the content violated in Konkoly’s letters con-
trasts with the emptying out of meaning in the envois of Endre Tót, five
of which were included in the book. Tót and Konkoly had both been
members of the so-called Iparterv generation of young artists who
came together in 1968 and ’69 to hold two major unofficial exhibitions,
Figure 3.3
Endre Tót, airmail letter to Gyula Konkoly,
and they remained in correspondence after Konkoly left the country.19
Tót’s section in the book consisted of a number of zero code pieces
(in which the letters are replaced by Os), among them an airmail letter
of May 1971, addressed to Konkoly and his wife, though it must have
been delivered in another envelope, for the one reproduced shows an
address consisting only of a string of upper- and lower-case Os (figures
3.3, 3.4). This was just one of a series of variations on possible means for
communicating zeros in different mailable media. Others included a
telegram addressed to Dr. Tibor Tóth with the word NOTHING copied
12 times in the box containing the message, signed “= ENDRE +,” and
a more official-looking zero letter to “Oooo,” signed “Yours faithfully,
Tót Endre.” Tót enjoyed playing with shifting the focus of the reader
from content to form: making the content the form while frustrating
Figure 3.4
Endre Tót, postcard sent from Sümeg,
Hungary, 1971. Courtesy of the artist.
70 Chapter 3
any efforts on the part of the censors to attribute subversive intent to
his undecodable envois. His mail art activity was an all-consuming oc-
cupation; it was fundamentally collaborative and superb at attracting
responses from all those to whom he wrote. His zero letters and cards
were provocative, intriguing, fun, enticing people into their world. One
of Tót’s correspondents was Pierre Restany, who composed a two-page
ode to Tót in a combination of languages, real and made-up. It began
“My TOT, mein TOT, TOT bless 0, TOT mit uns!” followed by a poetic
series of speculations on the possible meanings of 0 (figure 3.5).
Štembera’s pages echoed Tót’s, going a stage further in the void-
ing of meaning by paring the proposal right down to the blank page.
His Concept Book no. 2 Exemplar no. 3 (1971) consisted of 12 pages, ar-
ranged in groups of four across three pages of the book, all blank save
one, which gave the title, the name of the author, and the date (figure
3.6). The concept book was peculiar insofar as it consisted of perforated
paper of the type intended for spiral binding but had perforations
around the entire circumference of the page, so that a bound copy of
the book would have been unopenable. Each page was subjected to a
different minimal intervention: with the exception of two pages, pos-
sibly intended as the front and rear, Štembera had ripped or cut small
incisions into one hole along each edge of each page. Challenging the
spectator to a game of spot the difference, he concentrated on almost
imperceptible incidents on the blank page in ways that foreshadowed
his later performative engagement with Eastern philosophy, pushing
himself to new limits.
Štembera was enormously energetic in distributing information
about his own work and that of his peers internationally, playing a
key role in pioneering Czechoslovak experimental art and later in put-
ting artists from different countries in the Soviet bloc in touch with
one another. He had been invited to participate in Poinsot’s project by
Gerz.20 Štembera wrote to Poinsot in June 1971, in English, saying that
“of course, the mail is the essential means of communication about art,
etc., for me, and not only for me,” but that he had “no concept about
mail and phone.” He asked Poinsot to explain the distinction and prom-
ised to send materials for the project in another package—making it
72 Chapter 3
Figure 3.5
Pierre Restany, My Tót, Mein Tót …, 26 June
1975. Courtesy of Endre Tót.
Figure 3.6
Petr Štembera, Concept Book No. 1 (detail),
1971. Page layout from Jean-Marc Poinsot,
Mail art. Communication à distance.
Concept, 1971.
less likely that those checking mail at the postal office would make a
connection between the materials and their planned inclusion without
state authorization in a prestigious foreign exhibition.21
Štembera included in his introductory letter a bibliography demon-
strating his international credentials: Klaus Groh’s If I Had a Mind. Con-
cept and Project Art and Walter Aue’s P.C.A. Projecte, Concepte, Actionen
(both published Cologne: DuMont, 1971), and the Spanish artist Júlio
Plaza’s special issue of Atenea devoted to concept art (Mayaguez, Puerto
Rico, 1971). While primarily focusing on German, Italian, and US art-
ists, Aue’s book P.C.A.—a hefty gold-and-pink volume—had included a
74 Chapter 3
small selection of projects by artists from the Soviet bloc, among others
a piece entitled Kosmologie / Cosmologie: Elements: Wind & Ash by Josef
Kroutvor (1970), two outdoor projects on graph paper by Petr Štembera,
and Five Concepts by Gábor Altorjay (who was living in Cologne at the
time). One of Altorjay’s projects was a proposal for a World Trip Day in
which “Everybody in the world is to take a trip on February 14. 19. about
6pm (GMT).” Altorjay also provided a diagram showing a series of mi-
crophones and headphones linked so that everyone would be speaking
to someone, but their response would be relayed to another person in
such a way that only one of the six pairs of speakers and listeners would
be able to hear one another directly.
Poinsot’s Mail art book also included a contribution from Klaus
Groh—a set of propositions for harnessing existing networks to pro-
mote global communication. Groh’s concern was with “the post and
telephone institutions’ possibilities for communication and their dé-
tournement to aesthetic ends.”22 The pieces included were: a press clip-
ping announcing that there were now 255 million telephones on earth,
with a handwritten subtitle explaining in German “this means that
there is a great possibility for world-wide communication”; a map re-
vealing a plan for three-way connectivity between three cities—Paris,
Groh’s hometown of Oldenburg, and London; a map of the world
marked with x’s for telephones announcing that “all the telephones on
earth are connected to one another” (figure 3.7); and a reproduction of
a letter sent to Lev Nusberg in Moscow that had been returned to Groh
with a note from Post Office no. 3 Hannover explaining that it had been
returned from the USSR without any reason being provided, subtitled
the “absence of contact” (figure 3.8).23
The materials Štembera sent were for the most part original pho-
tographic prints, some enclosed in a professional-looking, made-
to-measure black envelope. He sent Poinsot six black-and-white A5
photographs and a map documenting a recent work titled Transposi-
tion of Two Stones from Sedlec to Prague-Dejvice (figure 3.9).24 The images
showed him outdoors placing two stones in a string bag and walking
off into the distance. A map traced his route. This simple piece revealed
Štembera’s early interest in artistic activity as a process unfolding in
Figure 3.7
Klaus Groh, All the Telephones on Earth Are
Linked to One Another, 1971. Courtesy of
the artist.
time, undertaken for oneself but documented to be shared with oth-

ers after the event. Clearly a non-event of sorts, the documentation of
something as banal as the transportation of two stones from one place
to another resonated with Zen-inspired ideas about how every small
change amounts to a change in the universe as a whole. The project fo-
cused on the journey and on the experience it afforded its author rather
than on an end product. The task of moving two stones from A to B en-
tailed a degree of physical exertion and insisted on the relationship be-
tween artist and stone that replicated in some respects the tradition of
sculpture as a physical encounter of artist and natural raw material. In
a letter to the Polish artist Jarosław Kozłowski, Štembera explained that
the action had been important for him because it had been the first in
76 Chapter 3
Figure 3.8
Klaus Groh, Absence of Contact, 1971.
Figure 3.9
Petr Štembera, Transposition of Two
Stones from Sedlec to Prague-Dejvice, 1971.
which his body had been the most important element: “This action was
a proof (an examination) of my physical endurance.”25 It was one of a
number of early pieces by Štembera that entered into a dialogue with
contemporary trends in land art and what might now be termed photo-
conceptualism. Štembera was sending similar packages and letters to
artists and critics around the world at the time, among others to Pierre
Restany in Paris, including a selection of images from an anti-form
series of photographs of tape piling into and out of a box.26
It was Gyula Konkoly who recommended Hungarian colleagues for
participation in the project to Poinsot: Tót and Miklós Erdély.27 The in-
vitation to participate reached Tót at a time when he had decided to
abandon painting and devote himself exclusively to conceptual art, a
decision validated by his participation in the Biennale: he recalled that
“it was thanks to the Paris exhibition that I almost immediately became
part of the international avant-garde.”28 Poinsot was very taken by Tót’s
work and began to correspond with him.29
Štembera’s and Tót’s parallel pursuit of international relations
was staged in a casual gesture of artistic appropriation performed by
Štembera in 1971. Far from being limited to a two-way exchange of au-
thored materials between a sender and a receiver, envois were open to
a wide range of circulations and multidirectional flows: a postal item
sent to one recipient could be forwarded to another and another, and
the piece being exchanged could be substantially altered in the pro-
cess. One such case was a postcard with a handwritten message sent
by Štembera to Poinsot (figure 3.10). Štembera’s message was written
on an original work in postcard form that had been sent to him by Tót,
the result being a reversible, composite proposition, a low-key instance
of collaborative practice among two artists from countries annexed to
the Soviet bloc.30 Tót’s My Rain / Your Rain postcard was itself an ap-
propriation, consisting of a graphic and textual intervention into a
regular tourist postcard of Budapest, which he then photographed and
printed to produce a customized interpretation of the image for his
own purposes. Having begun as an aerial photograph of Buda and Pest
divided by the river and connected by a bridge, the image was then fed
through a typewriter and modified. One side was labeled “my rain” but
80 Chapter 3
paradoxically showed no rain, while the other was labeled “your rain”
and was rhythmically covered with lines of sloping rain in the form of
typewriter strokes. Tót’s gesture reflected on the question of distance,
in line with an artist’s stamp he frequently used reading “I write to you
because I am here and you are there.” Just as the bridge linked the two
halves of the city, here art served as the bridge that connected the artist
to those from whom he felt separated. Whether the rain represented
nourishment or a nuisance was immaterial; what mattered was that al-
though the same statement meant different things on different sides of
the divide, communication was still possible.
The appropriation of an artist’s work by a colleague in this way served
to put it into wider circulation, and of course this benefit was one that
had been anticipated in the original project. Quite a number of artists at
this time used the format of the postcard-as-artwork to help their names
and works to reach new audiences through the network.31 If one sent
a batch of postcards to someone with important contacts, there was a
chance they would send them on to others. As such, Štembera’s addition
to Tót’s postcard may have been not so much an intervention as a com-
pletion of the project’s original intent. Štembera effectively promoted
Tót’s work, while in the same breath accomplishing aims of his own. He
used Tót’s postcard to let Poinsot know (in English) that he was sending
further documentation of his own work: “I don’t send you for publica-
tion, but as information about my present work! Now I am making 8 mm
films and photos—Handpieces—Daily Activities—for instance buttons
sewing, typewriting, etc.”32 For his part, Tót used this and other series of
postcards to communicate with artists at home and abroad, for instance
sending a collective card to his colleagues Jiří Valoch, Gerta Pospíšilová,
and J. H. Kocman in Brno (figure 3.11). When Valoch began working as
a curator at the Dům umění (House of the Arts) in Brno, he began, over
the course of 1973–1974, to publish “authors’ postcards,” printing visual
poems and concept pieces by Czechoslovak artists as well as cards by
Endre Tót and Imre Bak from Hungary.33
Groh, Konkoly, Štembera, and Tót all participated in the Section des
Envois, along with further additions from the Soviet bloc: Alex Mlynárčik,
the Hungarian émigré Tomas Zankó, and Cadere, with whom Poinsot
Figure 3.10
Petr Štembera, message to Jean-Marc
Poinsot on Endre Tót, My Rain / Your Rain,
postcard, 1971. Courtesy of the artists.
82 Chapter 3
Figure 3.11
Endre Tót, My Rain, Your Rain, postcard
to Jiří Valoch, Gerta Pospíšilová, and J. H.
Kocman, 19 June 1972. Courtesy of the
Marinko Sudac Collection.
had first discussed the need for such a project. Though the list of in-
clusions from Soviet bloc countries was not long, it offered an impor-
tant snapshot of pioneers of unofficial international relations at the
time. Artists who had emigrated were better positioned to find their
way into international projects of this sort, and it is telling that three
of the contributors were émigrés: Cadere had left Romania, where he
grew up, to settle in Paris in 1967; Zankó had arrived in France as a
refugee in 1957; and Gyula Konkoly had moved to Paris in 1970. Emi-
gré artists often acted as links between the colleagues they had left
behind and the international circles to which they had gained access
by leaving.
Installing the envois section in the cavernous space of Jean Nouvel’s
modernist construction in the Parc Floral de Vincennes was a challenge.
Poinsot recalled, “There were no walls in the exhibition space … there
were pillars and between them a cable stretched and then on this cable
a blue canvas.” Having organized all the materials received from artists
into folders, he decided to work by artist on one-square-meter wooden
boards to which he pinned the work: “it was quite simple … there was a
small panel at the top with the name of the artist. I stretched clear plas-
tic over the top … it was really a form of bricolage.”34 He sought to make
the presentation of the work “as neutral as possible.” In the end there
were around 40 panels. In addition to sending envois for inclusion in
the exhibition, artists had been invited to participate in a range of other
related activities and were reminded in a circular that “the section will
be unable to fulfil its experimental and informative role unless you par-
ticipate in it fully … this is in some way a collective effort.”35 The section
itself was intended as a participatory event: “at the Biennale processes
were put in place: some people edited postcards which were distributed
to the public, there were quite a number of things that were fabricated
for the exhibition, fabricated by the artists, so in fact I didn’t have a
strong sense of holding power at the exhibition.”36 Artists and public
were given access to phone boxes, an official post box and a stamp dis-
penser, as well as other post boxes for internal use and infrastructure
such as photocopiers to facilitate artists’ distribution of their projects
to the public (figure 3.12).
84 Chapter 3
Figure 3.12
Section des Envois, Biennale de Paris,
1971, installation view. Photo: Muller.
Courtesy of INHA—Collection Archives
de la critique d’art.
A rare photograph of the installation suggests that next to a series

of phone boxes there was also a photo booth. Székely recounts that
Konkoly “plastered the phone booth in the exhibition room with a selec-
tion of Lenin quotes” to support users in their efforts to hold ideologi-
cally appropriate conversations, while at the same time working with
a technician employed by Wolf Vostell to rig up a mechanism whereby
the organizers of a fictive branch of the Communist Party that Konkoly
had invented as his contribution to the show would be able to listen in
on conversations and intervene if they felt it necessary.37 Poinsot, for
his part, proposed that a book be provided in which visitors could write
their addresses and the names of the artists they were interested in. He
undertook to compile regular lists of these to be sent out to the artists
over the course of the exhibition.38
Mlynárčik’s proposal consisted of invitations to become coauthors
of a book, instructing visitors: “Please contribute your chapter overleaf.
Its form is optional: written, drawn, etc.; anonymous or signed. … Let
its content be your ideas—desires and hopes, experience and perspec-
tives. The book Anno Domini wishes to become a witness of our time.
/ Kindly put your contribution into the mailbox situated in the area
marked ‘Anno Domini’ at the Biennale. With thanks.”39 The project was
characteristic of those developed by participating artists, in that it did
not convey a message in itself but rather sought to serve as a vehicle for
messages to be generated by visitors. Cadere’s contribution took this to
its logical conclusion, taking the form of a newspaper announcement
declaring that (1) he was in possession of no message, (2) he had no de-
sire to transmit any message to anyone at all, (3) he would place at the
public’s disposal unsigned white cards without a message, to be sent
by anyone anywhere.
The distribution of cards was also central to the project proposed
by Groh (figure 3.13). His idea was to distribute 2,500 postcards with
instructions on the reverse side of each card: “two people who do not
know one another realize this project together at a distance of 1,000 km.
/ Note down an event in your momentary situation on the left side of
this card, send a 5-franc postal order to my address. You will receive the
completed card (the complete object).” The other side of the postcard
was divided in two and showed a barely discernible outline of West-
ern Europe divided midway with two crosses connected by direction
arrows and dotted lines, presumably referring to Paris on the one hand
and Oldenburg on the other. Groh’s name was on one side and a space
was provided for the sender to complete theirs on the other. While the
proposal was for a collaborative postcard, Groh’s was different, for he
hoped to sell the cards. When he wrote to ask whether Poinsot could
arrange this, Poinsot said that this was impossible, suggesting that par-
ticipants could perhaps be asked to enclose 5 francs with their submis-
sion instead.40
86 Chapter 3
Figure 3.13
Klaus Groh, Post-Communication for
VII Biennale de Paris, 1971. Courtesy of
the artist and INHA—Collection Archives
de la critique d’art.
In contrast to the professionalism demonstrated by many of the par-
ticipating artists, the organization of the Biennale was ad hoc. Almost no
effort appears to have been made to document the installation. Poinsot
did not take photos himself: “During the opening there was the Minis-
ter, Duhamel, who came to the exhibition, and then there was an artist
called Pinault who took a photograph and who sent me the photograph
with a little squeaky button on it that squeaked when you pressed it. It
was funny.” The anecdote echoes the playful spirit of envois as a category
designed to circumvent “high” art culture. Needless to say, there were
further disadvantages to the generally rather flippant approach. Poinsot
admitted that the Biennale was “n’importe-quoi … not organized.”41 The
supervision of the exhibition space was so inadequate that a 5-meter-long
canvas by Ben was stolen during the deinstallation, along with some en-
vois contributed by Beuys, and there was no insurance.
An international jury working for the Biennale awarded Poinsot a
prize for the exhibition. Although this had no financial consequences,
it meant that resources were allocated for the exhibition to tour over
the course of 1972, as the Biennale habitually selected parts of the exhi-
bition to travel. Poinsot reflects that “it attracted a lot of interest, and
I think that what happened was that there were artists from Eastern
Europe in the exhibition and so the Yugoslavs were interested … they
saw the exhibition and they wanted to bring it back.” The exhibition in
Paris ran from 24 September to 1 November 1971. After this, the materi-
als traveled. Poinsot went to Belgrade to help with their installation at
the Students’ Cultural Centre there in January 1972, before the works
went on to Zagreb that March.42
The photographs from the exhibition in Belgrade offer insight into
how the square boards Poinsot had composed looked in situ (figures
3.14, 3.15).43 The presentation had an immediate and amateurish qual-
ity, reflecting the ethos of the envois themselves. Looking back on his
Figures 3.14 and 3.15

“Postal Packages” exhibition, Students’
Cultural Centre, Belgrade, 17 January 1972.
Courtesy of SKC Belgrade.
88 Chapter 3
Figure 3.16
Želimir Koščević, “Postal Packages”
exhibition at Galerija Studentskog Centra,
Zagreb, 1972. Photo: Petar Dabac. Courtesy
of Petar Dabac, Želimir Koščević, and
Arhiv za Likovne Umetnosti, Croatian
Academy of Sciences and Arts.
stay in Belgrade, Poinsot recalled how different the working conditions

were compared to France: “I remember that people worked without too
many hierarchical relations. That struck me.”44
The fact that the exhibition of envois had itself become an envoi
was not lost on those receiving the crate containing the show in Zagreb,
where the director of the gallery (Želimir Koščević) decided to use it as an
opportunity to make a point of his own. Ivana Bago called the exhibition
the “culmination of curatorial experiments that Želimir Koščević realized
in the late 1960s and early 1970s.”45 Photographs of the unopened crate in
the center of the gallery space were reproduced in the student magazine
Novine SC, which was sent on to Poinsot (figures 3.16, 3.17).
Bago argues that Koščević’s treating the still-crated exhibition as
itself a kind of exhibition “indicated that the role and responsibility of
the curator was not merely to choose and exhibit, but also to choose to
refuse to exhibit,” interpreting the gesture in terms of his rejection of
“the commodification and institutionalization of Conceptual art.” “The
fact that Conceptual art had become so innocuous to be included in a
biennial, as the most conventional exhibition form,” meant the begin-
ning of its demise for Koščević:
The positive valorisation of the Biennale de Paris officially marked the end of
the life of this idea which, at its core, is not foreign or unacceptable to us. …
Instead of participating in the further deterioration of conceptual art, instead
of supporting its demise under the gallery and museum lights, we have exhib-
ited the content of this exhibition in its genuine state. We have exhibited—we
believe—the sublimate of conceptual art—the postal package as postal pack-
age. … Art is not to be found under a glass, under a glass bell, art is facing us.46
90 Chapter 3
The result was a contestation of Poinsot’s claims for the category of
envois as proof that the “transmitting of information has become more
important than transporting goods.” Bago notes that “the cumbersome,
unopened package placed in the center of the gallery space epitomized
the true state of affairs behind the claims of the art’s dematerialization,
revealing that the ‘transport of goods’ was still the undisturbed kernel
of the art system.”47
Arguably, however, Koščević fell into a similar trap as regards the
politics of distribution when the Galerija Studentskog Centra (Student
Center Gallery) in Zagreb sent out an international invitation to an ex-
hibition of work produced using a Xerox (photocopying) machine, to be
held 15–30 June 1973, announcing: “The gallery of Student Centre would
like to co-operate with you and bid you to suggest your form of co-op-
eration,” with photographs of the empty space included to encourage
them. 68 artists responded, including Groh, Valoch, János Urbân, Péter
Legéndy, Géza Perneczky, Gábor Tóth, László Beke, Károly Halász, and
Sándor Pinczehelyi. While Koščević emphasized the potential of Xerox
to help artists bypass institutions and stressed that his interest was in
distribution and not technique, explaining that “the thought of inau-
gurating a new technique in the field of art was completely rejected in
the idea of this exhibition,” the proposal failed to take on board the de-
gree to which access to xerographic technology, in Soviet bloc countries
at least, was a regulated and institutionalized affair, making any claim
that Xerox (in itself) was potentially liberating appear very idealistic.48
While Lippard’s approach to “dematerialization” and Poinsot’s to en-
vois may have been overoptimistic about the democratic possibilities
Figure 3.17
Želimir Koščević, “Postal Packages”
exhibition at Galerija Studentskog Centra,
Zagreb, 1972. Novine Galerije SC, no. 35
(March 1972), 137. Courtesy of Petar
Dabac, Želimir Koščević, and Galerija
Studentskog Centra.
for exchange these opened, Koščević’s exhibition proposal similarly
overlooked the materiality of Xerox technology and the unequal access
to such resources in the region, let alone globally.49
Štembera and Tót had been unable to see the exhibition in Paris.
Štembera wrote to Poinsot that he had read a good review of the Sec-
tion des Envois in a copy of Flash Art and inquired about when and
where the show would be in Yugoslavia.50 He also asked about the fate
of his copy of the Mail art book (making it clear that he and Tót had
been in touch with one another about their participation in the project
and the issue of the whereabouts of the book). Tót meanwhile wrote
directly to Boudaille, in early 1972, to ask when the book would appear
and to find out where the show would appear in Yugoslavia.51 Boudaille
explained that the book had already been published and that the exhi-
bition would be going to Novi Sad, Zagreb, and Ljubljana after Belgrade.
Tót responded that he had since received the book and was pleased
that he had “a good place” in it.52 He also sent Boudaille a selection of
rain-related postcards and a long thin white book of stamps entitled
Stamped by Endre Tót. When Štembera later confirmed that he too had
received the book, he wrote enthusiastically to Poinsot that he had ar-
ranged for the library of the Museum of Applied Art in Prague to buy a
copy. He called it a “very good book, which makes clear a new aspect
of contemporary art, above all unknown postal creativity of American
and European Fluxus.”53 Such letters convey the significance Tót and
Štembera attached to their participation in the project, and how anx-
ious they both were about receiving its material results. Their letters
demonstrate how systematic both artists were in maintaining corre-
spondence with their art world contacts, and how they sought to nour-
ish and further these relationships with updates on their activities and
gifts of original works.
The presence of Eastern European artists in the mail art and en-
vois projects may not initially have been planned by Poinsot, but their
participation was determined by the organic traffic of information
among artists and their contacts and friends. The project sent a power-
ful liberating message to artists in the Eastern bloc. The publication of
a serious book about ephemeral proposals exchanged though the post
94 Chapter 3
and the allocation of a space devoted to it within the framework of the
prestigious Biennale de Paris were a source of joy for artists with few
means at their disposal yet with a great desire to communicate interna-
tionally. Both the exhibition and the book played a part in marking out
Štembera and Tót as two of the most significant East European artists
of their day and putting them on the international map.
Asked whether he had been trying to overcome the division of Eu-
rope by uniting artists from both sides of the Iron Curtain, Poinsot ob-
served: “This feeling of the division of Europe, we had it from a political
perspective, but from the point of view of relationships between people,
because things happened by post, I myself never had any difficulties
in communicating with the artists I had invited. So I found their ad-
dresses etc.; I invited them; they sent me things. There was never any
problem with receiving things, and I never asked myself the question.”54
It is worth recollecting how young he was at the time—but this spirit of
openness also helped to make the impossible possible.
Poinsot saw both projects as a means to make public a hitherto
underappreciated new form, but he clearly considered his book to be
an exhibition in itself: a new form of publication in line with an exhibi-
tion format that had only recently gained currency in the art world.55 Of
course, “there were people who were furious, who said it was not seri-
ous and so on.” Poinsot and the young editor François Robinot went
all-out in terms of promoting the book, producing an impressive poster
and even an accompanying flexi-disk, and when Poinsot went to Docu-
menta 5 in Kassel in 1972, he took copies of the book with him to sell.56
He now notes with regret that he and his friend made certain strategic
errors, such as not taking up the offer of Dick Higgins from Something
Else Press to make an English-only edition, and deciding not to accept
Walther König’s financial conditions for distribution. Nevertheless,
Mail art. Communication à distance. Concept proved to be a huge success
and soon had a global reach, making its way through the constellations
of contacts enjoyed by each recipient of the book. Considering its hum-
ble beginnings as a speculative conversation between friends on their
way back from an opening one night, its long-term impact and the cult
status it achieved were remarkable.
4
NET:
An Open Proposition
In 1971, Jarosław Kozłowski and Andrzej Kostołowski conceived of a

conceptual proposal that was designed to be universal, prompting ex-
tensive East-East and East-West exchange (figure 4.1).1 Kozłowski recol-
lected: “Kostołowski and I met very frequently and talked about art a
lot, swapped books and so on. The idea of ignoring all the physical bar-
riers and borders which limited contacts was born in a very natural way,
as was the idea of using the post to get in contact with various artists
around the world.”2 On paper bearing the rubber-stamped blue header Chapte
“NET,” the pair painstakingly typed out a nine-point statement which
they each signed and mailed, from Poznań, in Poland, where they both
lived, to more than 350 recipients, reading:
NET:
– a NET is open and uncommercial
– points of the NET are: private homes, studios and any other places, where
art propositions are articulated
– these propositions are presented to persons interested in them
– propositions may be accompanied by editions in form of prints, tapes,
slides, photographs, books, films, handbills, letters, manuscripts etc.
– NET has no central point and any coordination
– points of the NET can be anywhere
– all points of the NET are in contact among themselves and exchange concepts,
propositions, projects and other forms of articulation
– the idea of NET is not new and in this moment it stops to be an
authorized idea
– NET can be arbitrarily developed and copied
Figure 4.1
Andrzej Kostołowski and Jarosław
Kozłowski, NET, 1971. Courtesy of
Jarosław Kozłowski.
98 Chapter 4
The proposal was produced in two versions, one in Polish, one in
English, and was an open platform to be shared by others indepen-
dently of its original designers. Initially a nominative exercise—a con-
ceptual artwork that was intended to become a generative principle—it
was to be a connector that would bring artists together within the struc-
ture of a unifying proposition. Significantly, though, Kozłowski insists
that NET “was never a group” and was, above all, “concerned with dia-
logues between individuals.”3 In addition to announcing a conceptual
framework for NET as a type of activity, the mailing also played a cru-
cial role in helping to put artists in contact with one another, for every
statement was accompanied by an appendix listing the names and ad-
dresses of the “persons invited to be co-creators of NET.”
The long list of recipients consisted mostly of North American and
Western European artists. However, a selection of Eastern European
figures were also included: from Poland, Wiesław Borowski, one of
the founders of Galeria Foksal, Urszula Czartoryska, Ireneusz Pierzgal-
ski (Łódź), and Maria Stangret; from Bulgaria, Slatni Boyadgiev (Plov‑
div);4 from Hungary, Endre Tót; from Czechoslovakia, the conceptual
artist Dalibor Chartny and the artist and visual poet Jiří Valoch (Brno);
from the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the visual poet Carlfried-
rich Claus; and the Yugoslav artists Janez Kocijančić (Novi Sad), Miroljub
Todorović (Belgrade), and Srečo Dragan (Belgrade). Kozłowski would
later invite several of those originally on the list to exhibit at Galeria
Akumulatory 2. The original mailing list reveals the limited connec-
tions among Eastern European artists at the time, and highlights the
degree to which artists remained largely oriented to the West. This not-
withstanding, NET represented considerable progress in fostering in-
dependent connections between artists in the Soviet satellite countries.
Kozłowski explains that “at least to begin with, everyone got the
list. Later it wasn’t so co-ordinated any more. At some point we stopped
sending the list. We sent out a few batches of the manifesto with the
first list, and then there were appendixes when the list grew, then there
were two or three appendixes. But later I stopped sending appendixes
because the whole thing became internally generative and there was no
longer the need to inform people about it.”5 He stresses that NET was
NET: An Open Proposition 99

addressed to “artists who were not interested in careers, commercial
success, popularity or recognition: artists who devoted more attention
to the issue of their own artistic, and therefore ethical, stance than to
their position in the rankings, whether the ranking in question was
based on the highest listing on the market, or the highest level of ap-
proval from the authorities. These artists professed other values, and
other goals led them onward, they were focused on art, conceived as
the realm of cognitive freedom and creative discourse.”6 The assump-
tion was that such attitudes transcended the ideological frameworks of
both really existing socialism and capitalism.
Kozłowski and Kostołowski saw parallels in artists’ responses to
the cultural shortcomings of both systems, reflecting that their con-
tacts with Western artists had convinced them that artists there had
“attitudes analogous to those we had here,” in spite of certain obvious
differences in circumstances. As Kozłowski later put it: “Here, ide-
ology was really related to the system, while over there it was about
commerce, institutions, the whole commercialization of art and in-
stitutionalization of art that was very present.”7 NET highlighted the
common basis of the two systems and parallels between the ways their
respective circuits for distributing art were guarded by gatekeepers,
whether state-appointed representatives of cultural institutions or cap-
italist gallerists and museum workers. The ideological criteria of both
distribution systems forced artists to try to negotiate certain models
which would be rewarded. In both cases, the artist had to jump through
hoops and engage in professional networking in order to achieve vis-
ibility, confronting a range of bureaucratic and institutional obstacles.
NET sought to bypass existing art world mechanisms by proposing a
field in which artists could distribute their ideas freely.
The proposal played with adopting an official aesthetic. Kozłowski
reflects that the distinctive blue block lettering of the header “NET,”
achieved by carving the letters out of rubber, was part of a strategy de-
signed to dupe censors or controllers at the post office into thinking
that the letter had been issued by an officially supported organization
of some sort, and did not merit closer scrutiny. Their decision to sign
the document added to the bureaucratic “look” they sought to cultivate.
100 Chapter 4
The artists also declared that “the idea of NET is not new.” Kozłowski
explains: “We wanted to be pragmatic. So we didn’t want to emphasize
that it was our idea, as authors—authorship would have interfered,” but
they signed the documents because they “wanted to act responsibly.”8
In defining NET as a decentralized, infinitely reproducible scheme
for the transmission of ideas to interested receivers, Kozłowski and
Kostołowski offered a pioneering theorization of the alternative net-
work. But they were also describing a system that was already in opera-
tion, drawing on existing instances of unofficial artistic exchange and
sociability. Their statement declared that all such activities were now
connected; that all independent initiatives were significant and that ev-
eryone acting autonomously in some way was also doing so within the
framework of a new, powerful, solidarity.
Kozłowski had deployed the Polish postal system to artistic ends
in an early series Correspondence I-V, anonymously distributing five
conceptual propositions in the years following 1968 (figure 4.2).9 He
explained: “The anonymity of the correspondence piece came out of
a desire to avoid authorship and not to construct an artistic identity
or a name for oneself—to escape attributing whatever exists in art to
the signature.” The mailings contained proposals for participatory
artworks, some of which entailed the recipient taking action of some
sort upon receipt of the instructions. These included counting grains
of sand, making a paper airplane to be signed and thrown out of the
window, and pairs of half-photographs mailed to different people ac-
companied by the name (without further contact details) of the person
who had been the recipient of the other half. He had been interested
in forming connections that were unlikely ever to be translated into
meetings: “if I sent it to Mr X, there was information that the rest of the
photograph, which wasn’t there, was in the possession of Mr Y, and Mr
Y’s with Mr Z, and in this way a huge circle was produced.” If the pro-
posal was a game that raised questions about the limits of knowledge
while courting connectivity, it was not an entirely hopeless case insofar
as there remained a chance that the two halves of the image might at
some point be reunited. While Kozłowski mailed out at least 100 copies
of each proposal, they were not all sent to strangers: “They were sent

102 Chapter 4
Figure 4.2
Jarosław Kozłowski, Correspondence
I–V, c. 1968. Courtesy of the artist and
Fundacja Profil.

to people I knew and to people I didn’t know, whose addresses I took
from the phone book. … Not necessarily artists.” While he had delib-
erately conceived of these first five pieces as a form of mail art, he had
not considered NET to be a mail art activity: “It was just that the mail
was the only possible way to distribute the idea.” One of the earlier mail
art pieces had been destroyed by the postal service: “the name of some
high up politician happened to be among the addressees, which led
them to be suspicious. To be on the safe side, they destroyed the entire
batch of correspondence, which I had carelessly sent from just one post
office.”10 He did not make the same mistake with NET and mailed the
letters from different post offices. The project ultimately came to the
attention of the secret police anyway, though by different means.
Although there were comparatively few Eastern European artists on
the first list, those who had been included soon managed to get the
ball rolling. NET worked according to a system of permanent recom-
mendation and expansion. Eastern European artists were among the
most enthusiastic recipients of the proposal, and many people wrote
to Kozłowski and Kostołowski asking to be included in the project, re-
questing to receive materials and to have their names added to the list.
Tót conveyed information to other Hungarians, Chartny and Valoch
to others in Czechoslovakia, and so on. There was a sense of urgency
about international contacts at this time, manifested particularly
strongly by artists in Czechoslovakia, whose conditions had turned
from being very open to being dramatically curtailed in a short space
of time. When concrete poet Jiří Kocman in Brno wrote to Kozłowski in
1972 to request a copy of NET, he mentioned that he already knew Groh,
Štembera, Valoch, and Perneczky. He also summed up the general feel-
ing among these artists: “Communication between us all is very impor-
tant now!”11 Although a degree of concern with the appearance of the
typed copies is clear, the physical copies of the communiqué were not
conceived of as artworks: “in a sense the objects and works are periph-
eral. But it is only natural that the registration of the idea—the proposi-
tion—becomes the language of exchange.”12
Other artists were soon using the list to carry out their own ini-
tiatives, taking NET into a new phase and realizing its potential for
104 Chapter 4
expanding communication in practice. Hungarian conceptualist
László Lakner, for instance, sent a mailing inviting recipients to eat a
piece of cake (torte) made of cardboard, providing a circle sliced into
equal portions with one section labeled as having crossed over into
“reality” (dated 1 March 1972). He invited participants to photograph
themselves eating the slice, to hang it on the wall, or, in the event that
they did not wish to do either, to give it to an ex-convict. His playful
exercise demonstrated that there were many ways to take an image and
make it real: consumption and display being two of these, with shar-
ing as an important third option (figure 4.3). Petr Štembera provided
a reproduction of Hans Holbein the Younger’s painting of Charles de
Solier of 1534–1535 and requested that people copy the sitter’s gestures,
Figure 4.3
László Lakner, This Piece of Torte Has
Wandered Over to Reality, 1972. Courtesy
of the artist and Jarosław Kozłowski.

photograph themselves doing so, and send him a copy (figure 4.4).
Kocman invited NET recipients to take part in a Butterfly-Environment
Series: to “interpret” an environment for a given butterfly, sign it, and
return the results to him in Brno (figures 4.5–4.7). The hundreds of ini-
tial hours Kozłowski and Kostołowski had spent typing at the outset
of the NET initiative could read as a gift of labor to the artistic com-
munity: by sharing the extensive contact list that they had compiled,
the pair enabled countless others to share their work and to initiate
new collaborations. What mattered was “exchange and getting to know
people.” Above all, NET enabled artists to share what Kozłowski called
artists’ “attitudes.”13
The project echoed the wider ethos of those times and a growing
concern with the distribution of ideas rather than objects. Kozłowski
was committed to overcoming boundaries between artistic forms. But
most importantly from the point of view of international relations, he
saw this as a parallel project to the overcoming of borders more widely
by way of art, to create new dialogues modeled on friendship rather than
rivalry. As he explained: “NET … aimed to cross not only geographical,
ideological and political boundaries, but also those set by artists, which
were in a sense breached by the conceptual revolt. All -isms, -arts and
other divides became irrelevant, it was all about art in its great diver-
sity … utterly different articulations, attitudes and underlying ideas … a
breeding ground for artistic friendships, which were arguably the most
important value of the NET. … I was immensely suspicious of all at-
tempts at categorization or division.”14
Kozłowski’s assessment is in line with Lippard’s theorization of de-
materialized art as being “all over the place in style and content, but
materially quite specific,” referring in particular to “work in which the
idea is paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight,
ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or ‘dematerialized.’”15 Both
the article on the “dematerialization of art” and the NET project, in
their own way, carried forward Dick Higgins’s pioneering use of the
term “intermedia.” Higgins’s 1966 statement explained: “Our real en-
emies are the ones who send us to die in pointless wars or to live lives
which are reduced to drudgery, not the people who use other means
106 Chapter 4
Figure 4.4
Petr Štembera, Perform This Gesture,
1971. Courtesy of the artist and
Jarosław Kozłowski.

Figure 4.5 (above)
Jiři H. Kocman, letter to Jarosław Kozłowski,
c. 1972. Courtesy of the artist and Jarosław
Kozłowski.
Figure 4.6 (facing page, top)

Jiři H. Kocman, Butterfly-Environment
Series, invitation, 1973. Courtesy of the
artist and Jarosław Kozłowski.
Figure 4.7 (facing page, bottom)

Jiři H. Kocman, Butterfly-Environment
Series, JHK / 770113.167, 1973. Courtesy of
the artist and Jarosław Kozłowski.
108 Chapter 4
of communication from those which we find most appropriate to the
present situation.” He went on to observe: “For the last ten years or
so, artists have changed their media to suit this situation, to the point
where the media have broken down in their traditional forms, and have
become merely puristic points of reference. The idea has arisen, as if
by spontaneous combustion throughout the entire world, that these
points are arbitrary and only useful as critical tools, in saying that such-
and-such a work is basically musical, but also poetry. This is the in-
ter-medial approach, to emphasize the dialectic between the media.”16
Higgins clearly saw intermediality as a political statement of sorts: a
matter of artistic solidarity in opposition to the political status quo. He
was especially concerned with the Vietnam War and with the crisis in
the labor movements in the United States.
And it was not only Eastern European artists who wrote asking to
be included in NET. The US artist Barry McCallion, for instance, wrote
to Kozłowski explaining that he had heard about the project from Hans-
Werner Kalkmann and that he would be happy to contribute and to
“encourage other United States artists to participate if participation is
something that you want.” The letter was penned on the back of a page
of sheet music covered by an array of smaller and larger black dots—a
piece completed in 2 hours 15 minutes, as he noted, between 9:46 and
1:23 with a break for lunch. The dots are connected in a complex forma-
tion, accompanied by a numerical system. Perhaps by chance, McCal-
lion’s “chance-play” or “process-mapping” itself resembled a network
(figure 4.8).17
Kozłowski arranged a “reception” of the materials that the recipi-
ents of NET had sent him in response to the proposal in his apartment
in Poznań on the evening of 22 May 1972 (figure 4.9). Though the recep-
tion was a way of sharing the materials that had arrived in the post (“af-
ter a month or two all sorts of mail arrived”) from 24 of those to whom
they had sent the proposal, it was more informal than an exhibition,
with materials hung all over the place, piled up on tables, and arranged
on the floor for lack of space. Among them, was Perneczky’s series on
the theme of identification, suspended above a desk (figures 4.10, 4.11).
Kozłowski had written to Perneczky (in German) in March 1972 after
110 Chapter 4
receiving a card from him, promising to put him on the NET appen-
dix and send him a copy soon. He explained that he was planning to
present the NET materials received to date in May and asked to include
“Deine Concept Art.”18 The artist had invited just 10 close acquaintances
to the reception, making the raid that occurred 45 minutes after the
invitees arrived all the more shocking, since it was clear that one of his
friends had informed on him. The materials were duly confiscated, in-
cluding the film from the camera used to document the meeting itself:
“They took it all down and took it away.”19
Interrogations and investigations followed for more than a year:
“The leitmotiv was that we were founding an anarchist organization di-
rected against the state. … Later, they calmed down and a day before
the court hearing which was due to take place I was informed that they
had abandoned the idea.”20 Kozłowski’s everyday possibilities were cur-
tailed, despite the decision to drop the case: he was unable to travel
abroad, banned from teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts, and as-
signed to work in the library for the next five years.21 He continued to
pursue the many new contacts that had been established as a result of
the original mailing and the extended network that had subsequently
evolved though. While he could not leave the country, his work contin-
ued to be shown internationally: “I sent my works by mail, as simple as
that. At that time, I used to receive many invitations to present my work
abroad, but my passport applications were automatically rejected. … It
was only in the late 1970s that I started travelling abroad.”22
He turned to self-publishing: “books offered freedom,” a means to
circulate art without recourse to galleries and institutional structures.23
As he explains: “For us, in the East, books gave opportunities to find
modes of expression beyond the official system of institutions. The
only obstacle in the way was censorship.” Kozłowski devised ways to
pass through the censorship process: “On some of my books, you can
find the names of imaginary publishers … they were made up but nec-
essary in order to get the censor’s stamp, which allowed you to print a
hundred or so copies.”24 He distributed the books among friends and
through his international networks and used his new contacts to find
publishers for his artists’ books abroad, finding a home for his book
Lesson with the Beau Geste Press.

112 Chapter 4
Figure 4.8
Barry McCallion, Signal Dots, 1972. Courtesy
of the artist and Jarosław Kozłowski.

Figures 4.9 and 4.10 (facing page)
First reception of NET, Poznań, May 1972.
Courtesy of Jarosław Kozłowski.
Figure 4.11 (below)

Géza Perneczky, Identification Program
(1 of 5), 1971. Courtesy of the artist
and Chimera-Project Gallery, Budapest.
The Press had been founded by a collective of artists who had come
together in rural Devon in England when Mexican émigré artists Felipe
Ehrenberg and Martha Hellion moved there in 1970. Their rented manor
house in Collumpton became the Beau Geste Press, initiated by Ehren-
berg and Hellion with a number of British collaborators, among them
David Mayor. They would devote two issues of their magazine Schmuck
to Eastern Europe—an Aktual Schmuck edited by Knížák and a survey of
contemporary Hungarian art put together by Dóra Maurer and László

Beke.25 Mayor, who has been described as “an obsessive letter writer,”
was instrumental in the organizational aspects of the Press.26 His corre-
spondence with Kozłowski about his book projects, outlining a range of
options for printing and distributing, gives insight into the peculiar com-
bination of ad hoc decision making and professionalism that character-
ized the Press as an independent enterprise. Mayor specifically asked
that Kozłowski send him the NET list, showing that its significance went
well beyond the Eastern European network it helped inspire.27
In addition to continuing to pursue such dialogues, Kozłowski
found new ways to use loopholes in the system, in particular the rel-
atively relaxed rules relating to professional social spaces known as
“clubs.” A second NET reception was held in October 1972 at the Club of
the Creative Unions in Poznań and lasted just three hours. Kozłowski
explains that what mattered was “to do another show and not to give
up” (figure 4.12).28 The second reception was more focused than the
first, consisting of printed documentation from exhibitions held at the
Art & Project gallery in Amsterdam suspended on wires strung between
the walls, so that spectators could encounter the objects physically in
space and handle the displays. This time there was no interference
from the secret police.29
Together with three students from Adam Mickiewicz University,
Kozłowski secured the use of a students’ club under the aegis of the
Union of Polish Students (later called the Socialist Union of Polish Stu-
dents) on shared terms with a student nightclub, to hold exhibitions four
days a week. The Union provided minimal funding for costs such as in-
vitations, printing, nails and wall paint, and photographic documenta-
tion.30 The international exchanges initiated by way of NET were central
to the exhibition program of the new space, which they called Akumula-
tory 2 (a name taken from the neon sign over the space advertising car
batteries). The aim of the gallery was “the presentation of exhibitions of
avant-garde artists, representing—to as broad an extent as possible—the
newest tendencies in Polish as well as world art.”31 They could rely on
attracting a good crowd: “there was a permanent audience, a group of
about 40 people, who regularly came to the gallery, in addition to which
there were sometimes more people. It was a very good audience, mostly
116 Chapter 4
Figure 4.12
Second reception of NET, Poznań, October
1972. Courtesy of Jarosław Kozłowski.
artists and students from the academy and from art history, art histori-
ans, but also from the university, from other departments.”32
Kozłowski sought to run the space in as democratic a way as pos-
sible: “We worked with established and also with very young unknown
artists. For example, we had an exhibition of work by Richard Long,
and the following week we had a show by a fourth year art student.
There was no hierarchy.” Artists were simply invited to take over the
space, without intervention by the organizers: “There was nothing for-
mal, or written to say so, but still artists had a certain responsibility as
a matter of principle. After all, they were all strangers to me and when
they came to have their show, they would all live at my place. There was
no state sponsorship.” There was still a requirement to provide evi-
dence of proposed activities to the censors, but Kozłowski recalls that
it was all something of a charade: “I had to take every exhibition invita-
tion we proposed to print at Akumulatory to the censors, it all seemed
a bit puerile. They were ready to buy or accept anything provided it was
presented in such a way that it didn’t arouse suspicion; of course, it
could have done, but it was a matter of interpretation. It was a simple-
minded system.”33 Postal exchanges could be erratic, though: “Corre-
spondence went missing. It was controlled at that time after all. There
was in existence a paradoxical institution called the Office of Postal
Exchange, which carried out checks. As regards all foreign correspon-
dence, I assume that in those countries something analogous existed.
And as a result the letters were lost. Contacts were often interrupted.”34
One of the first to be invited was Štembera, who later commented
that “besides the Hungarians, the Poles were the only ones in Eastern
Europe interested in what we were doing here.” What’s more, Poles had
at their disposal “a whole mass of galleries which were not subject to
censorship, outside the official structures ruled over by the commu-
nists.”35 It was a particularly difficult time in Czechoslovakia and the
full weight of “normalization” had descended on artistic circles, with
experimental artists expelled from the Union of Artists en masse,
though Štembera was an employee of the Museum of Decorative Arts
and not registered as an artist. Kozłowski “organized an exhibition in
his name,” which ran from 15 to 18 January 1973.36 In addition to his
118 Chapter 4
documentation of the Transposition of Two Stones, he sent a selection
of the Daily Activities, such as Tying Shoelaces (figure 4.13) and Button
Sewing.37 The exhibition was called “Genealogy,” and the invitation con-
sisted of a family tree.38
Besides being immensely active in disseminating his own work,
Štembera was also attuned to the work of other artists in Czechoslo-
vakia and in neighboring countries. Valoch recalls that he had initially
mailed out “photographs of his land art installations and his conceptual
Figure 4.13
Petr Štembera, Daily Activities (Tying
Shoelaces), 1971. Courtesy of the Artist.

books. Somewhat later came his Weather Reports … a very interesting
transfer of meteorological news in the form of a mailed message.” Such
pieces, Valoch argued, entailed a disavowal of the artist’s subjectivity
and a desire to become “a mere middleman in the transfer of informa-
tion.”39 Maja Fowkes likewise notes that the Weather Reports were “both
a means of communication and a way to emphasize the problem of
information transmission,” but she argues that this was not just any
“banal, objective, and neutral scientific data” but “factual information
about changes in the weather system,” pointing out that the weather
is “something that everyone is exposed to” and represents “one of the
most universal bodily experiences.”40 László Beke was an early recipient
of these reports (figure 4.14).
Štembera also wrote about art (like Valoch, who regularly contrib-
uted essays to artists’ exhibition catalogs).41 He provided a pioneering
survey in English of experimental trends in Czechoslovak art in 1970,
which was first printed in Puerto Rico and then reprinted in edited form
in Lucy Lippard’s Six Years.42 The text, entitled “Events, Happenings and
Land-Art in Czechoslovakia: A Short Information,” was the first attempt
by an artist to offer an international audience an overview of the con-
temporary Czechoslovak alternative art scene. Štembera made links
between developments in Czechoslovakia and international trends,
saying that “news trickled into Czechoslovakia about the work of the
American happeningsmen, in the first place the names of A. Kaprow
and the Fluxus group.” He argued that the information they received in
the 1960s was “too incomplete and short to be capable of really influ-
encing and forming anybody.” He noted, however, that “Knížák himself
acknowledges Kaprow as one of the lasting personalities of happening
Figure 4.14
Petr Štembera, Weather Reports
(Information), 1971. Courtesy of the artist
and László Beke.
120 Chapter 4
Figure 4.15
Klaus Groh, Aktuelle Kunst in Osteuropa
(Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1972).
Courtesy of Klaus Groh.
122 Chapter 4
art, and he proves this in 1968 with his trip to America, which was actu-
ally a trip to see Kaprow.”43 While paying his dues to Knížák as a pio-
neer, he remarked, perhaps a little pointedly, that “we have but a small
choice of information at our disposal about the present-day activities
of the indubitable leader of Czechoslovak happenings, Knížák … as he
has been living in New York since 1968.” In his text, Štembera offered
brief sketches of the activities of the Aktual Group, Stano Filko, Alex
Mlynárčik, Eugen Brikcius, Eva Kmentová, Zorka Ságlová, Václav Cigler,
and Hugo Demartini. The artist only referred to his own activities very
modestly toward the end of the text, writing of himself in the third per-
son: “Petr Štembera stretches out sheets of polythene between trees in
a snow-covered landscape, and stretches out textile ribbons in a single
colour, paints rocks, etc.”44
Štembera played an active role in writing and disseminating the art
history of his moment. This self-historicizing strategy coincided with
a wider shift in the period toward a new fluidity between the positions
of artist, critic, and art historian—a shift that is observable in the case
of quite a large number of the experimental artists from Eastern Eu-
rope active in international circuits. Not least because of the absence
of a supporting infrastructure, some artists felt compelled to contrib-
ute to the construction of a context for the reception of their work.45
Štembera’s artistic, social, and scholarly activities would all prove cen-
tral to the expansion of the network. Among others, he provided the im-
petus for Klaus Groh’s landmark book Aktuelle Kunst in Osteuropa—the
first survey of experimental art in Eastern Europe (figure 4.15).

5
Aktuelle Kunst
in Osteuropa
Štembera had written to Klaus Groh in the autumn of 1970 about the
possibility of publishing “a comprehensive report on the art scene in
Czechoslovakia.”1 He included in his letter a copy of a text by the art
historian and writer Josef Kroutvor entitled “Possibilities.”2 Kroutvor’s
eulogy consisted of 34 statements explaining how and why possibility is
so fundamental to our existence. Insofar as the text comprised a series
of statements defining the properties of possibility, its message of hope
was aligned to dissident thinking across central Europe after 1968.3 Part
manifesto, part poem, the piece proposed that “everything is within us,
everything is possible,” for “time and space open out in all directions.”
Kroutvor’s statements on what he called “the art of possibility” cap-
tured the essence of the experimental practices to which Groh’s book
Chapter
would be devoted:
the art of possibility is an art of projects and demonstrations, events,

gestures, individual and collective rites and a form of experimental activity Aktuelle
in various guises.
the art of possibility is an art which is open to all materials and systems.
the art of possibility does not seek aesthetical brilliance and beauty but
communication and perspectives.
the art of possibility is art and is not art. the point of departure is an idea,
like life. it is not known where art begins and where it ends.
the art of possibility opens new cosmic and social space (dimensions).
the art of possibility is utopia and rite of the present: this present …4
The openness Kroutvor was advocating was both material and
existential: it saw possibility in everything. Its openness to “systems”
echoed Groh’s interest in the détournement of existing systems to artis-
tic ends, and it aimed at communicating and opening pathways to mul-
tiple perspectives, focusing on ideas rather than aesthetics, resonating
with Lucy Lippard and Robert Chandler’s text on “The Dematerializa-
tion of Art,” discussed in my introduction. That Štembera’s practice
embodied the position of openness expressed by Kroutvor is also clear:
his proposals tested the art of possibility in a given situation and com-
municated this to others.
Perneczky noted the key role played by his Czech colleague in wid-
ening the network of artists brought on board: “He wrote me a letter
in 1970 when he was collecting for Groh’s book” (figure 5.1). Štembera’s
approach was spontaneous: “He sent me lots of photos, but without
any system … he didn’t even send me his concept. … He only gave away
impulses, one photo here, one photo there.”5 In the same apparently
haphazard way, Štembera had sent Groh documentation of some of his
“daily activities,” which for the most part took the form of black-and-
white A5 photographic prints on the reverse of which he had added a
sticker with his name and the typed title of the piece. Despite what Per-
neczky says about the apparently arbitrary nature of his distribution
systems, Štembera’s professional approach to the presentation of his
projects also demonstrates a strong degree of self-awareness. Among
the earliest pieces mailed to Groh by Štembera were Writing with a
Type-writer and Opening the Window—simple photographs of the artists’
hands carrying out the named activities (the first of which also found
its way into Lippard’s book in 1973).6 A few days after this first approach,
Groh received further photographs and documents of Czechoslovak ac-
tivities. He recalls that he was so impressed by their “originality and
quality” that he decided to look for similar materials in other Eastern
European countries, taking Kroutvor’s title “Possibilities” as the work-
ing title for a book project.
Groh was born in the German town Neisse, which was subsequently
annexed to Poland, and so had a personal connection with Eastern
Europe, if only for political reasons. As a consequence of the border
126 Chapter 5
Figure 5.1
Petr Štembera, letter to Géza Perneczky,
15 December 1970. Courtesy of the artist
and Géza Perneczky.
Aktuelle Kunst in Osteuropa 127

changes imposed at the end of World War II, he became a refugee: “I
was one of the million people that came to the West. Being in West
Germany happened really by chance. One half of the transport stopped
in Dresden and the other half at the next station, in Hannover, and I
had the luck that it was not in the GDR but Hannover. Along with my
mother and my brother, we were put up in farmhouses or anywhere
where they had a free room. My father was still in a Russian prison,
and then in an American one.”7 The family settled in Cloppenburg, near
Oldenburg. Groh went on to study art history and art education in Ol
denburg, where the experimental scene was thriving in the ’60s and ’70s
and Cage had good connections.8 He was especially interested in Schil-
ler’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, the idea that “mankind
only learns when he plays” and that “every moment is an artistic activ-
ity,” and sought to pursue such questions by way of his engagement
with teacher training, performance, and book art.9
In 1969, Groh had founded an IAC (International Artists’ Coopera-
tion), Xeroxing and distributing the IAC-INFO bulletin with the help
of an ever-expanding array of “foreign contact centres.” Dóra Maurer
describes it as “the first mediating agency for idea art” and writes that
Groh was a “hyperactive propagator.”10 In November 1973, Groh devised
an INFO mail art show which was shown, in turn, in a network of semi-
alternative spaces across Poland: Galeria Propzycja in Kraków, Galeria
Labirynt in Lublin, and the Warsaw Polytechnic student club Galeria
Remont, among others. Anna Potocka’s apartment Galeria PI in Kraków
hosted a meeting with Groh on 13 October 1974. The invitation announced
the “International Artist Cooperation in Art System.” Potocka recollects:
He was … collecting all possible addresses … he held a meeting at my place …

during which he was also collecting data. At first this was Xeroxed and given
out. It consisted of cards on which all sorts of artistic addresses from this rather
closed-off world and which were in some way coming to light were handwrit-
ten by him and by others … he wasn’t collecting it for himself, to send some-
thing himself, but so that we could all add our names and use it. He made
copies and then the list was passed around between us, it was a way of passing
on addresses. It was an artistic address book.11
128 Chapter 5
Groh also welcomed a steady stream of visitors to Oldenburg, some in-
vited, some not.12
The IAC launched an edition of black-and-white booklets by its
members, and the first was by Štembera, entitled Private Activities, 1972
(figure 5.2).13 It consisted of a series of simple activities in English verb
form, such as “to sleep,” “to speak,” “to go”—a banal list, with the verb
“to officiate” inserted in the middle. This unexpected inclusion laconically
suggested that officiating, like eating, or loving, had become the most
Figure 5.2
Petr Štembera, Private Activities, 1972.

natural thing in the world. The gesture is a typical example of the under-
stated humor that characterizes so much of Štembera’s deadpan work.
Perneczky stresses the significance for the network of a 1972 issue of
the IAC-INFO listing 84 avant-garde magazines from around the world,
entitled “Mini Press All Over the World” where he noted in particular the
presence of Latin American titles alongside the East European list. That
same year, Groh began to compile a Mail Artists’ Index. In relation to
what mail art meant at the time, he says that quality was “not important.
It was just giving signs. I am here, you are there, but it was not the quality
of conversation, not just a matter of quality, it was just doing. Just doing
things to be heard. … Before … 1990, it was impossible for many people to
get in personal contact, even writing letters, so this kind of game was the
only possibility.” He insisted on working on an individual basis: “I had no
contact with galleries, it was only personal contact.”14
Assembling the material for Possibilities (which came to be called
Aktuelle Kunst in Osteuropa) was not easy, as “contacts with the creative
avant-garde in Eastern Europe were scarce and artists’ activities were
only made available to a wide public in a few individual cases—whether
through exhibitions or through publications.”15 Groh relied on con-
tacts in Eastern Europe and others who were in touch with artists in
Eastern Europe to assist him in the project. Complementing the ma-
terials gathered by Štembera, Groh received Czechoslovak materials
from Jürgen Weichardt in Oldenburg and Jiří Valoch in Brno. Among
the 22 Czechoslovak artists selected for inclusion, those who played
the most prominent role in pursuing international contacts were Pe-
ter Bartoš, Stano Filko, Jiří Kocman, Alex Mlynárčik, Štembera, and
Valoch. Kostołowksi, in Poland, sent Groh full documentation from the
pioneering exhibition “Sztuka pojęciowa” (Concept art) held in Galeria
Pod Moną Lisą in Wrocław in 1970.16 As a result, 20 Polish artists were
included in the survey, including networkers Jan Chwałczyk, Kozłowski,
Andrzej Lachowicz, and Natalia Lach-Lachowicz.17 Groh already had a
number of Hungarian contacts and organized an exhibition entitled
“Sechs ungarische Künstler” (Six Hungarian artists) at the Oldenburg
Kunstverein in 1970. Among them was Gábor Attalai, whom David Fehér
130 Chapter 5
describes as operating “outward” from Hungary.18 Attalai wrote to Groh
at the end of December 1970 saying that he would be glad to contribute
to his book, sending contact details of three other artists, giving their
Budapest addresses. The first two, Konkoly and Perneczky, emigrated
that same year, but the third, Szentjóby, remained in Budapest until
1975 (figure 5.3). Fourteen artists from Hungary were eventually fea-
tured in the book, including Tibor Gáyor, László Lakner, Dóra Maurer,
Perneczky, and Tót.
Štembera recommended that Groh contact the Movement group
in the USSR, and another contact provided Lev Nusberg’s address in
Moscow. Nusberg was to be the only Soviet artist included in the pub-
lication. Contacts with Romanian artists materialized in a roundabout
way, via the editor of the magazine Pages in London, David Briers, who
informed Groh about the Sigi Krauss Gallery in London. Pavel Ilie, Ritzi
Jacobi, Horia Bernea, and Paul Neagu were included as a result. Christo
in New York provided contacts for Bulgarian artists, though in the end
none were included. Jiří Valoch put Groh in touch with Marko Pogačnik,
who sent him materials relating to artists’ groups from Yugoslavia:
OHO, Grupa Kôd, and Grupa (ə. Among the Yugoslav artists included
were Braco Dimitrijević, Bogdanka Poznanović, and Goran Trbuljak.
Groh explained about the collaborative nature of the project in his
preface and made it clear that such a substantial undertaking would
have been inconceivable without the network of contacts and their
contacts in turn. His contacts also helped in translating the materials
into German, with the exception of those in English, which Groh de-
cided to leave. Among the helpers were Štembera, who translated from
Czech to German, and Tatiana Štemberová, who translated Russian
to German.
Only a few of the artists in the book had been included in Groh’s
earlier overwhelmingly Western-oriented publication on conceptual
art: If I had a mind … (ich stelle mir vor …) concept-art project-art (pub-
lished by DuMont in 1971). The exceptions were Štembera, Polish con-
ceptual artist Edward Krasiński, and émigré artists Christo and the
Hungarian János Urbân (by then living in Switzerland).19 Štembera had

Figure 5.3
Gábor Attalai, letter to Klaus Groh,
29 December 1970. Courtesy of Klaus Groh
and Forschungstelle Osteuropa, Bremen.
132 Chapter 5
contributed three photographs of a land art–type action in the snow
and two drawings for a gallery installation, while Krasiński sent photo-
graphs of a series of metal tubes threaded together and lying in a zigzag
on the floor of the studio (figure 5.4).
Aktuelle Kunst in Osteuropa was similar to its predecessor in design
and likewise allocated several pages to each of the artists whose docu-
mentation had been received, structured alphabetically by the artists’
surnames. The emphasis was on the documentation of the proposi-
tions rather than on the artists themselves—with biographical infor-
mation limited to their year of birth and place of residence. In addition
to Krout vor’s text on “Possibilities …,” Groh included texts by Filko
and Attalai. He added as an epigraph a citation from Lenin’s famous
statement concerning the need for art to be “understood and loved”
by the masses. There was a clear frisson in linking Lenin’s Bolshevik
fervor to the ironic responses to really existing socialism explored by
the artists in the book, not least because the latter had no access to a
mass audience.
The book’s alphabetical survey of artists opened with a deadpan
statement by Attalai: “My best friends are farmers, pilots, train driv-
ers, street sweepers, hairdressers, meteorologists, flow adjustors, math-
ematicians, postmen, chemists and numerous others.” Groh’s editorial
juxtaposition of the Lenin quotation with Attlai’s statement appar-
ently proposed that the Bolshevik vision had finally been fulfilled five
decades on, and that artists no longer saw themselves as a category
apart but had become one with the people. The link made in this way
between the Soviet historical avant-garde and “contemporary art in
Eastern Europe” expressed a tendency to place everything “Eastern
European” under one umbrella, irrespective of the marked differences
between the Soviet Union of the 1920s and postwar Kádárist Hungary,
Gomułka’s Poland, Titoist Yugoslavia, or Ceauşescu’s Romania.
Filko’s contribution was the latest in a series of conceptual
propositions exploring social freedom, whether actual or imaginary.
Happsoc IV took the dynamic form of a rocket, and exhorted every-
one in Slovak, French, German, and English to “TRAVEL IN SPACE,”
both mental and physical, in accordance with their “possibilities and

Figure 5.4
Edward Krasiński, N … (Intervention 4,
Zig-Zag), 1969. Photo: Eustachy Kossakowski.
© Hanna Ptaszkowska and the archive
of Museum of Modern Art Warsaw.
Courtesy of Paulina Krasińska and the
Foksal Gallery Foundation.
faculties” (figure 5.5). Štembera’s offering opened with the statement: “1.
my work is only meaningful in a temporo-spatial relation / 2. I am not in-
terested in art, but rather in active processes / 3. ‘in-formal’ work / con-
stant change / that is what concerns me.” The facing page showed the
artist squatting by a stream with an open can of paint, using a brush to
paint a rock with water flowing around it (figure 5.6). The double-page
spread that followed showed 12 photographs of two boxes gradually be-
ing filled with a tangle of film from a reel and then emptied out again.
Valoch’s piece was Secret Room—an impossible gallery space in which
one could potentially exhibit at the cost of being unable to leave, inevi-
tably conveying a palpable sense of artists’ isolation and the ambiva-
lence of having to work partially underground (figure 5.7).
Alongside his own contributions to the volume, Trbuljak sent a se-
ries of “projects” attributed to his grandfather Grgur Kulijaš, scrawled
in capital letters by hand: “Project 1. When one of my 3 projects appears
in Klaus Groh’s book, I will be the happiest man in the world”; “Proj-
ect 2. When one of my 3 projects appears in Klaus Groh’s book I will
enter into history”; “Project 3. When one of my 3 projects appears in
Klaus Groh’s book, I will no longer have to work with conceptual art.”
His multiple submission pointed to the degree to which conceptual-
ism was becoming the international art language de rigueur: to become
conversant with its terms promised to unlock the potential for access
to the network that had evolved around artists in its orbit. Trbuljak’s
contribution under his own name was a series of self-portraits taken
over the course of four years (figure 5.8). Trbuljak explains that when
Groh wrote to him to ask for some work, he also asked him to suggest
some other artists: “I gave him the name and address of my grandfather
… I said I would be very happy if he would print this work, then I would
never have to do it again. In one way this book was very important for all
of us, but with this example you can see that it is possible to make some
kind of a manipulation. My grandfather received many letters from dif-
ferent parts of the world. For a short time he was treated like an artist.
No one asked him again to send work, but he received invitations to
shows.”20 Over the years Trbuljak would develop many more projects

Figure 5.5
Stanislav Filko, Happsoc IV, 1971. Courtesy
of the Slovak National Gallery.
136 Chapter 5
Figure 5.6
Petr Štembera, Painting Stones, 1972.

138 Chapter 5
Figure 5.7 (facing page)
Jiři Valoch, Secret Room, 1971. Reproduced
in Klaus Groh, Aktuelle Kunst in Osteuropa
(Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1972).
Courtesy of the artist and the Moravian
Gallery in Brno.
Figure 5.8 (below)

Goran Trbuljak, Self-Portraits, 1972. Page
layout from Klaus Groh, Aktuelle Kunst in
Osteuropa (Cologne: DuMont Schauberg,
1972). Courtesy of the artist and Galerija
Gregor Podnar.

that challenged the operating mechanisms of the Western art system,
and the market in particular.21
When Štembera received his copy of the book, he recalls that he
“woke up and thought ‘I will be a big artist and then I will be rich man
and so on.’”22 The distinctive yellow cover of the book was illustrated
with an arrow pointing “out of town,” taken from a photo-conceptualist
piece by the Slovak artist Rudolf Sikora. Sikora was more specific than
Štembera about the opportunities the publication delivered for him,
though he noted that he was not able to take them up for the most part:
“After Aktuelle Kunst in Osteuropa was published, I received many invita-
tions, but I couldn’t leave and travel abroad. For example I received an
invitation from Harald Szeemann to participate in Kassel Documenta
in 1972 (in the wider selection). I was invited on a stipend to the USA but
had to refuse. In Poland I received the main prize in the poster competi-
tion for my work Habitat I., II. and III. As a prohibited author I couldn’t
receive any official prizes, and it was an international scandal.”23
If, hitherto, a majority of Eastern European artists interested in in-
ternational contacts focused their attention on networking with West-
ern colleagues, and were less informed of parallel developments across
the bloc, the publication of Groh’s book marked a change. It became
clear that the independent activities of artists from neighboring coun-
tries were part of a shared field where all manner of action-based, con-
ceptual, and other forms of experimental art were quietly flourishing.
A number of parallel initiatives were under way, though none had the
same scope or focus as Groh’s project. Maurer notes that “preparations
for further publications were initiated by Walter Aue (Berlin) and Jiří
Valoch (Brno), but their plans for new conceptual art books—for vari-
ous reasons—did not materialize.”24
Groh’s book was only distributed in a small number of copies be-
fore being withdrawn, despite his potentially precautionary measure of
having included no East German artists. He has a different explanation
for this decision, however: “Of course I knew a number of artists from
the … GDR. … The experimental art scene in the GDR was just not part
of my ‘Eastern Europe’ selection. For me, the GDR belonged to Ger-
many, not to Eastern Europe. Politically it was very different.”25 Groh
140 Chapter 5
recounts that “a new editor at DuMont was planning to publish a sepa-
rate book on East German Art … Aktuelle Kunst in der DDR. However, it
did not deal with the ‘unofficial,’ ‘alternative’ art, but the current ‘con-
temporary’ scene. And so she contacted the official artists’ associations
of the GDR for material.” At this point, the story took a political turn.
Groh claims that the artists’ associations “promised to cooperate, pro-
vided the publisher withdrew Aktuelle Kunst in Osteuropa from their list.”
This was what they did, and Groh was not even allowed to purchase the
remaining stock.26 Meanwhile, the proposed book on the GDR never ap-
peared. Groh’s book disappeared from circulation. Of the print run of
3,000, Groh believes only around 500 copies were ever distributed, most
of these to the contributors themselves, before the rest were destroyed.

Part II
Points of Passage

The second part of this book is devoted to a selection of way stations for
experimental art and artists from the Soviet bloc in the period 1972–1976.
Whether the place in question was an artist-run space, a gallery hosting
international exhibitions, or a European city that proved for one rea-
son or another to be a hub for encounters between experimental artists,
each might be characterized as a “point of passage.” The idea combines
Jarosław Kozłowski and Andrzej Kostołowski’s observation that “points
of the NET are: private homes, studios and any other places, where art
propositions are articulated” with a sense of the human traffic they
saw: these were spaces which people and objects passed through at var-
ious rates of intensity—places that generated further encounters and
exchanges.
Opening with a series of meetings between émigré artists in Co-
logne, I explore the role of key players in the distribution of Hungarian
art internationally and the connections these people made with col-
leagues in neighboring countries and further afield. The next chapter
offers a detailed account of a groundbreaking exhibition of Hungarian
artists at Galeria Foksal in Warsaw, a one-off in a space best known for
its solo exhibitions of conceptual artists from Western Europe and the
United States, usually serving to offer Polish artists a “window to the
West.” The third key point of passage is in Hungary itself—the Bala-
tonboglár Chapel Studio of György Galántai, where many experimental
meetings were held over the course of three long summers, including a
legendary meeting between Hungarian and Czechoslovak artists orga-
nized by László Beke in 1972.
Edinburgh is the next point of passage: an important point on the
Eastern European creative landscape thanks to initiatives by Richard
Demarco to organize exhibitions and festivals in Scotland devoted to
Polish, Romanian, and Yugoslavian art and artists, often attended by
the artists in person. The final chapter is a spin-off from this, insofar as
it concerns the American artist Tom Marioni, whose tour of Eastern Eu-
rope was a result of contacts made in Edinburgh. Marioni’s account of
his tour, published on his return to San Francisco in his magazine Vision,
provides an interesting synthetic account of the art scenes in Poland,
Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia in the early 1970s from an out-
side perspective. It serves as an opportunity to reexamine assumptions
about the region and the politics of its cultural field at the time.
Part II
Points of Passage
144 Part II
6
Émigré Encounters
in Cologne
“Eastern Europeans were simply delighted by Groh’s register [Aktuelle

Kunst in Osteuropa]. In fact, a book about the status of the network
could not have come at a better moment,” Géza Perneczky recalled.1
This was also a very important moment for him, personally. He had
left Hungary in 1970, though his emigration was not exactly planned: “I
made my first journey to the West in ’65 and ’66. I finished university
in ’62. The first time, I went to Holland illegally, to Amsterdam and The Chapter
Hague. It was quite random. I only wanted to spend a month there, but
during that time my workplace, the Künstverlag in Budapest, ceased to
exist and I stayed on. … The second time, I went to Germany in ’69, to
Cologne, Düsseldorf, Stuttgart, and I saw that this was my home.” One
of his earliest friends abroad was Ulises Carrión. He describes Carrión Émigré
as “global, completely international,” adding that he was unique in his

ability to distinguish between what Perneczky calls the “provincial” on
the one hand and the “underground” on the other.2 He explains: “Am-
sterdam was close by, and I could always stay at his when I was there. I
don’t know why we became such good friends. We were both emigrants,
and we were both short. … The telephone book in Cologne is full of
Hungarian names but I didn’t know any of these people … ordinary
people without a particular interest in art. The only one who was there
was Gábor Attalai, but he had already left Cologne by the ’70s and
moved to Frankfurt.”3
Groh’s book played a crucial part, Perneczky explained, “for us East
European artists to get to know each other.”4 He found his artistic com-
munity thanks to the book. In March 1972, he received an enthusiastic
letter from Jiří Valoch (in German): “I am very happy that I received
your card—the things of yours which I saw in Klaus Groh’s book were
the ones I actually found the most interesting in the whole book! I was
going to ask Klaus for your address.” He went on to invite him to partici-
pate in an exhibition he was organizing at Dům umění in Brno (he was
made director in 1972), prefacing this by saying “you will understand
that it is not easy to put on such an exhibition here today,” but added
that he hoped it would give an overview of contemporary problems in
art such as “land art, documentation, projects, concepts, body works,”
and mail art, which he referred to as “art per post.” He explained that he
wanted to show both the best-known artists (he mentions his friends
Christo, Antonio Dias, and Terry Fox) and to make known “new materi-
als (especially from Eastern Europe).”5
Valoch sent Perneczky his latest publications and explained that
he had been making visual poetry since ’64, noting that in recent years
he had become “interested in the relationship between visual poetry
and land art and visual poetry and concepts.”6 In a postscript he added
that once he received more materials from Perneczky he would be able
to make an exhibition for him at the mini-gallery of Dům umění, say-
ing he was also going to show Attalai, Ben, and Christo (15–20 works by
each).7 As Helena Musilová has explored, Valoch put on around three
exhibitions a month in a wide array of spaces. In addition to Dům
umění, where his office became a meeting place for artists, many of
whom would not have been shown in an institutional framework in
either Bratislava or Prague, he also put on exhibitions in ten smaller
venues. One of these “mini-galleries,” as he called them, was the vet-
erinary institute where his friend Jiří Kocman worked.8 Valoch wrote to
his new friend Perneczky to say that they hoped to put on a small show
of contemporary Hungarian art “at the veterinary institute, where Koc-
man works.”9 Later in 1972, he sent out invitations to Hungarian artists
to contribute works to a major exhibition of Hungarian art he planned
to host in Brno in October 1972.10
Perneczky was soon in touch with Kocman too. He wrote to him (in
German) saying how happy he was that he had “finally” found his ad-
dress from his “very good friend J. Valoch.” Kocman talked about how
148 Chapter 6
his and Perneczky’s work overlapped in its interests, and asked that he
send him something.11 Kocman replied to Perneczky saying how happy
he was “that I have found a new friend. A twin brother NOxYES.” He was
referring to the fact that both of them had been working with the YES/
NO opposition, producing parallel works with these concepts. He said
it was a “surprise—wonderful—very good—it is a corpus delicti of our
equal sensibility.”12 One of Perneczky’s variations on the theme YES/NO
at the time was a set of matchboxes, arranged in different configura-
tions. As always in his work, the materials were simple, and the results
impeccably documented (figure 6.1). Kocman explained to his new col-
league that he was a 24-year-old veterinarian and said that he has been
making “graphics, objects, book-objects, land art and lately especially
Figure 6.1
Géza Perneczky, YES NO Matchboxes, 1971.
Courtesy of the artist and Chimera-Project
Gallery, Budapest.
Émigré Encounters in Cologne 149

projects and concepts,” that he thought that “ART IS A SENSIBILITY,”
and that he considered his activity as a veterinarian to be another form
of “ART-ACTIVITY.”13 He added: “Despite my good job I have very woeful
possibilities for my life. So many things remain in prototype or in my
notebook as unrealized projects—and all of them will be old and will
lose their spark.” He ended his letter as follows: “I often think about
Duchamp’s saying ‘Kunst geht in der Illegalität’ (Art will go in … ille-
gality)! For me friend-contacts (so friend-art-contacts) are the most
important and I am very sorry that borders exist and that contacts
are suppressed!”14
In a letter thanking Perneczky for his Snail Action (figure 6.2), Koc-
man wrote that he had been staying with Peter Bartoš for a few days and
described him as a someone with “great vitality and really fantastic sen-
sibility for nuance.” He said that they should meet and talk and asked
Perneczky to send Bartoš something relating to the theme of nature, as
Bartoš was working on what he called ZOO-Art. Kocman explained: “the
most important ZOO-Art project is the search for a new breed of dove. It
is a somewhat extreme work, but in Peter’s hands very fantastic!” He said
that he hoped to complete both his publications LOVE and STAMP by the
end of the year, adding: “It is very bad to do things together with artists
as almost all of them are very disorganized: the first makes his thing in
a different format, the second in too few copies, the third 3-dimensional
(which brings many complications when it comes to binding).”15
Perneczky launched Important Business, a triannual journal de-
voted to East European art, in February 1973, on the theme of YES .=/
NO, including his own work and Kocman’s in the first issue (figure 6.3,
6.4). Photos show Perneczky making the magazine at home with images
scattered around the floor, illustrating the hands-on process of assem-
bling the publication (figure 6.5). Kocman wrote to say how pleased he
was to receive his copy, not only saying it was beautiful, but also refer-
ring to it as a form of “Ost-Hilfe” (East-Help).16 Issue two was on Károly
Halász. Perneczky swiftly distributed the new magazine through the
network (whose historian he would become). One subscriber to send
in a payment was Jean Brown, who was in the process of amassing a
major archive of alternative magazines and small press publications.
150 Chapter 6
Figure 6.2
Géza Perneczky, Snail Action, 1972. Courtesy
of the artist and Chimera-Project Gallery.

Figure 6.3
Géza Perneczky, Important Business, no. 1,
1973. Courtesy of the artist and Chimera-
Project Gallery.
152 Chapter 6
Figure 6.4
Jiří H. Kocman, Bipolar Analysis of a Square,

Figure 6.5
Géza Perneczky, photograph taken by the
artist while compiling Important Business,
David Mayor replied on behalf of the recently founded Beau Geste Press
to thank him for his copy, saying: “really nice ! with humour, which
is so bloody rare now ! i would like to subscribe to it, but have very
little money, so wonder if it might be possible to do an ‘exchange
subscription’ with some of the things we print here. … that way there
could be exchange of information, not just of money … would that be
possible, do you think ? i’m hoping to finish the schmuck by april 1:
we’ve printed quite a lot of it already, and now most of the work is quite
154 Chapter 6
straightforward … i think it’s one of the best things we’ve done so far,
really ! enclosed: something about the czech artist milan knížák—he is
in bad trouble in cssr, for doing what seems to be nothing at all. i hope
you will help as far as you can.”17 The conversation with Mayor was one
that would continue, through various channels, and his appeal to Per-
neczky to help Knížák serves to show how committed the members of
the evolving network were to seeking to galvanize international support
in such cases.
Perneczky was invited to give a short speech on the occasion of the
publication of Aktuelle Kunst in Osteuropa, which was celebrated by an
exhibition of materials from the book at Studio DuMont in Cologne
in the spring of 1972 (figure 6.6). When Kocman received photos of the
event from Perneczky, he replied that it was “strange to see shots of an
exhibition that I have not been officially informed has been opened.”
Perhaps, he speculated, all Groh had wanted from him were “materials
for his business.”18 Groh sold part of the work received for the book, later
explaining that he did so in order to help raise the artists’ international
profile (figure 6.7).19 If the question of the sales later led to misunder-
standings, then these were also indicative of the different approaches
taken to networking and distribution on either side of the Iron Cur-
tain. They also suggest a possible double standard among Western art
world professionals in their dealings with Eastern European colleagues.
The “Aktuelle Kunst in Osteuropa” display at Studio DuMont marked
the “arrival” of this work within a new context. Photographs suggest
a professionally delivered opening with a well-dressed crowd politely
drinking beer from glasses. Besides Perneczky, Dóra Maurer and Tibor
Gáyor were also present (figure 6.8).
Dóra Maurer’s situation at the time made her particularly well
placed to foster international connections. She had become involved
in organizing exhibitions early on. The first group show she worked on
gave her “a taste of the magic of outwitting—if overly cautiously—the
powers that be.” It was what she called a “partisan exhibition” entitled
“Artisti Ungheresi della Grafica” at the Galleria il Segnapassi in Pesaro,
Italy, in 1966: “To play it safe, we invited some graphic artists who
played a leading role in the Union of Visual Artists—[Renato] Cocchi

Figure 6.6
Géza Perneczky (left foreground) at DuMont
Studio, Cologne, 1972. Courtesy of Géza
Perneczky.
Figure 6.7
Klaus Groh (second from left) at DuMont
Studio, Cologne, 1972. Courtesy of Géza
Perneczky.
Figure 6.8
Dóra Maurer and Tibor Gáyor, DuMont
Studio, Cologne, 1972. Photograph by Géza
Perneczky. Courtesy of Dóra Maurer, Tibor
Gáyor, and Géza Perneczky.
referred to them as ‘umbrello’—so that the truly important artists, from

the point of view of the exhibition, such as László Lakner, János Major
and Pál Deim, would not get into trouble if the enterprise should come
to light.”20
In 1967, Maurer was awarded a Rockefeller Scholarship for a six-
month residency in Vienna. She recollected: “This opportunity to go
abroad, gained through private channels, at the time ruffled the feath-
ers of the State Grant-Distributing Commission, who granted special
favour when they conceded the travel permit.” While there, at an eve-
ning “organised by the Vienna International Artists’ Club,” she met
the ’56er Gáyor, and they married in Vienna the following year. They
decided to try to divide their time equally between Budapest and Vi-
enna—a life of “commuting.”21
In around 1970, Maurer said that the “idea for the loose grouping
referred to as SUMUS was born, when we were on our way home from
the vernissage of an exhibition (Joseph Beuys) at the Galerie nächst St.
Stephan, and we once again felt intensely that sensation of double-
edged isolation.”22 The couple felt isolated from the Hungarian scene:
“We were not able to take part in the progressive exhibitions and actions
in Hungary at the turn of the Sixties-Seventies. If I look for a reason for
this, I can find several, in fact. We were not acquainted, for instance,

with the majority of the newly appearing artists; many of those curious
about us viewed us as aliens—our old colleagues and friends perhaps
viewed our presence as natural and remained silent.”23 They decided to
become a collective of two, and became key link figures between Hun-
garian colleagues and the international art world. Gáyor presented his
status as an intermediary in diagram form by way of his contribution to
Groh’s book. He marked up an electric-circuit-like map of Europe with
an arrow pointing to a numbered link between two fields designated
A and H (Austria and Hungary) annotated “Das bin ich!” (That’s me!)
(figure 6.9).
Emigré artists were often uniquely placed to play key roles in con-
necting their networks to foreign opportunities. Gáyor and Maurer met
Groh through the painter Imre Bak—László Lakner was also instru-
mental in helping them to make contacts in Germany and played a part
in their being invited to exhibit in an unofficial exhibition of Hungar-
ian art at the Galerie Baukunst in Cologne.24 When Gáyor and Maurer
visited Groh they “made fast friends with the gentle, empathetic David
Mayor, who organised from London the flux-west movement, an open,
more popular version of the original Fluxus concept.”25 One contact led
to another. Following through on the encounter with Mayor in Cologne,
Maurer and Tót participated in the touring “Fluxshoe” exhibition in the
United Kingdom, masterminded by Ken Friedman and Mike Weaver (a
friend of Maciunas) assisted by David Mayor, who had studied under
Weaver in Exeter.26 “Fluxshoe,” initially intended to be called the “Flux
Show” but renamed to embrace a typing error, toured England for a
year, beginning in Falmouth in October 1972 before passing through Ex-
eter, Croydon, Oxford, Nottingham, and Blackburn, ending in Hastings
in August 1973.27 It was a substantial operation, funded among others
by Exeter University’s American Arts Documentation Centre and the
British Arts Council. It was “no ordinary exhibition”; Mayor noted that
this and other Fluxus festivals were deliberately geared toward produc-
ing “private meeting points for artists who had been previously working
very much alone, or in isolated groups.”28
“Fluxshoe” presented “a collection of things by over a hundred peo-
ple that seems at first to have little coherence: there are films, tapes,
158 Chapter 6
Figure 6.9
Tibor Gáyor, Das bin ich!, 1972. Courtesy of
the artist.

slides, plastic boxes, banana skins, bundles of envelopes, sacks, old
shoes, postcards, douche bags, boxes in boxes, cards in boxes, scores,
letters, statements, books, bottles, calendars, maps, old loaves …”29
Mayor explained that the small scale of many of the works in the show,
besides the fact that the entire show was a touring one and therefore
had to be able to fit into a smallish van, was also the natural conse-
quence of the degree to which the community relied on the mail: “Sepa-
rated by oceans from the people to whom they feel closest in terms of
what they are doing, they mail their things to others around the world.
For them, the sort of art they have contributed to the FLUXshoe is more
of a hobby and a game than work or a profession. They belong to an
international and semi-underground community like UFO enthusiasts
or stamp collectors.”30
Endre Tót was one of those who felt “separated by oceans” from
those he felt most affinity for in artistic terms. Thanks to Maurer’s
meeting with Mayor, he was able to participate in “Fluxshoe” in person.
His Statement for FLUXenglandSHOE consisted of a hole-punched sheet
of black carbon-copy paper with typewritten bullet points consisting of
many zeros and the word “art,” signed and dated. Initially, he sent zero
letters, among others an “Audio-Visual” letter to John Lennon and Yoko
Ono (figure 6.10), for inclusion in “Fluxshoe,” and then joined the tour
in person in 1973. In addition to proposing to install a Flux-TV, consist-
ing of a television screen covered in black card with the words “Flux-TV”
cut out, reminiscent of Nam June Paik’s altered TV sets, Tót proposed
a FLUXchess GAME / without playing. The game was to be an impossible
one, as all the pieces were to be set up in one half of the board, leaving
no blank spaces, and making it impossible for either player to make the
first move. Tót’s proposed opponent was to be “either Dave Mayor / or
Bobby Fisher.” The loser was to be the person who, within the course
of an hour, either failed to move one of his pieces or failed to show up.
FLUXchess GAME / without playing made an ironic point of turning the
tables on Bobby Fisher’s notorious defeat of Boris Spassky (USSR) at
the world championship of 1972 in Reykjavik. Mirroring the stagnation
of détente, in which, as a result of nuclear proliferation on both sides, it
had become effectively impossible for either side to make the first move,
160 Chapter 6
reducing room for maneuver to zero, Tót conspired to give the Soviet
bloc an advantage by rigging the rules—Bobby Fisher would not be in-
formed of the game, and would undoubtedly therefore fail to show. In
his absence, the two artists would play—who lost would be a matter of
chance, depending on who was allocated the white pieces.
Tót performed the first of his zer0-typing actions at “Fluxshoe” (fig-
ure 6.11), announcing in advance: “I will be typing at a writing table—in
the gallery. / Only zer0000s! / For about two hours a day.” Adding to this
busy schedule, Tót proposed to stare at the wall for an hour a day, and
spend an hour a day stamping documents: “I will be watching / gazing
at / the wall—in the gallery, for exactly one hour a day. On my back there
will be a note, with the following text on it: ‘I am glad if I can watch /
gaze at / the wall for an hour a day,’” and “I will be stamping at a writing-
table—in the gallery. / Only a zer0! / For about one hour a day. On the
writing-table there will be a note, with the following text on it: ‘I am
glad if I can stamp a zer0.’”31 Tót’s zeros and stamps filled piles of the
County Borough of Blackburn Recreation Committee Museums and
Art Galleries’ letterheaded notepaper. Each page was carefully labeled
and dated. Among the stamps Tót used on his correspondence was one
reading “DOCUMENTS MAKE ME CALM.” The zero-typed pages from
Blackburn carried a coat of arms with the Latin inscription ARTE ET
LABORE.
Gáyor and Maurer’s encounter with Mayor also led to an indepen-
dent publication in March 1972, which drew in wider circles of Hungar-
ian artists. Mayor invited Maurer to edit an edition of the Beau Geste
Press’s magazine Schmuck.32 She accepted and worked with Beke to
present an overview of the Hungarian unofficial art scene.33 The cover
consisted of a casually presented typed English-language statement on
behalf of the 24 participating artists: “Considering our special circum-
stances under [which] we following authors live & work as well as our
experience we have gained about the prohibiting measures taken by su-
pervisory authorities in our firm belief only in lack of understanding /
declare hereby that we do not assent to the publikation & distribution of
the hungarian SCHMUCK” (figure 6.12).34 The undersigned artists play-
fully acknowledged the Hungarian authorities’ lack of understanding

Figure 6.10
Endre Tót, Audio-Visual Letter to Yoko Ono,
1973. Letter and recording of typing noise.
162 Chapter 6
Figure 6.11
Endre Tót, zero typing at “Fluxshoe” in
Blackburn, 1973. Courtesy of the artist.
of experimental artistic trends, while performing an ironic about-turn

in refusing to accept responsibility for disseminating internationally
their unauthorized and supposedly incomprehensible work in a cool
parody of only partial self-censorship. The back cover advertised Beke’s
“World Archives,” listing a range of functions: “Organization / Critics
/ Documentation / Theories / Exhibitions / ? / Publications / ?? /,” and
invited recipients interested in receiving further information to take
their scissors and cut out from the back cover one of three postcards
prestamped (by Tót) with Beke’s Budapest address (figure 6.13).
Tót was allocated a double-page spread for his zero code and stamp-
ing works, including a letter from Ben and his response, and a “State-
ment of Defectiveness” reading “NOTHING AIN’T NOTHING,” as well
as a strip of photos taken in a photo booth in Southend-on-Sea in June
1971 which had already been sent to David Mayor on the occasion of
“Fluxshoe.” This recycling of the same works in different contexts can
be seen time and again among the most self-consciously networked of
artists: their decision to keep sending the same set of works or visibly
related works must have served to contribute to the international rec-
ognizability of artists such as Tót and Štembera.

Figure 6.12
László Beke and Dóra Maurer, eds.,
Hungarian Schmuck (Collumpton, UK: Beau
Geste Press, 1973), front cover. Courtesy
of Dóra Maurer.
164 Chapter 6
Figure 6.13
László Beke and Dóra Maurer, eds.,
Hungarian Schmuck (Collumpton, UK: Beau
Geste Press, 1973), back cover. Courtesy
of Dóra Maurer.

Beke and Maurer included a self-portrait by János Major in the
form of a three-column table: the first gave the year; the second the key
historical events that occurred in that year; the third a commentary on
events from Major’s personal life. The entry for 1945, for instance, read:
“Hitler commits suicide” in column two, and, in three: “the Red Army
liberates Budapest, consequently Major János is free of persecution.”
Tamás Szentjóby was represented by a line, reminiscent of his New Unit
of Measurement, with the subtitle “Deadline” and a statement explain-
ing that this was a piece from his “Forbidden series.” The magazine
also carried three photographs of a soap bubbles action by Perneczky
with instructions on how to carry it out at home (figure 6.14). A double-
page spread of advertisements for other independent publications was
included, Perneczky’s Important Business being one of these. These ad-
vertisements were works of art in themselves, meticulously sketched by
hand rather than photocopied or printed.
In addition to presenting a thorough survey of the Hungarian neo-
avant-garde, Maurer treated Hungarian Schmuck as the first in a new set
of secret magazines within magazines entitled MA ma (Hungarian Activ-
ists today, in memoriam Lájos Kassák), Hungarian SUMUS-magazine.35 The
next issue of the secret magazine was part of UM(N)WELT DESIGN 47
(1974/4), an “illustrated poster paper” edited by Peter Baum and pub-
lished in Stuttgart and Vienna with photos of artists’ studios and events
at Balatonboglár taken by Gáyor and Maurer.36 At around the same time,
working with Gyula and János Gulyás, Gáyor and Maurer produced an
annual in the form of an events calendar for the year and a “slide col-
lection of 5 new works each from 28 Hungarian artists,” in 10–12 copies,
which they sent out to major museums such as the Folkwang Museum
Figure 6.14
Géza Perneczky, Concepts Like Commentary—
Art Bubbles (i–iv), 1972. Courtesy of the artist
and Chimera-Project Gallery, Budapest.
166 Chapter 6
in Essen.37 Though the second such annual would never be completed,
it was presented in the form of a double-slide-projection lecture given
by Maurer in October 1974 at the Fiatal Művészek Klubja (Young Art-
ists’ Club) in Budapest under the title “Where I Have Gone, There Was
No Off-Season.” It included slides made with the Gulyás brothers while
on a trip around Czechoslovakia and Poland, documenting visits to Jiří
Valoch in Brno as well as to artists’ studios in Bratislava, Warsaw, and
Wrocław and to the Museum of Modern Art in Łódź.38
German colleagues visited Gáyor and Maurer in Budapest for New
Year’s Eve 1972. Among them was conceptualist and mail artist Hans
Werner Kalkmann, who had become well integrated into the East Eu-
ropean experimental network. In April 1972, for instance, he had col-
laborated with Jiří H. Kocman on a call for contributions addressed in
English under the heading A.R.T., asking artists to send in their details
and to describe the kind of work they did “in catch-word-form” leaving
“the remaining place on the page … reserved for the artists’ imagination
of art.” They added: “If possible you should write in English; please
use a type-writer,” and promised that the result would be “a valuable
and world-wide artist-card-index.”39 Such initiatives were beginning
to proliferate: in a sense, everyone was undertaking an archiving and
networking project in parallel, and every approach was unique. Maurer
recounts that when Groh heard about Kalkmann’s visit, he decided to
come too: “we all took part in the open New Year’s Eve party of Ilona
Keserű. The filmmaker Gábor Bódy was also there. … The next day, over
cabbage broth (for our hangovers), the obligatory avant-garde group
photos were taken in our flat in Szász Károly utca.”40 Photographs re-
corded the prosaic event of Beke, Kalkmann, and Tót posed in pyrami-
dal structure and eating from the same bowl (figure 6.15).
Figure 6.15
Kalkmann, Endre Tót, and László Beke
eating from the same bowl, 1 January 1973.
Courtesy of Dóra Maurer.
168 Chapter 6
Gáyor recalled the sense of energy at that time: “That was the time
when conceptual art had spread all over the world, which meant a fran-
tic, teeming period, which during the late Sixties and early Seventies
coincided with what we were doing. We gladly joined in the Hungarian
art movement and were able to make use of our connections abroad.
We continued to visit the biennials and triennials of graphic art, estab-
lishing new contacts, which others profited from, too.”41 Gáyor notes
there was also a shift in attitudes toward the Central European histori-
cal avant-gardes at the time: “Among the first to break new ground was
Dieter Honisch, who, for example, showed Polish constructivism in the
West, and Jürgen Weichardt, who took works from eastern Europe to
Germany.” He and Maurer also sought “to organise good Hungarian
exhibitions, which came as a surprise in the Netherlands, Germany and
Norway. I believe that what we achieved was quite significant.”42
Weichardt was the director of the Oldenburg Kunstverein, and later
invited the couple to collaborate on the show “Ungarische Kunst ’74,”
bringing together work by the constructivist generation with a survey of
newer trends. Maurer recollects that the trip to Oldenburg was the first
they made with their new VW van: “we made our first big trip with our
VW van bought at the time, with which we were able to transport large
artworks (remaining unnoticed on the borders) for years on end.”43
Perneczky also stresses the importance of the microbus:
They lived here and there, which is important. They had a VW minivan in
yellow, maybe an old postal wagon, I don’t know. And this minivan had great
power, not on its own—the two were important too, of course, because the
van couldn’t drive by itself—but the whole neo-avant-garde, all the Hungar-
ians, wouldn’t have had any international contacts without them—the mini-
van brought them everything … everything, even large paintings. At the border,
they always told them “this is decoration” because it was abstract. Even if the
Stasi knew that the works were expensive, they couldn’t do anything, because
the Marxist socialist doctrine didn’t let them be seen as art—it couldn’t be art
for customs. There was nothing they could do. They knew it was very expen-
sive, but—only decoration. This really was a kind of sweet irony of fate.44
170 Chapter 6
As these Hungarian contacts illustrate, in the context of the mobil-
ity and mobilization of experimental artists around Europe, it seems
very unlikely that anywhere near as many as “six degrees of separation”
separated any pair of artists at the time. If the art world was becoming
a single “global village,” its foundations were becoming as solid across
much of Eastern Europe as they were anywhere else by the early 1970s.

7
Hungarians at
Galeria Foksal
A series of significant exhibitions of contemporary Hungarian art were

organized in Poland in 1970 by the émigré art historian János Brendel,
who came to Poznań to study and then worked at the National Museum.
Piotr Piotrowski called Brendel an unofficial “ambassador of Hungarian
culture” during this period.1 The exhibition proposal sent by Brendel to
the Poznań BWA (Biuro Wystaw Artystycznych or Bureau of Artistic Exhi-
bitions), part of a national network of official exhibition spaces, framed
the project in relation to the 25th anniversary of “The Revolution of the
Hungarian People’s Republic.” The events of 1945 were remembered by
way of a “Week of Hungarian Culture” in Poland that April, and Bren-
del discussed involving the “Society of Polish-Hungarian friendship.”2
As such, Patryk Wasiak has rightly observed that the brief document— Chapter
couched in the language of cultural exchange between socialist na-
tions—exemplified the “grey zone” straddling official and unofficial life
that was so characteristic of the art world of the times.3
Brendel arranged with the artist Attila Csáji in Budapest to gather
together around 100 works. These were taken off their stretchers, rolled Hungarians
up for transportation, and concealed behind the middle bunk in the

cabin of a sleeper train to be smuggled into Poland by Brendel.4 He rec-
ollected being so nervous that he had to drink three quarters of a liter of
vodka.5 A number of sculptures were also delivered in person by artists
who came to Poland by car—Brendel mentions Gyula Pauer and István
Harasztÿ. The undertaking was especially risky as Brendel and Csáji had
both tried and failed to secure permission to export the works from the
Hungarian Ministry of Culture. Various semilegal solutions to the prob-
lem of organizing the exhibition were engineered: although the selected
Hungarian artists were issued with official invitations by the director of
the BWA in Poznań, the Ministry of Culture was sent no paperwork, and
the artists made no contact with their own Ministry of Culture.
The so-called “Group Exhibition of Hungarian Artists” (“Wystawa
grupy artystów węgierskich”) toured from the BWA in Poznań to Lódź
and then to Szczecin.6 26 artists participated, including Tamás Hencze,
Gyula Konkoly, László Lakner, Gyula Pauer, and Endre Tót.7 Konkoly’s
Monument, first shown at the second exhibition at the Iparterv State
Architectural Offices in 1969 and almost immediately censored there,
was among the works shown, the only work of sculpture to have been
transported from Hungary to Poland (figure 7.1). The piece consisted of
large blocks of ice wrapped in gauze, more or less in the shape of a body,
sprinkled with a form of potassium permanganate. This reacted with
water to form a red liquid which seeped into the gauze as the ice melted
and dripped into a tray below. For the Polish exhibition, Konkoly’s ice
blocks were suspended above a container into which their blood-red
fluid was deposited. As Brendel recounted: “Everybody still remem-
bered the year 1956, it was still fresh in people’s memories. … One of
the sculptures was a monument to 1956, though it was impossible to
write that.”8
Extraordinary as these early Polish shows of Hungarian art were,
the one that most captured the art historical imagination of that time
was an exhibition at Galeria Foksal in Warsaw in 1972. The gallery was
one of a new category of exhibition spaces that had begun to appear in
Poland in the 1960s, often referred to as “author’s galleries.” In many
respects they were characterized less by what they did than by what
they did not do: what mattered to those involved in their activities,
Kozłowski said, was that “they functioned outside the official circuit.”
This made them unlike “other exhibition spaces in Poland at that time,”
which “realized programs that reflected the political program of cul-
ture in that period” and were “entirely state-controlled.”9 The new gal-
leries “built their own program and weren’t in any way coordinated by
the Ministry of Culture and Art or the Union of Artists.” They required
the support of an umbrella organization which could host and in some
cases sponsor them, if only by printing invitations to openings or simi-
lar provisions. In some cases this was a local association of artists or
174 Chapter 7
Figure 7.1
Gyula Konkoly, Monument, second Iparterv
exhibition, Budapest, 1969. Photo: László
Beke. Courtesy of the artist and László Beke.
a students’ club. In the case of Galeria Foksal, the support came from
an institution called the PSP (Pracownie Sztuk Plastycznych or Work-
shops of Plastic Arts), which was tasked with commissioning official
memorials, banners, and similar design projects. Such arrangements
provided a basis for new creative possibilities and marked a new stage
in Poland’s rapid post-Stalinist “thaw.”
Wiesław Borowski recalled being surprised when the director of the
PSP—“a bureaucrat not devoid of fantasy”—agreed to allow a group of
artists to convert the office space of the organization into an indepen-
dent gallery. He was even more surprised when the official in question
accepted the draft program for the gallery that Borowski and two other
Hungarians at Galeria Foksal 175

young critics—Anka Ptaszkowska and Mariusz Tchorek—presented in
1966. One of their stipulated goals was to “create an international con-
text for Polish art by establishing direct contacts with artists and art
institutions abroad.”10 None of them had ever left Poland at this point,
but their plan would bear fruit in an ambitious and far-reaching exhibi-
tions program for years to come.
The theater director and artist Tadeusz Kantor was soon a central
figure in the Foksal circle, despite his parallel affiliation with Galeria
Krzysztofory in Kraków (which operated through a similar arrangement
there, under the aegis of the Association of Artists). He helped his War-
saw colleagues forge a strong network of artistic contacts throughout
Europe and beyond.11 Among others, Foksal participated in the Salon
International de Galeries-Pilotes at the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts
in Lausanne in 1966 along with two other pioneering Eastern European
spaces (the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb and the Galerie Art
Centre from Prague), and again in 1970 along with Moderna Galerija
Ljubljana.12 Magazines and journals received from abroad were key
to expanding the gallery’s international sensibilities. Borowski recol-
lected: “We had access to ARTnews, Studio International, and Opus In-
ternational. So we decided to contact innovative artists abroad and,
eventually, invited them to exhibit in our gallery. We wrote letters to
numerous Western galleries asking for catalogues and publications
devoted to contemporary art. Some art magazines, Art in America (and
later Artforum International) gave us free subscriptions. It was unbeliev-
able.”13 While foreign editors were impressed with the initiative demon-
strated by this “young gallery behind the Iron Curtain,” the founders
of the gallery reciprocated by mailing out invitations and exhibition
catalogs to their Western contacts.14
Capturing the Cold War fascination of East with West and West
with East, Borowski noted that “Western galleries helped us actively in
bringing their artists to Warsaw, which was very important for us.”15 This
meant that Polish artistic circles were able to “learn firsthand” about
American conceptualism and Fluxus, and that they could “put a human
face” on otherwise “mythical” artists; “they became our friends, and
often visited us in Warsaw.”16 An emphasis on how ideas were shared
in person is a crucial feature in Borowski’s account of the period. The
176 Chapter 7
gallery made contact with Pierre Restany and Pontus Hultén, resulting
in a range of collaborations in the shorter and longer term.17 As Thomas
Skowronek has argued, the Foksal’s international relationships were
“mainly built on personal contacts and the reputation they mediated,”
by means of which they were able to build up what Borowski later called
a “directory” by way of which their “travel experiences were translated
into an administrative compilation, where locations and persons were
represented as junctions in a discursive map.”18
For visitors from other Soviet bloc countries, the Foksal served as a
“window to the West.”19 In Borowski’s words: “The Czechs and everyone
were envious of the possibilities and relative freedom we had in Poland
at that time, that we could organize exhibitions, etc. They had much
tighter restrictions and control there. At the same time, we were not al-
lowed to have any exhibitions with them here. We could, and did, show
… practically any Western artist we wanted, but the Hungarian exhibition
in 1972 was the only such meeting with other East Central European art-
ists. We couldn’t show we were in contact with Czechs, Slovaks, let alone
any Russians or anyone like that.”20 Impediments to cultural exchange
outside the officially sanctioned pathways were part of state strategy:
under Gierek, the authorities “wanted to promote a new Poland, free
and international, with a happening art scene, but certainly wanted
to make the development of any cooperation among artists from the
Eastern bloc impossible, to prevent any larger-scale organizations devel-
oping that might be potentially subversive.”21 As such, Galeria Foksal’s
exhibition of Hungarian artists was exceptional. The title was simply
the list of the artists’ names, “st.jauby—jovanovics—lakner—miklós—
pauer—tot.” The first was one Szentjóby’s pseudonyms, Jovánovics and
Tót were missing accents, and Miklós Erdély was listed under Miklós
rather than his family name. These oversights suggest that Brendel was
not involved in overseeing the catalog, unless Erdély’s identity was de-
liberately obfuscated by reversing the Hungarian convention of putting
surnames before forenames.
The show was organized on an entirely personal basis. Some art-
ists found that they were able to come to the opening on private in-
vitations; others were not. Borowski reflects: “In fact I’m not really
sure how the Hungarian thing was arranged … everything was under

cover and unofficial or it would never have been allowed.”22 The exhi-
bition opened on 27 May 1972 and was a smaller affair than the 1970
touring show, showcasing an extraordinary selection of nuanced and
complementary works by just six artists (three of whom had not been
included in the tour).23 The catalog consisted of a folder containing an
introductory statement by Brendel and a set of loose-leaf sheets with
each participating artist’s name and year of birth and one or two repro-
ductions of their works, in some cases coinciding with pieces included
in the exhibition itself, in others not. Brendel made a point of noting
that the artists whose work was being presented “do not constitute any
consolidate[d] group, nor are they a representation of the Hungarian
art.” By proposing that the artists were merely individuals, rather than
in some way connected to one another or purporting to represent their
country of origin in any way, the preface both anticipated and sought
to protect artists from suspicion; likewise, by explicitly stating that the
works did not represent Hungary, he anticipated accusations that they
might be seeking to present Hungary unfavorably. Though he claimed
that their selection had been arbitrary, he noted (deliberately opaquely,
it seems) that “definite conditions have imposed upon the works their
peculiar and various power of expression.” He proposed that “in as
much as the artists join the tendencies of conceptual pursuits, they
are directed both towards the purest centers and towards the fringes
which they claim for themselves, giving them specific meanings and
using them to their advantage.” These artists had all found a way to
“annex peripheries,” he noted, echoing Tadeusz Kantor’s insistence on
the need to “annex” reality for creative ends. Brendel noted that the
work had not been “extensively displayed” before but explained that
Budapest was a “vitally active” field that produced work “permeated
with passion and sharp artistic reflection.”24
Reading between the lines, contemporary spectators would have
understood that Brendel was alluding to the particular cultural politics
of the country he had himself chosen to leave behind. He knew how to
use the particular tone of the press release, with its tendency toward
generalities, in ways that alluded to the political context without ex-
ceeding an art world remit. If his point was that the artists whose work
he was presenting had found a way to give “specific meanings” to their
178 Chapter 7
work, then it also served as an invitation to the reader to participate in
the creative process of decoding these.
A reproduction of a Citation Piece by Lakner was included in the exhi-
bition folder: a quote from Lukács’s essay “Aesthetic Culture,” dated 1913,
in which he declared that “The Form is: the maximum effort in the given
possibilities of a given situation” (figure 7.2). Rather than being photo-
graphed mounted on a wall, the unframed board was casually propped
up against metal fencing on the pavement, potentially drawing attention
to the limitations of the “given situation” in question and serving as a re-
minder of the openness of Lukács’s prerevolutionary writings on aesthet-
ics. Lakner also exhibited a new variation of Citation Piece—Wittgenstein
of 1971, based on the last line of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus, usually given in English as “What we cannot speak about
we must pass over in silence.”25 The version of the piece installed in the
gallery consisted of “impersonal” aluminum letters stuck to the wall.26
While the original version of his piece had been in four languages (Hun-
garian, English, German, and French), for the Foksal exhibition he broke
the sentence up into five distinct parts in a new order: English, French,
German, Hungarian, and Polish. The result was a text reading “Whereof /
Il n’est pas possible de / Sprechen / arról / trzeba milczeć” (figure 7.3). In-
terrupting the reader’s passage though this Central European Esperanto
were a series of vertical dividing lines demarcating divisions between
each phrase, labeled “boundary”—granica in Polish (also denoting the
borders between nations). These boundaries propose both the linguistic
and the geopolitical isolation of each part of the sentence. To make sense
of the whole, one has to cross the borders, conceptually echoing Wittgen-
stein’s point that if something cannot be spoken of then it will necessarily
be passed over in silence. In the context of an unofficial Hungarian exhi-
bition in Poland, the international message acquired further meanings:
potentially referring to the impediments to free movement across Euro-
pean borders at that time.
Besides this piece, there was a tape player with a “phonetic drawing”
by Lakner repeating the sound “Tuk Tuk” above which was installed a
page from an illustrated magazine showing the formation of sounds in
the throat. An accompanying explanation of the exercise pointed out
that the sound produced between the k and the t when repeating the

180 Chapter 7
László Lakner, Citation Piece—Lukács, 1972
as reproduced in exhibition catalog for
“st.jauby—jovanovics—lakner—miklós—
pauer—tot.” Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 7.3 (above)

László Lakner, Citation Piece—Wittgenstein
as installed at the exhibition “st.jauby—
jovanovics—lakner—miklós—pauer—tot,”
Galeria Foksal, Warsaw, 1972. Photographer
unknown. Courtesy of the artist.

word tuk multiple times “is created in every case” and “nobody can pre-
vent it.” Beke explained: “if you repeat continuously the word Tuk Tuk,
you observe an unconscious voice in-between.”27 Echoing the boundar-
ies separating the components of the cited phrase in the Wittgenstein
piece, Lakner’s 1970 intermedial Protest-Poem focused the spectator’s
attention on the empty space between words. Brendel noted that these
sorts of quasi-scientific works related to Lakner’s interest in the writ-
ings of the phenomenologist Roman Ingarden. They later became part
of a series he called the Early Morning Speaking Exercises.28
The modest white cube gallery was further activated by elements
suspended from the ceiling and a range of floor pieces. Photographs
show that rather than wall labels, titles were written directly onto the
walls, accompanied by a range of arrows and drawn rectangular out-
lines; square white stools of different heights (some of them labeled
Living Archives following the installation of the “Living Archives” by
Borowski and the art historian Andrzej Turowski in 1971) were deployed
in versatile ways as plinths and props for performances. One bore
stacks of envelopes and a rubber stamp, used by Tót at the opening
in his stamping performance I Am Glad if I Can Stamp in Warsaw, Too
(beneath a wall full of stamped or typed sheets of zeros) (figure 7.4). An-
other stool was home to stacks of Pauer’s Marx-Lenin piece, consisting
of copies of an official photograph of a bust of Marx from Karl-Marx-
Stadt with a second blank sheet with a Lenin-shaped hole cut out of it,
such that the shape of Lenin over the portrait of Marx reveals a hidden
portrait of Lenin in the Marx statue (figure 7.5). With his Soviet-made
representation of Marx, Pauer called into question the possibility of
there being any original Marx to return to, contributing his own skepti-
cal take to intellectual debates about the reformability of socialism.
Lenin was also memorialized in Jovánovics’s contribution, which
featured a series of reconstructed chess games. In a statement describ-
ing the same project elsewhere, he explained: “For more than two years
I have been dealing with reconstructing Lenin’s games of chess / with
the help of my friend P.NY.V., a kinetic sculptor from Moscow. / I suc-
ceeded in reconstructing eight complete games / among them a game
played against Tristan Tzara in 1916, Zurich, Terrasse Café / as well as
the final step of six other games. Upon request I can send from among
182 Chapter 7
Figure 7.4
Endre Tót, I am Glad if I Can Stamp in War-
saw, Too, as part of the exhibition “st.jauby—
jovanovics—lakner—miklós—pauer—tot,”
Galeria Foksal, Warsaw, 1972. Photographer
unknown. Courtesy of Tamás Szentjóby.
Figure 7.5
Gyula Pauer, Marx-Lenin, Galeria Foksal,
Warsaw, 1972. Installation view from the
exhibition “st.jauby—jovanovics—lakner—
miklós—pauer—tot.” Photographer
unknown. Courtesy of Tamás Szentjóby.
them to anybody. My address is: XI Budaörsi ut. 23/a Budapest, Hun-
gary.”29 If Jovánovics’s project was exemplary in terms of networking
the bloc insofar as he collaborated with a friend in the USSR, engaging
in historical research on an amateur basis, it was also interesting in
harking back to Zurich in 1916, the foundation for the creative transna-
tional collaboration that characterized the avant-garde spirit at its best.
Zurich symbolized antimilitarism and the ideal of neutrality; the vision
of Lenin and Tzara playing chess at the Café de la Terrasse evokes a lim-
inal intellectual European culture that continued during the Great War,
despite the devastation all around. Using Poland as neutral ground, Jo-
vánovics too was engaged in overcoming historical misunderstanding
and enmity (any connection with the USSR had to be seen in terms
of 1956), by way of anti-ideological play. The length of time spent re-
constructing and documenting the games spoke of an anachronisti-
cally anti-communist form of labor: not the ideologically correct labor
of moving forward, but the labor of moving back in time, recapturing
past possibilities.
Pauer’s other contributions took the form of a selection of Pseudo
pieces and copies of his Pseudo Manifesto: a flat sheet airbrushed to
look like nonchalant photocopies of crumpled surfaces. The mani-
festo (translated into Polish) was a theory of objects deliberately pro-
voking false ideas, passing by way of minimalist and op art to explain
that “PSEUDO sculpture is an imitation of sculpture. PSEUDO sculp-
ture says nothing about sculpture, but about its situation.” In addition
to the works on paper, there was a three-dimensional postminimalist
Pseudo piece: a pink cuboid form whose airbrushed sides had the illu-
sion of crumpled paper while in fact being flat (figures 7.6, 7.7), and an
arrangement of hemispherical forms giving the illusion of having flat
tops. The device was laid bare in one of Pauer’s contributions to Aktu-
elle Kunst in Osteuropa, in which the artist presented in diagram form
the simple but deceptive difference between reality and illusion in the
painted hemispheres. Hanging from threads suspended from the ceil-
ing nearby were three sheets of white card with strips of colored paper
just the right width to be held up to one’s face to serve as glasses. These
formed part of an installation he called Pseudo voting in which the artist
184 Chapter 7
had created a visual relay of exchanges between the terms yes and no;
when one looked through a red filter, yes became no, and vice versa.30
That the distorting filter happened to be a red one would not have been
lost on the audience.
Szentjóby could not travel to Warsaw, as his request for a passport
was refused. When he cast a set of divination sticks and asked the I
Ching the question “What should I show at Foksal?,” the answer he re-
ceived from the ancient Chinese text served only to confirm his situa-
tion: “At this time of year the king does not travel.” And so he had his
friends take with them to Warsaw to exhibit at the gallery the photo-
graphs of the sticks marked with a red flag and a record of the I Ching’s
answer (figures 7.8).31 He also sent instructions for a second interactive
piece relating to censorship mechanisms, with the title Action Object
(the visitor to the exhibition can do what the secret police do occasionally
with letters). The artist recalls that it consisted of “an official, white, A3,
sealed, postal adhesive envelope” with a piece of paper inside and a
“ready-made stick cut lengthways in two parts.” The instructions ran
as follows: “place the sticks into the open end of the envelope, shake
the paper into the split of the sticks without opening the envelope, roll
up the paper on the sticks, pull out the sticks with the paper through
the hole at the end of the envelope, read aloud the text written on it:
‘NEVER TALK ONE-TO-ONE’ (Mahatma Gandhi), roll up the paper on
the sticks, replace it in the envelope through the hole at the end of the
envelope.”32 Like Pauer’s Pseudo voting piece, Szentjóby’s invitation to
the public was a form of role play: in one case visitors were encouraged
to play at being active citizens, in the other, they were given insight into
the meticulous means by which the state surveyed its citizens’ private
activities and offered advice in the form of the quote attributed to the
father of nonviolent struggle for independence against foreign rule.
St. Jauby’s card in the exhibition folder had a series of images of
his famous Portable Trench for Three, first exhibited at the Iparterv ex-
hibition of 1969. The piece resisted interpretation while raising a range
of troubling sensations with its fragile frame—awkwardly balanced
above ground, though of course meant to be dug in underground: ap-
parently designed to be practical but installed in a situation where its

only values became conceptual or aesthetic—invoking a front line, is-
sues around attack and defense, visibility and invisibility, and above all
exposure to danger. These ideas were portable only in dematerialized
form, however, as only photographs of the fragile trench, made of wood,
aluminum, gauze, sulfur, and cane, could be brought to Warsaw.
The most complex piece in the exhibition was Erdély’s series of five
collaged panels of images and texts entitled Moral Algebra—Solidarity
Action. (Script of a concept realized in photomontage and statistical tables),
one of which featured a French press photograph of a Cambodian
“head hunter.” Erdély demonstrated by way of charts and statements
that “according to the logic of massacre, if everybody kills two people,
all of humankind can be exterminated in thirty-two moves, considering
that a person cannot be killed twice.”33 Annamária Szőke has discussed
how aspects of the composition were considered too politically explicit
to be included in the catalog, in particular a citation taken from psy-
chiatrist Gustave Gilbert’s Nuremberg Diary of an interview with Her-
mann Göring. Göring was quoted as saying that “it is the leaders of the
186 Chapter 7
Figures 7.6 and 7.7 (facing page)
“st.jauby—jovanovics—lakner—miklós—
pauer—tot,” exhibition at Galeria Foksal,
Warsaw, 1972. Installation view.
Photographer unknown. Courtesy of
Galeria Foksal Archive.
Figure 7.8 (above)

Tamás St. Jauby, What Should I Show at
Foksal?, Galeria Foksal, Warsaw, 1972.
Photo: Iván Rozgonyi. Courtesy of the artist.

country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to
drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictator-
ship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship … the people can
always be brought to the bidding of the leader. That is easy. All you
have to do is tell them that they are being attacked, and denounce the
pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It
works the same in any country.”34 On submitting his work, Erdély was
asked whether he might refer to Göring simply as “a Nazi politician”
and deploy ellipses for “certain parts of the text.” He replied that “nei-
ther will Göring become more popular as a result of the text, nor will
the Communist dictatorship be more alarming because Göring talks
about it. The use of the ellipses in a work of conceptual art I find espe-
cially absurd, or rather the contents of the catalogue page automatically
constitute a protest against censorship.” He explained the message of
the piece: “The primary task of the political concept is to search for new
models to replace the vapid and tiresome formulas so that people won’t
get tired of self-defense, lest they become victims of their own institu-
tions or the emergencies created by them.”35
In the event, no translation from Hungarian was offered of the
Göring citation, and Erdély’s page in the catalog was left blank, save for
the words (in Polish) “everybody-everywhere-at the same time.” This
idea had been developed in one of the panels, which included a let-
ter from Beke to Erdély with translations of the three terms in 13 lan-
guages.36 The individual pages of the catalog were also marked either
“everyone-everywhere-at the same time” or, more ambivalently, “while
others.” Assuming that the pages were intended to be housed in alpha-
betical order, as listed on the title page, Tót’s entry, given over entirely
to an assortment of expressive zeros, would have been last. Tót’s zeros
returned the spectator to the theme of silence raised by Lakner’s Witt-
genstein citation, enacting a particular form of self-censorship.
Looking back, it remains remarkable that the Foksal played host to
a show of works abounding in references to bureaucracy, censorship,
the critique of institutions, the barbarity of the Cambodian proxy war,
and the spurious nature of voting procedures.37 In general, Borowski
recalled, “our gallery always avoided engaging directly in political
188 Chapter 7
activities. It was evident to us that our enemy was the political system
that suppressed freedom of speech and hampered artistic exchange.
But we also believed that art ought to oppose oppressive ideology with
its proper methods and means, without having to directly respond to
particular socio-political conditions.”38 The gallery was engaged in a
careful balancing act, and the Hungarian exhibition represented a peak
in terms of the level of risk taken.39
Galeria Foksal’s international program rode on the crest of a wave
of conceptual attitudes. Piotrowski argues that it was Andrzej Turow
ski’s involvement in the gallery that “led to a joining of a morally based
critique of the official art scene with a social critique and self-critique
of the institutions comprising that scene.”40 Turowski recalled how at-
titudes coalesced internationally at the time:
I became well acquainted with the circle of French artists in revolt. I felt an af-
finity with this atmosphere of the contestation of culture. I observed what was
going on in the international scene with interest. After the tumultuous year
1968, 1969 seemed to be a breakthrough. After all, it was when Seth Siegelaub,
after having closed his gallery, organized the show March 69 in New York, and
Wim Beeren at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam Op Losse Schroeven. In Dusseldorf,
Konrad Fischer opened Prospekt 69, and in Leverkusen Konzeption / Concep-
tion. Also … Harald Szeeman’s … When Attitudes Become Form.41
He and his colleagues remained interested in news from Paris while be-
ing increasingly well versed in transatlantic developments:
I recall the interest with which we read The Artists’ Reserved Rights Transfer
and Sale Agreement produced by Siegelaub and Projanski … a utopian proj-
ect of legally and morally regulating relations between the world of art and
institutions. I remember how keenly we followed, doubtless the last to do so,
the opposition of young artists to the taking over of their art by official and se-
ductive politics at the Paris exhibition popularly called Pompidou 72.42 A new
group of artists in the circle of new galleries appeared in these breakthrough
years. We also sought to make contact with them. Many of them would col-
laborate with the Living Archive, or show at the Foksal Gallery in the 1970s.43

While invitations to Western artists were not entirely trouble-free,
they represented less of a problem, and no further artists from satellite
countries were invited. Instead, the gallery hosted Robert Barry (1973),
Ben Vautier (1974), Tom Marioni (1975), Allan Kaprow (1976), Lawrence
Weiner (1979), and many other well-known Western artists. Such occa-
sions were not always without incident: during Ben’s show, entitled My
Present Position in Art, 1974. I Answer All Questions, Ben, 1974 a banner
was suspended above the entrance to the gallery reading: “1. The new
is always revolutionary. 2. In order to create the new one has to change
not the form but the person. 3. In order to change the person one has
to change the Ego” (figure 7.9). The banner had disappeared by the
morning after the opening. Ben had come for the opening in person
from Nice, and the visit of the Fluxus legend caused some excitement
in the artistic community. Borowski believes that the authorities be-
came progressively more aware of the degree to which the gallery had
been successfully skirting confrontation and to some degree “leading
them by the nose” with its apparently “apolitical” stance. Attempts to
host foreign artists were not always successful as a result: Kaprow’s first
visit, during which he had meetings and workshops at the gallery and
a lecture at Galeria Dziekanka, was a great success. Either despite or
perhaps because of this, Borowski reports that a second visit by Kaprow
was blocked (figure 7.10), as was an exhibition of work by Joseph Beuys,
in the late 1970s. Of all the exhibitions at Galeria Foksal in the 1970s, the
exhibition of the Hungarian artists would remain the most evidently
politically charged, and an easy instance of collaboration between ar-
tistic circles in neighboring satellite countries.
Figure 7.9
Ben Vautier, My Present Position in Art,
Galeria Foksal, Warsaw, 1974. Photo: Jacek
Maria Stokłosa. Courtesy of Jacek Maria
Stokłosa and Galeria Foskal Archive.
Figure 7.10
Allan Kaprow at Galeria Foksal, Warsaw,
1976. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of
Galeria Foksal Archive.
190 Chapter 7
8
International Meetings
at Balatonboglár
In 1968, the Hungarian sculptor György Galántai managed to negotiate

a 15-year lease on an abandoned Roman Catholic chapel on a hill above
the village of Balatonboglár at Lake Balaton, in exchange for restoring
the building’s structure and protecting it from dereliction (figure 8.1).1
The Balatonboglár Chapel Studio, as it came to be known as of 1972,
would go on to host 35 events over the course of four summers from
1970 to 1973: “exhibitions, concerts, poetry recitals, theatrical perfor-
mances, and film showings … featuring the best of Hungary’s (undesir-
able) avant-garde artists and artists from abroad.”2 Each year, Galántai
conceptualized and organized a program for the coming summer, invit-
Chapter
ing artists and other collaborators to participate. By 1973, the program,
consisting of a fold-out schedule with information and directions, ap-
peared in five languages and was being mailed to a list of almost 2,000
people. The Chapel Studio became the most significant meeting point
for experimental artists from Hungary, as well as an important place for Internation
international encounters.
Participants in the events at the chapel recall the atmosphere with
nostalgia. Tamás Szentjóby, for instance, wrote: “It was Summer. It was
sexy. It was prohibited. It was seducing. We were the winners.”3 There
was a great sense of energy among artists at the time, no doubt associ-
ated with their having succeeded in finding a creative outlet that was
outside the officially sanctioned framework. The organization of events
and exhibitions was in part delegated to different artists and groups,
so that the place functioned as a platform for self-organized initia-
tives within Galántai’s overall conceptualization of the space. Galántai
Figure 8.1
The chapel in Balatonboglár, 1970. Photo:
György Galántai. Courtesy of the artist and
Artpool Art Research Centre.
194 Chapter 8
recalled that this was a time when artists had begun operating indepen-
dently “as a culture or a movement-type network.”4 While the program
initially focused on Hungarian circles, there were also several impor-
tant international encounters at the chapel.
The first group of visitors to the Chapel Studio from abroad were
the group Bosch+Bosch from Subotica in Vojvodina, a region of north-
ern Yugoslavia with a significant Hungarian-speaking minority (figure
8.2). Emese Kürti notes that group member Bálint Szombathy set the
ball rolling when he came to Budapest in 1970, following discussions
with Beke and Attila Csáji about organizing an exhibition of work
by Lajos Kassák in Novi Sad.5 It was Csáji, she writes, who proposed
that Szombathy and the rest of the group come to Balatonboglár. An
exhibition of work by László Kerekes, Slavko Matković, László Szalma,
Szombathy, and (non-group member) Predrag Šidjanin ran from 6 to 13
August 1972. The Hungarian Ministry of Culture wrote to Galántai stat-
ing that they did not approve the “private initiative of displaying the
works of the Yugoslav artists’ group” and reminded him that interna-
tional exhibitions were “the duty of the state organizations in charge,”6
but the artists came anyway. Szombathy recalls: “It was our group show,
and I went in the chapel personally to install the exhibition.” He ex-
plains: “the Yugoslavian passport was one of the best in the world at
that time. So I visited Hungary every two or three months, very often.
I put in my bag the photos of my artworks; it was conceptual art, you
know. Everything was on paper, so it was very easy to transport it across
the border without any problem, and without any official permission.”7
Galántai printed the flyer advertising the group as “young artists
of the freshest art tendencies and visual margins” on the back of an
existing print run of flyers announcing an exhibition of work by Kassák
(whose widow had promised to loan the works but then withdrew at
the last minute), thereby letting his audience know that such an event
had been on the cards but canceled, in the same breath.8 A sense of the
historical avant-garde spirit lingered in the installation too: a banner
with the words DADA painted on it in large white capital letters was
pinned by Szalma to the doors to the chapel—a version of his Homage
to Dada series (figure 8.3). Matković, for his part, invoked the poetry of
International Meetings at Balatonboglár 195

the Hungarian revolution of 1848 with a piece he called Sándor Petőfi’s
Poem Tisza in a Bottle, referring to a lyrical poem by the Hungarian na-
tional poet about a gentle river that bursts its banks, becoming a rag-
ing torrent flooding the landscape, potentially providing an analogy for
people breaking their chains and rising.9
Their contact with Szombathy was significant for Hungarian artists
in networking terms. As Kürti has noted, he moved to Novi Sad in 1971
and worked for a time as the art editor at Új Symposion, the Hungarian-
language arts journal. The journal would publish an important issue
containing information on the Hungarian avant-garde by Bogdanka
Poznanović, relating to key figures such as Lakner, Pauer, Szentjóby, and
Tót.10 Beke and Szombathy worked together to provide Poznanović with
196 Chapter 8
Figure 8.2
Bosch+Bosch at the Chapel Studio
of György Galántai, Balatonboglár, 1972.
Photo: György Galántai. Courtesy of
Figure 8.3
Bosch+Bosch at the Chapel Studio
of György Galántai, Balatonboglár, 1972.
Photo: László Haris. Courtesy of Artpool
Art Research Centre.

the materials she needed for her piece, Kürti reports.11 A wide range
of further publishing collaborations were undertaken in the period.
Szombathy worked with Attila Csernik in Novi Sad on the production of
an assembling periodical Mixed Up Underground of 1972, featuring work
by Galántai, Szentjóby, and Gábor Tóth, among others.12 Szombathy,
Matković, and Szalma were also coeditors of the magazine WOW, which
included contributions from Hungarian colleagues such as Tót and
Tóth. Tóth and Szombathy would also form a para-institution known
as Experimental Art Publisher, which took advantage of Tóth’s job as a
printer in Budapest to engage in underground publishing.13
Several of the members of Bosch+Bosch appeared at the Chapel
Studio again the following summer, bringing more people with them.
As Kürti surmises, the Bosch+Bosch visit was driven by a “common
motivation of Yugoslav and Hungarian artists … to participate in the
collective imaginary space of contemporary art. … Human factors of
personal relationships, the dynamic of particular interests, the genera-
tional consciousness, the commitment to the subversive functions of
the avant-garde, the complex matrix of the desire for representation
and internationality.”14 This time, the visitors participated in an exhibi-
tion listed in Galántai’s later chronology of those times under the title
“Yugoslav Colleagues.” The participants were József Ács, Ferenc Baráth,
Csernik, Gábor Ifjú, József Markulik, Matković, József Smit, and Szom-
bathy. The stand-out event, for Galántai at least, was a sound poetry
performance combining tape recordings and voice by Katalin Ladik,
which he records in his diary as: “divine. An unintelligible sound per-
formance over relatively little intelligible speech” (figure 8.4).15
Later in the summer of 1972, Beke coordinated a major meeting be-
tween Czechoslovak and Hungarian artists at the Chapel Studio. The
event, which unfolded over the course of a weekend—26–27 August—
marked the passing of four years since the invasion of Czechoslovakia
by Warsaw Pact troops. If, as Kürti rightly argues, the visit of the Voj
vodina artists proved that “in micro-communities of autonomy, the
intentions and opportunities were present for modelling a possible
neutralization of historical conflicts within the region,” the Czechoslo-
vak meeting marked an apogee.16 Beke recalled that “at the end of the
198 Chapter 8
Figure 8.4
Katalin Ladik giving a sound poetry
performance in connection with the film
O-pus, Chapel Studio of György Galántai,
Balatonboglár, 1973. Photo: György
Galántai. Courtesy of the artist and Artpool

1960s I had a vision that all these countries had to unify or join the
radical avant-gardist artists.”17 He later explained that he “had always
been irritated by the fact that Slovaks and Hungarians have seemed
to hate one another for 150 years,” observing that “whenever we take a
closer look at things, we can co-operate in really productive ways.” He
had taken the step of beginning to learn Slovak because he “wanted to
do something personally to melt this tension.”18 Some 15 Czechoslovak
artists and the same number of Hungarians participated in the week-
end at the Chapel Studio, including from Czechoslovakia Peter Bartoš,
Stano Filko, Jiří Kocman, Vladjimír Popovič, Gerta Pospíšilová, Rudolf
Sikora, Petr Štembera, and Jiří Valoch; and from Hungary Imre Bak,
Beke, Miklós Erdély, Galántai, Gyula Gulyás, Péter Halász, Béla Hap,
Ágnes Háy, György Jovánovics, Péter Legéndy, László Méhes, Gyula
Pauer, Tamás Szentjóby, Endre Tót, and Péter Türk. They engaged in
a range of creative actions, culminating in an exhibition at the chapel.
In his diary, Galántai referred to an intensive outdoor planning ses-
sion whose aim had been to agree on the form of “the documentation
of the meeting itself” (figure 8.5).19 His comment suggests a conscious
self-historicization on the part of the diverse artists who had come to-
gether for the event—a concern to record it for posterity. This may have
reflected Beke’s hand in the proceedings, insofar as his primary do-
main was art history—though his orchestration of this and other major
events in the period could equally be classed as a form of artistic activ-
ity. It may also have been the result of Galántai’s early commitment to
documentation (he and Júlia Klaniczay would go on to found the world-
leading archive of experimental art Artpool in the late 1970s). Looking
at the list of participants in the meeting, it is striking that so many had
been pioneers of international communication. They, too, were doubt-
less highly aware of the (nonmonetary) “exchange value” of documen-
tation. Whether working with photographic documentation or textual
or other graphic records of their actions or ideas, artists such as Filko,
Kocman, Pauer, Sikora, Štembera, Tót, and Valoch were all active in
disseminating their projects by way of documentation.20 Valoch, for in-
stance, explained that “the artistic medium of the mail has become an
area of interpersonal communication that does not measure its success
200 Chapter 8
on the quality of single works created in its name. The important thing
is the fun to be had by becoming involved.”21
Beke’s core contribution to the conceptualization of the event was
threefold: the staging of a tug-of-war, a project designed to facilitate
communication at the level of language, and a handshaking concept.
He had come across a photograph of Hungarian Warsaw Pact troops at
rest, playing tug-of-war after marching into Czechoslovakia, in a spe-
cial issue of the magazine Pages, and had the idea of turning the event
into a tableau vivant.22 Beke recalled: “The whole thing was put together
in a very naive manner, of course: instead of using a rope, Hungarian
and Czechoslovakian artists separated into two groups, played tug-of-
war with the issue of the aforementioned periodical. The story is a bit
Figure 8.5
Czechoslovak and Hungarian artists at
Chapel Studio of György Galántai,
Galántai. Courtesy of the artist and Artpool

forced, as I suddenly realized that this was not only a political allusion
but also, in some way, the magical annihilation of a photograph, while
also being a scenario of a picture within a picture. It was similar to com-
posing a tableau vivant to reconstruct an event for a historical painting.
I had a great time coming up with this idea.”23 The photographs docu-
menting the action show Czechoslovak artists in single file on the left
and Hungarians on the right, as well as a range of spectators on the
sidelines. The Czechoslovaks appear to have been the winners, despite
being outnumbered 5 to 4; the Hungarians collapsed in a delighted
heap. Though likely accidental, there is an element of historical retri-
bution at play. Added to which, there are certainly echoes of the Slavic
children’s story of the Enormous Turnip, in which a grandfather plants
a seed that grows so gigantic that he cannot harvest it alone and asks a
string of people and creatures for help, the result being that they all col-
lapse on top of one another in an undignified dénouement (figure 8.6).
The second activity proposed by Beke took the Shakespearean form
of “words words words” pinned with drawing pins to the wall in three
columns. The gathered artists had collaborated on drawing up a list
of a hundred words that sounded similar in Czech, Slovak, and Hun-
garian (figure 8.7). These were not just any words, but something akin
to a transnational lexicon of art and dissent. One version of the list,
arranged alphabetically in each case, included words such as “action,”
“democracy,” “initiative,” “communications,” “no,” and “protest”; an-
other photograph shows a different set of lists starting with the word
“bureaucracy” and moving straight on to “emigration.” Pauer recollects:
“We had a great time together. I almost learned to speak in Czech and
Slovak, and they almost learned Hungarian.”24 Though the accumula-
tion of words developed organically, with people making their own sug-
gestions on cards and receiving translated responses, they may equally
have benefited from the expertise of Béla Hap, a professional translator
of Czech and French literature at Corvina Publishing House, who was a
participant at the event.25
In the spring of 1972, Hap had co-launched with Árpád Ajtony a
samizdat magazine known as szétfolyóirat—referring to a form of “writ-
ing that flows apart”—under the title EXPRESSZIÓ.26 Galántai later
described it as “the perfect underground medium: source unidentifi-
able, unanalyzable and incorruptible.”27 Dóra Maurer recalled that
it had a “snowball effect,” for it was distributed in seven typewritten
copies: “According to the rules, the new editor had to take one-third of
the content of the examples that had reached her/him from the previ-
ous issue, but above and beyond this, the new issue could be compiled
at everyone’s own discretion.”28 The February 1973 issue of the journal,
produced by Maurer, included a key theoretical essay by Hap with the
Figure 8.6
László Beke, meeting of Czech, Slovak, and
Hungarian artists; tug-of-war, 1972, Chapel
Studio of György Galántai, Balatonboglár.
Photo: György Galántai. Courtesy of László
Beke and Artpool Art Research Centre.

Figure 8.7
László Beke, meeting of Czech, Slovak,
and Hungarian artists; Czech, Slovak and
Hungarian lists of words, 1972, Chapel
Studio of György Galántai, Balatonboglár.
Photo: György Galántai. Courtesy of László
Beke and Artpool Art Research Centre.
title “Soft-Spoken Hungarian Underground Manifesto.” To the question

“WHAT IS THE UNDERGROUND?” he answered simply “Unofficial art.”
He explained that it was a “cultural ‘movement’ which neither supports
nor attacks the establishment but is rather outside of it,” for, as he rea-
soned, “if it attacked the establishment, it would be acknowledging its
existence. If it were a true organized movement, it would be playing
the games of the superficial world.”29 “What does the Hungarian under-
ground want? It wishes to be art that is unidentifiable, defies analysis,
204 Chapter 8
remains an outsider, and which cannot be appraised and corrupted. A
PRIVATE ART. Who does it address? Itself. One artist to another. Every-
one who has a positive interest in it.”30 There are clear affinities here
with the NET manifesto, which also referred to the idea that proposi-
tions be presented to “persons interested in them” as a structural key.
Hap went on to explain that the bonds between those associated with
the underground were “those of friendship.”31
His theorization of a programmatically weak position—“soft-spo-
ken” rather than loud and clear, operational rather than oppositional—
was spatially echoed by the relocation of experimental artistic activity
from Budapest to provincial Balatonboglár. Refusing to be pinned down,
Hap wrote that the “coordinates of the underground are free-moving
coordinates” and that the underground “does not ban its followers
from addressing political themes, since, as a general rule, it neither
forbids nor commands, and the emergence of such themes are always
the private affair of the respective artist.”32 The emphasis is strategically
placed on individual over collective responsibility, “individualism,” in-
cidentally, being one of the 100 shared words produced at the meeting.
Beke’s concluding contribution was his “handshake concept,” doc-
umented, as Galántai recalled, in the form of around 15 Czechoslovak
and 15 Hungarian artists shaking hands on an “action board” made up
of a grid of photographic close-ups of “individual handshakes of soli-
darity between the Czechoslovak and Hungarian participants” (figure
8.8). It was exemplary of Beke’s later definition of what he calls the “East-
ern European variant” of conceptual art as “flexible and elastic, ironic,
humorous and ambiguous, nonprofessional, communicable, always
ready to become a social activity of a group of young people or even an
alternative movement … most likely an expression of utopian notions of
social organisation … intrinsically critical of statist regulation.”33 Beke
recounts that he used an East German “Werra III” with black-and-white
Kodak 35mm film: “everyone shook hand with everybody, the duration
of the whole work was not more than 3 or 4 hours.” The photographs
were developed and arranged—with help from a photojournalism stu-
dent named Jenő Boriszov, who was Beke’s neighbor at the time—to
show all the possible individual connections that had materialized that

day. Pauer recollected: “we took photos of this—hands holding hands,
one by one—and put the small cubes next to one another like a mosaic.
In the end, all those who were shaking hands signed the photos. … By
this action, we symbolically made peace with each other, at a time when
our political system was still in conflict with Czechoslovakia. We made
peace, and that’s what was important.”34 Magdalena Radomska has
rightly noted that the project paradoxically “realized in practice the slo-
gan justifying the Warsaw Pact invasion, namely ‘fraternal support.’”35
Galántai’s diary of 1972 noted several contributions by Slovak art-
ists to the meeting of 26–27 August: Filko distributed catalogs of his
work, Valoch wore a T-shirt saying Merde on it, and Kocman organized
a Love Stamp Activity on cards, which were later displayed on the wall.
Beke recalled that Popovič played a similar game: “He distributed
sheets of A4 with his rubber stamp and signatures, asking everybody
to sign (and stamp) these.”36 Other contributions to the event included
a set of documentary souvenirs by Bak, who “brought exercise books
and handed out envelopes; everyone put their fingerprints inside, then
sealed it and put their names and the date on it, Balatonboglár, 27. 08.
1972.” There was also a proposal for a collective action: Péter Halász had
suggested that everyone should go “to the chapel, blindfolded, hold-
ing hands” and that the activity would be documented in photographs,
but this did not take place. Pauer made “pseudo-cards” of some variety
with participants. Tót, who was not there in person, sent a Telegram ad-
dressed to Chapel Exhibition Balatonboglár which simply read “I send
you this telegram because you are there and I am here.”
Invoking a similarly matter-of-fact tone, Péter Legéndy presented
an Appeal Form. The document shown at the meeting was completed
by Legéndy and was addressed to “HUNGARIAN SOCIETY” at large.
Figure 8.8
László Beke, meeting of Czech, Slovak,
and Hungarian Artists, Handshake Action,
1972. Courtesy of László Beke and Marinko
Sudac Collection.
206 Chapter 8
Following all the conventions of an application, the artist provided a
reference number for his appeal and supplied his personal informa-
tion (first name, last name, nationality, date of birth, mother’s maiden
name, and so on). In a box marked “PURPOSE OF FILLING OUT THE
FORM,” he gave as his response “The introduction of ‘APPEAL-ART.’”
Legéndy’s form was a fantastic parody of the total bureaucratization
of life in the name of revolution.37 He referred to the case as relating to
the “communication between society and the individual” and gave as
the date the anniversary of the Revolution of 1848, 15 March. This was a
key date in the struggle for Hungarian independence that received no
official acknowledgment under Soviet rule (though it was celebrated
unofficially) and found expression in civil society in the form of street
demonstrations, which met with varying degrees of repression. Legéndy
explicitly accused the authorities of positioning themselves above the
“LAW” (which he put in inverted commas and proposed to redefine as
“the realization of the human psyche’s demands”), condemning the
utilitarian approach of the state to “social situations.” He proposed to
circulate the document and ended with a comment reading, in bold,
“APPEAL IS THE ART OF THE PEOPLE!,” signing and dating the form to
confirm that all the above statements were “true and accurate.”38
Beke recalled that Legéndy was fascinated by bureaucracy and that
his project was devoted to “promoting appeals of any kind,” and in par-
ticular those seeking to “appeal (i.e. attack) everything ‘official,’ that’s
why he edited an application form to fill in as an appeal.”39 Legéndy’s ap-
peal captured the oppositional character of the meeting and its means
of carrying out politics by other means: taking the language of official
cultural life and repurposing it, whether in the form of a state document
détourned to serve civilian purposes or as an encounter between troops
restaged by civilians. These and other projects contributed to the sense
that those participating in this remarkable gathering were doing more
than taking part in a self-organized plein-air. They were also participat-
ing in the ethic of the Balatonboglár Chapel Studio as an artistic project
in itself. As Pauer reportedly told curious visitors who came to the cha-
pel from the village, there was an “attitude, intellectual disposition and
behavior, which characterize our community and hold us together.”40
208 Chapter 8
If Hap’s manifesto mobilized the idea of private life as a form of de-
fense against moral entropy, this was in part a reflection of the pragma-
tism needed to sustain an underground that could deliver international
encounters. Beke played at inviting artists to be self-reflexive again in
an international exhibition the following year on the theme of the mir-
ror, which was, as he explained in the introductory text for the catalog,
“the greatest commonplace of art.” The mirror, he wrote, “has a dual-
istic character, being dull and everyday on the one side, brilliant and
incomprehensible on the other. It is coldly rational and mysterious in
the same time.” As such, he proposed, it was the “metaphor of art.”41
The exhibition (5–11 August 1973) brought together contributions by 35
Hungarian and international artists revealing the extent of Beke’s net-
work at the time (figure 8.9).
Impressed by the extent of the NET appendixes (see chapter 4) and
curious about whether Kozłowski was really in contact with everyone
on the list, Beke had written to the Polish artist the year before: “Does
this mean, that you have contacts with these people up to this date?”42
He had gone on to list all those in the NET appendix whom he already
knew.43 While more modest in its extent, Beke’s list also reveals the de-
gree to which he was at the heart of the European network at this early
stage in the 1970s, while being less concerned with the North American
scene. The Hungarians he included were the art historian Brendel, Gá-
bor Attalai, Erdély, Lakner, Pauer, Perneczky, and Tót; the Poles, besides
the authors of NET, were Borowski, Turowski, the Japanese émigré Koji
Kamoji (all associated with the Foksal Gallery), and Marek Koniecz-
ny; and the Czechoslovaks, Štembera and Valoch.44 The range of par-
ticipants included in the “Mirror” exhibition ultimately exceeded the
number of artists listed in his letter to Kozłowski the previous summer.
Besides the Hungarians, the participating artists from other Soviet bloc
countries were Dalibor Chartny, Jerzy Kiernicki, Kocman, Romuald
Kutera, Zdzisław Sosnowski, Štembera, and Valoch.45
Among the contributions to “Mirror” was a piece by Kocman that
was a variation on his interest in tactility: a photograph of himself
touching his face remotely with his finger, via a mirror, entitled JHK
Pseudo Touch (figure 8.10). Valoch supplied Mirror Piece for László Beke:

a succinct visual poem on clear plastic with the first r in the word “mir-
ror” rearranged such that the two central r’s became mirror images of
one another. Štembera sent in five photographs of himself tying his
shoelaces. Perneczky provided a series of photographs: one of these,
titled Concepts Like Commentary (Anti-Reflection) (1971), shows a wooden
ball stamped with the word “art” positioned on a grid before a mir-
ror yielding trompe l’oeil reflections, invoking all the solipsistic narcis-
sism of both modernism (in the form of the staple grid) and Kosuthian
matter-of-fact statements of the “a chair is a chair is a chair” sort, given
a clinical twist (figure 8.11).
Figure 8.9 (above)

László Beke installing “Mirror” exhibition
at Chapel Studio of György Galántai,
Galántai. Courtesy of László Beke and

Jiři H. Kocman, JHK Pseudo Touch, 1971.
210 Chapter 8
Figure 8.11
Géza Perneczky, Concepts Like Commentary
(Anti-Reflection), 1971. Courtesy of the artist
and Chimera-Project Gallery.
Szentjóby’s interactive piece Movable Guilt showed two dead bodies

and only one head. The photograph was mounted on metal and had a
small circular mirror on a magnet, which could be positioned at will
by the spectator whose likeness it reflected. By moving the mirror, one
could cover the missing head of one but never both of the two corpses,
potentially pointing out the limits of artistic games of this sort when
faced with the scale of the human tragedies unfolding in Cambodia
and around the Cold War globe (figure 8.12). With his characteristically
direct humor, Szentjóby’s piece poked fun at orthodox Marxist-Leninist
212 Chapter 8
“reflection theory,” at art’s pretentions, and potentially at Beke’s ludic
proposal. János Major also used the call as a means to reflect on mortal-
ity, contributing a photograph of a tombstone bearing the family name
Spiegel (mirror).
“Mirror” had been preceded by several significant projects of a simi-
lar nature confined to the Hungarian orbit. On 4 August 1971, Beke had
announced a project entitled “Imagination,” proposing that “the work =
the documentation of an idea” and inviting a selection of artists to send
him work so that he could put together an overview of the “current
state of a few tendencies in Hungarian art” as a way “to find a solution
to the well known difficulties of exhibiting, publishing etc.”46 He later
noted that the collection of works on paper received in response to his
call had reflected a moment in which “traditional painting, sculpture,
and graphic arts were gradually replaced by a new system of media that
could record light, witty and provocative thoughts: typed texts, photos,
montages, drafts, audio tapes,” all of which “represented intellectual
freedom, rather than material values.”47 “Imagination” was conceived
of as an exhibition that, though “only realised in thought,” could nev-
ertheless be “accurately documented.”48 Beke later noted that the works
received (from 31 artists) had for the most part been “unrealisable” at
the time, “given political constraints.”49 As such, the project had been
designed to serve as a forum for the realization of flights of the imagi-
nation—facilitating the passage from idea to material, if only in paper
form. Another such call was his March 1972 proposal that recipients
make works on the theme “Cobblestones and Gravestones.” It was
one that would yield a great many spin-off projects in various media
for years to come, including Gyula Gulyás’s posting of a cobblestone
painted in the Hungarian national colors to Tót on the anniversary of
the revolution of 1848.
Beke’s typewritten journal Ahogy azt a Móriczka elképzeli (In your
dreams! How little Móricka imagines things) of 1972 consisted of art
criticism in the form of letters to his friends, and gave over the last
page to mail art calls. He wrote to Kozłowski at that time saying that
he was planning to create an “international exhibition of mails in my
and my friends’ ownership,” as well as what he called a World-Famous

Figure 8.12
Tamás St. Auby, Movable Guilt, 1973.
World Archives of Ideas, Concepts, Projects etc.50 He put his idea out as an
international appeal on 14 June 1972. Like the earlier Hungarian project
“Imagination,” which had resulted in some 40 folders of materials, this
project also appeared in A4 format, as a ring binder with a black cover
containing proposals in hole-punched plastic jackets. He made “a regu-
lar show each month of another artist with the same black ring-binder,”
turning the small room where he lived with his family into a gallery to
which he would invite one or two people at a time to see the project.
Beke estimates having shown the piece to a circle of around 80 or 90
people in this way, recalling the irony of the space being so cramped,
while the activities presented were worldwide.
The hyperbolically named World-Famous World Archive had begun
life as a “trendy manifesto” according to Beke, but it was really more
“like an appeal” on the author’s part: “send me materials from all over
the world.”51 He says that the black folder eventually became some-
thing of a “fetishist object,” despite its “very primitive” format. Later
on, the project was condensed into the form of a portable book of some
80 pages that could be presented in different locations, sometimes by
Beke but also at times taken on trips by Dóra Maurer, who had recently
returned to Hungary.52
Maurer observed that “many new people were active” in the early
1970s and that there was an “ambitious movement and bustle” that was
“more attractive, and participation in it was more stimulating, than the
fixed, balanced art scene in Vienna”—an unexpected surprise for some-
one who had thought, as a student, that the “Hungarian scene” was
“without prospects,” and had her first solo show in Bologna rather than
Budapest.53 Tibor Gáyor rekindled his contacts with Miklós Erdély, who
had been his peer at university and was now the most influential ex-
perimental artist on the Budapest scene.54 Maurer said: “I was inspired

to be active in public life when, after a longer, isolated existence in Vi-
enna, already together with Tibor, I came back to Hungary. Here we wit-
nessed a situation of upswing, in which we wanted to take part. I was
touched by the sense of esprit de corps that was prevalent at the time,
which replaced the previous mentality of enmity.”55 Her first significant
initiative in terms of exhibition organizing in Budapest after her return
would be at Balatonboglár: an international exhibition of experimental
poetry, alongside the younger artist Gábor Tóth.
“Szövegek / Texts” ran 19–26 August 1973, and was the other major
international event of that year at the Chapel Studio (figure 8.13). It rep-
resented a first effort on Maurer’s part to “process … a marginal area”
including “concrete texts and concepts,” a field with which her own
practice was closely concerned;56 “the collection presented consciously
merged visual and concrete poetry with the textual forms of represen-
tation of conceptual art.”57 “Szövegek / Texts” included work mailed to
them from artists abroad with the help of Klaus Groh, among them “for
the first time in Hungary the visual texts of renowned French, Italian,
German and Yugoslav authors.”58 Foreign participants included Ben,
Ugo Carrega, Jochen Gerz, Kocman, Andrzej Lachowicz, Clemente
Padín, Miroljub Todorović, and Valoch.59 Among the pieces displayed
that are identifiable from the photographs, we see János Major’s Les-
son 1 from his artist’s book Exercises, in which he offered two ques-
tions and one answer. “Question 1. How should an avant-gardist make
his living? Answer 1. Marcel Duchamp made his living in New York by
teaching French. Question 2. Could I make my living in New York by
teaching Hungarian?” We do not know whether he answered the sec-
ond question, for the corner of the book had been cut out, leaving no
box for an answer. Major’s deadpan speculations about the practicali-
ties of emigration were thus shown to have a foregone conclusion for
structural reasons.
Suspended from a string beside Major’s misshapen book was one
of Tót’s artist’s books, entitled Incomplete Informations Verbal and Visual,
its cover scrawled in his characteristic zero code. Also included were
a number of image-poems by Szentjóby: a piece called Coca Cola with
Vodka (consisting of the Coca-Cola logo above with the Hungarian for
216 Chapter 8
Figure 8.13
Dóra Maurer installing “Szövegek / Texts”
exhibition at Chapel Studio of György
Galántai, Balatonboglár, 1973. Photo:
György Galántai. Courtesy of László Beke
and Artpool Art Research Centre.

“with Vodka” below), adding an Eastern European twist; a photograph
of “ballpoint pen marks in a headwaiter’s white smock pocket”; and a
photograph of the action Hungarian Verse in which he used a cymbal
hammer to play on a typewriter, with a banknote stuck to his forehead,
thus playing the role of a folk musician (invoking a Hungarian tradition
of listeners sticking money to the foreheads of playing musicians with
their spit) (figure 8.14). The Hungarian banknote in question was one
carrying a portrait of the poet Endre Ady, who famously questioned the
role of money in society, referring to it as “Lord Swine Head” in one
poem in particular.60
The “Szövegek / Texts” exhibition proved to be the last event at the
Chapel Studio. Multiple state agencies became involved in a “campaign
of official harassment” against Galántai: “the police, the department of
public health, the building authorities, the Fire Department, the Na-
tional Insurance Company, the local, the district, and the county coun-
cils, and their cultural departments and party committees, and the
Cultural Committee of the Central Committee of the Hungarian Social-
ist Workers’ Party.”61 Piotrowski proposes that this harassment “shows
how afraid the authorities were of any international initiatives, particu-
larly those establishing exchange among artists from the East.”62 The
detailed account of the myriad bureaucratic attacks to which Galántai
was subjected, the uninvestigated burglaries, the endless toing and fro-
ing between different administrative bodies must have been harrow-
ing enough, without the frequent impromptu identity checks and the
night-time raids and interrogations carried out by policemen, some
of them plainclothes, over the course of 1973.63 Though Galántai and
the artists associated with the chapel managed to negotiate their way
around successive attacks (agreeing at a meeting with representatives
of cultural policy at the headquarters of the Hungarian Socialist Work-
ers’ Party Central Committee that in future works to be exhibited at the
Figure 8.14
Tamás St. Auby, Hungarian Verse, 1973.
Photo: Júlia Veres. Courtesy of the artist.
218 Chapter 8
Chapel Studio would be submitted to a jury, as regulations demanded),
the Chapel Studio was ultimately closed on the pretext of a breach
of construction laws and fire regulations; those present were evicted
and the building was boarded up by a team of military policemen.64
Galántai carried out a departure action as he left, wearing a deadpan
sign congratulating the secret police on their “Barátságos bánásmód”
(Friendly Treatment) (figure 8.15)
The personal consequences for Galántai were grave: “for years he
could get no work, his acquaintances would be afraid to be seen with
him on the street, he was penniless, and his teeth fell out from malnu-
trition. By trial and error, he learned how to do screen printing; what
saved him from starvation was an order from a tradesman for some
gaudy souvenir tablecloths. Secretly his friends tried to help him: at
László Rajk’s instigation, for instance, the members of the alternative
theatre group the István Kovács Studio, who had performed with Tibor
Hajas at the Chapel Studio, collected money on his behalf.”65 The Art
Fund, which provided all graduates of the Institute of Fine Arts with an
all-important occupational stamp for their papers, was called upon by
the Ministry of the Interior to suspend his membership. While the Art
Fund refused this request (doubtless fearing that this would jeopardize
the power of its own cadres), it also withheld from Galántai the basic
salary to which its members were entitled, and provided him with no
further commissions.66 In a particularly cynical move, a year on from the
eviction of the Budapest artists, the local council of Balatonboglár an-
nounced that the chapel had been renovated “by the state” and opened
it as a venue hosting “Chapel Exhibitions,” under the auspices of the
Association of Hungarian Artists and the Somogy County Council.67
The story is an example of a clear-cut division in the Hungarian context
at this time between the unofficial artistic world and its official coun-
terpart. A division between two parallel worlds of art was not always
so evident, not least to networkers interested in bringing experimental
Eastern Europe art to the West. Galántai’s commitment, ingenuity, and
hard work had borne fruit in the extraordinary, if short-lived, success of
the Chapel Studio. The hard work of the Italian-born Scottish impresa-
rio Richard Demarco in Edinburgh was also noteworthy, though rather
different in terms of its philosophy and scope.
220 Chapter 8
Figure 8.15
György Galántai, Departure Action, leaving
the village after his forced eviction from
the chapel with a sign on his back saying
“Friendly Treatment.” Balatonboglár, 1973.
Courtesy of Artpool Art Research Centre.

9
Edinburgh Arts
Richard Demarco’s commitment to fostering dialogue and bringing a

shared spirit of a common European culture to Scotland was in part
born of his formative experience as the son of Italo-Irish immigrants.
He knew what it meant to be treated like an “enemy” alien in postwar
Britain. His childhood made him a fierce opponent of isolationism and
nationalism, giving him insight into the grim plight of exiles across Eu-
rope. His belief in the need to unite Europe by way of art (after her divi-
sion at Yalta) acquired a dual focus: the need to reconcile Germany and
Poland on the one hand, and to bring together East and West on the
other. The method was the construction of friendships to build bridges
and using art as a way to bring people together. Taking advantage of
the opportunities for cultural encounters occasioned by the founding
of the Edinburgh Festival, Demarco’s cultural activities at the Traverse
Theatre and later at the Richard Demarco Gallery sought to contribute
to the wider spirit of the festival as a “sign of peace.”1
Demarco insisted that “art originates in the meeting of friends
and their sharing of artistic truths and in their preparedness to defend Chapter
these truths against all odds.”2 He conceived of his role as that of a

mediator, a connector of art and life who—like Joseph Beuys, whose
work Demarco had first experienced in a transformative encounter at
Documenta IV in 1968—saw his project as a form of social sculpture Edinburgh
capable of bringing about a form of spiritual healing. Like Beuys, too,
Demarco always had a view to posterity. He spontaneously but system-
atically documented his countless international encounters on inex-
pensive cameras. Indeed, anyone who has met Demarco has probably
experienced him suddenly exclaiming: “My God!” in excitement at an
artwork and grasping them by the shoulders, before snapping a pho-
tograph and giving out half a dozen business cards and recommenda-
tions of people to meet.3
By bringing together artists like Joseph Beuys, who defined his
art as his teaching, and Tadeusz Kantor, whose Cricot 2 Theater from
Kraków “took one straight to the core of European expressionist the-
atre,” Demarco’s “plan” amounted to “a war against the status quo.”4
He first worked through the programs of the Richard Demarco Gallery,
which had emerged from the Traverse Theatre Club Art Gallery opened
by Demarco in 1963, soon extending beyond the small space above the
theater to include temporary spaces rented across town and beyond.5
The Traverse Gallery, Demarco explained, “was created out of the
friendship generated by a small group of people living in Edinburgh
who wished its cultural life to extend beyond the Festival.” It was not so
much a theater as an “art centre,” Demarco notes, “based on the form
of Jim Haynes’ Paperback Bookshop. Jim saw to it that bookselling was
merely an excuse for people to come together.”6 The Richard Demarco
Gallery opened in 1966 as a “London West-end style” dealer’s gallery
on three floors of an elegant house with a bistro-style restaurant in the
basement.7
In October 1967, the gallery exhibited “16 Polish Artists” (among
them Roman Opałka).8 The assistant director of the Edinburgh Fes-
tival had approached the Union of Fine Artists on behalf of Demarco
while visiting Warsaw that year, and an exhibition was conceived on a
reciprocal basis, beginning with an exhibition of 15 UK artists in Poland
in May-June 1967.9 The encounter with Polish art was at the heart of
what became for Demarco an “ever-expanding dialogue with Eastern-
Europe,” leading to an important two-week tour in 1968 when he visited
first Warsaw, then Bucharest.10
Like Restany and others, he rejected the perceived American take-
over of the art world and sought to promote European art; one reason
for his desire to extend the dialogue with Eastern European artists was
that he “saw the danger of European art all too easily defined by the
Western European artists who dominated the Venice Biennale and the
224 Chapter 9
Documenta exhibitions of the Sixties.”11 His early encounters with Pol-
ish art were followed by exhibitions in 1968 of the Gobelin tapestries
of Tamara Hans-Jaworska and of Franciszka Themerson’s concrete po-
ems. The gallery program was not limited to painting, and Demarco
was prepared to embrace a very wide spectrum of works from the tradi-
tional to the experimental, and from practices deeply concerned with
materiality and craft to more ephemeral or time-based works, whether
performative, conceptual, both, or neither. Demarco’s contacts with
Poland were cemented by a number of visits (he liked to call his visits
to Eastern Europe and further afield “expeditions”), among others to
Warsaw, including to Galeria Foksal where he met Wiesław Borowski,
and to Łódź where he met the director Ryszard Stanisławski. The Pol-
ish artists he met through these key figures would remain central to
his repertoire. As he became more familiar with the scene, he became
less reliant on the official network of artists put forward by the Union,
though he continued to work through official channels to secure fund-
ing and permissions.
In 1972, the Demarco Gallery collaborated with Ryszard Stanisławski’s
Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź to bring Polish art and artists to the Edinburgh
Festival. “Atelier ’72” was an exhibition of 43 Polish artists aiming to
“enable Festival-goers to appreciate fully the achievements of a signifi-
cant group of avant-garde artists who work successfully within a So-
cialist system of patronage.”12 Demarco heaped praise on the Polish
authorities, writing: “I know of no country in Eastern Europe, or per-
haps in Europe as a whole, which enjoys a more intelligent and benign
attitude of patronage from the highest governmental levels than Po-
land.”13 This sort of flattery went a long way, and Demarco knew how to
play the bureaucratic game to ensure that he got what he wanted. The
exhibition, which was centered around the Richard Demarco Gallery
in Melville Crescent, included a wide cross-section of artists and ap-
proaches and carried over into the street and other venues. The theater
director and artist Józef Szajna propped up a giant ladder against the
facade, fitted with shoes caught in perpetual escape (figure 9.1). Tower-
ing above these was a cut-out of an official identification photograph of
Szajna taken at Auschwitz. A large room in the gallery served as a stage
Edinburgh Arts 225

Figures 9.1 and 9.2
Józef Szajna, Auschwitz, in “Atelier ’72,”
Richard Demarco Gallery. Courtesy of
Demarco European Art Foundation
and Demarco Digital Archive, University
of Dundee.
226 Chapter 9
for a fuller exploration of the artists’ memories of his internment in
Auschwitz and Buchenwald (figure 9.2).
Magdalena Abakanowicz’s installations also crossed between in-
side and outside the gallery space. She spectacularly linked the gallery
with the Catholic church of St. Mary’s by way of a vast snake of plaited
rope dyed burgundy that threaded its way in and out of the ventilation
holes in the gallery facade before weaving its way along the street and
up onto the church roof (figure 9.3). The piece became a performance
as all manner of casually dressed young people clambered up ladders
and onto the roof of the church building, bearing the infinitely long
cord to connect artistic and spiritual life in myriad impromptu and in-
formal ways.
Edinburgh Arts 227

Figure 9.3
Magdalena Abakanowicz, installing red
rope at St. Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh,
as part of “Atelier ’72.” Courtesy of
of Dundee.
Zbigniew Warpechowski performed both indoors and out. Indoors,
he played a tin whistle, cut pieces of his clothing, engaged in automatic
drawing, and taped his head to a helmet in the wall in a room filled with
modified plates (figure 9.4). Outdoors he carried out a piece involving
pieces of paper with the word “nothing” written on them, making out
of paper and then setting fire to the word “water,” and arranging dead
fish to form the word “life” on the pavement (figure 9.5).
All available space was used: documentation of Kantor’s happen-
ings and other manifestations was installed in the gallery café (figure
9.6). Demarco felt that the gallery was an insufficiently flexible space
for theater, however, and arranged for the “use of a disused plumber’s
Figure 9.4
Zbigniew Warpechowski performing as part
of “Atelier ’72,” Richard Demarco Gallery.
Courtesy of Demarco European Art
Foundation and Demarco Digital Archive,
University of Dundee.
Edinburgh Arts 229

Figure 9.5 (below)
Zbigniew Warpechowski performing as part
of “Atelier ’72,” Richard Demarco Gallery.

Documentation of Tadeusz Kantor’s
happenings installed in the basement
restaurant at the Richard Demarco
Gallery during “Atelier ’72.” Courtesy of
of Dundee.
230 Chapter 9
workshop at Forrest Hill, the old medieval poor house of Edinburgh” to
accommodate Kantor’s group Cricot 2 (figure 9.7). Demarco had first
encountered Kantor’s work at Galeria Foksal in autumn 1971, and was
especially thrilled with a barrel hanging from a chain there bearing the
inscription: “to be opened in 1984.” When he saw Cricot 2 performing
Witkacy’s Les Cordonniers in Paris, he determined to bring the troupe to
Edinburgh.14 Borowski later commented that the connection had been
clear from the outset: “Demarco’s homeless gallery, Kantor’s theatre
with no base and our gallery existing as it did on the margin of offi-
cialdom” all shared “a similar predicament.”15 Demarco and Borowski
would become lifelong friends (figures 9.8, 9.9).
The poorhouse proved to be an excellent setting for The Water Hen
in 1972. Kantor was committed to “poor reality” throughout his life, and
photographs capture the synergy between the space and the events un-
folding.16 Like Beuys, Kantor was invited to give master classes on his
philosophy for participating artists and students as part of the Edin-
burgh Arts program launched by Demarco that summer. Edinburgh
Edinburgh Arts 231

Figure 9.7
Cricot 2 actors at Forrest Hill Poorhouse,
1972. Courtesy of Demarco European Art
Figure 9.8
Wiesław Borowski in Richard Demarco’s
office, Edinburgh, 1972. Courtesy of
Demarco European Art Foundation and
Demarco Digital Archive, University
of Dundee.
Figure 9.9
Richard Demarco in Wiesław Borowski’s
office, Warsaw, 1976. Courtesy of
of Dundee.
Arts was conceived of as a summer school program, serving first as an

independent prequel to the Festival, and then running concurrently
with the official program. Demarco explained: “The work of Joseph
Beuys as a teacher had caused me to see the gallery more as a place
where artists of the calibre of Joseph Beuys could work with students
and younger artists based on the idea of the ‘university under a tree’…
in the environment of Edinburgh and the surrounding countryside.”17
Another high-profile visitor in the summer of 1972 was Jack Burnham.
The catalog for “Atelier ’72” gave a page to each artist, providing bi-
ographical information, an artist’s statement, and a selection of works.
Each page was headed with a triangular logo reading “Edinburgh Festi-
val ‘Atelier 72,’ August-September 1972,” and the artist’s name, but in all
other respects each was radically different. Every page was an artwork in
itself and had the quality of a poster. Some had an interesting textured
ground, with photographs or drawings laid out on stone (Gostomski),
cardboard (Hasior), sand (Koterski), grass (Krasiński), fabric (Natalia
LL), wood (Nowosielski), or the artist’s own works (Opałka). The cata-
log acknowledged that the exhibition had been imported readymade
Edinburgh Arts 233

by using for its cover a photocopy of the envelope received from a pho-
tographic studio by the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź and then forwarded to
Demarco with the images for exhibition, complete with enlarged Polish
stamps and postmarks (figure 9.10).
Stanisławski stressed that the selection for “Atelier ’72” was merely
the tip of an iceberg: “It is in fact an arbitrary selection of works by a few
dozen from among the several-thousand-strong group of artists living
and working in Poland. They represent the full scale of interests, com-
mitments, joys and anxieties which determine the complexity of the
art that is being born and which very often is full of doubts regarding
its essence and its very existence.”18 Stanisławski framed the show as a
survey of diverse trends, in contrast to the essentializing tone adopted
by some contributors to this and further Demarco catalogs, which
tended to refer to issues such as the country in question’s “national
temperament.”19 As Piotr Piotrowski argued in relation to exhibitions
such as this in Edinburgh, “The problem of the nationalization of mod-
ern art of an international origin and in fact international character in
the countries ruled by the communists came to the surface even more
distinctly whenever artists of particular countries had their shows or-
ganized in the West. Such exhibitions … took place under the banner
of ‘contemporary art from this or that country,’ which meant that their
Western reception contributed to the nationalization of those histori-
cal-artistic processes as well.”20
The first in the gallery’s trademark A3 format bilingual exhibition
catalogs had been devoted to the 1970 exhibition “Strategy Get Arts” (a
palindrome). This proved to be a watershed event for Demarco and a
linchpin in his early effort to “support the new-found vitality of Euro-
pean art … gloriously made manifest in the Köln/Düsseldorf area. It was
overdue, for the New York scene had dominated almost too long and
a healthy dialogue was again necessary.”21 “Strategy Get Arts” was an
international program of exhibitions, events, concerts, films, and en-
vironments at the Edinburgh College of Arts, in collaboration with the
Düsseldorf Kunsthalle and the West German Ministry of Culture. The
international contributors, all associated with the Düsseldorf Academy
in some way at that time, included key figures such as Bernd and Hilla
234 Chapter 9
Figure 9.10
“Atelier ’72,” Richard Demarco Gallery,
catalog cover. Courtesy of Demarco
European Art Foundation and Demarco
Digital Archive, University of Dundee.
Edinburgh Arts 235

Becher, Joseph Beuys, George Brecht, Robert Filliou, Imi Knoebel, Kri-
wet, Blinky Palermo, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Dieter Rot, Daniel
Spoerri, and Günther Uecker. The exhibition was generously sponsored,
and many of the artists were able to come to Edinburgh. The art critic
of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Georg Jappe, reported that it had
all been an “experiment in independence through teamwork,” such
that artists were central to the whole process of designing and deliver-
ing the program.22
The idea for a German exhibition had come out of an encounter
with Uecker in Dublin several years previously, when the artist had
invited Demarco to Düsseldorf to visit his studio. Demarco was im-
pressed by Uecker’s commitment to teaching: “I knew that my Polish
and Romanian artist friends should be in dialogue with him, as an art-
ist who was born in East Germany and obliged, like many of the art-
ists of Düsseldorf, to start life anew … on the confluence of the Rhine
and the Ruhr.”23 In January 1970, Demarco embarked on a tour of Ger-
man art centers funded by the West German Ministry of Culture and
reported feeling utterly convinced after visiting Düsseldorf (the Paris
of the Rhine) that “what is happening in and around Dusseldorf must
encourage those who wish to see Europe play its role on equal terms
with the Unites States in the advancement of the visual artists in this
new decade.”24
Strategy Get Arts would be the first exhibition of avant-garde Ger-
man art in the United Kingdom since 1938. Guy Brett reported on “Rin-
ke’s coiled water cannon which sends a jet through the front door that
you have to squeeze past, or Uecker’s mechanism repeatedly banging
the time-worn door of a life-classroom” (he was referring to the installa-
tion in a sculpture studio on the first floor of the building).25 More than
half the artists were present in person and installed their own works,
among them Uecker, who produced a corridor structure for spectators
to walk through, with a series of knives jutting outward to be navigated,
which he renamed Sharp Corridor Blunted by Police after being made to
install a protective cage around the blades by the local constabulary.26
Demarco stressed that he wanted the building to be a “non-gallery
… which is to say an exhibition in progress” and, on the other hand, that
236 Chapter 9
he wanted to produce an exhibition “which would emphasize the art-
ist’s role as magician able to revive our sense of wonder … an exhibi-
tion that would weaken the spirit of materialism.”27 Beuys contributed a
four-hour-long performance twice daily for five days entitled Celtic (Kin-
loch Rannoch): The Scottish Symphony and transported the VW Micro
bus containing his installation of The Pack to Edinburgh College of Art
(figures 9.11, 9.12). One critic reported that on leaving the exhibition
“all the clichés of Dada and Surrealism whose battered truths one had
begun to doubt, came alive again.”28
If two of Demarco’s most important connections were with Kan-
tor and Beuys, the third was with the Romanian artist Paul Neagu.
Demarco felt a personal affinity for Romania and may have had Tran-
sylvanian relatives. He also saw important historical links between Ro-
mania and Scotland: “Romania was once the south-eastern boundary
and Scotland the north-western boundary of the same world, sharing
a way of life and culture which united Europe under the standards of
the Roman legions.” He saw his project as being to try to help the two
countries “rediscover the links which once made them part of the one
world,” referring to shared traditions of folklore and spiritual mystery.
Following an exhibition of “Romanian Art Treasures” at the 1965 Ed-
inburgh Festival, Demarco made a trip to Bucharest in 1968, where he
met Ion Bitzan. One inspiration for the visit had come in the form of a
trip from Athens via Bulgaria to Bucharest by Roland Penrose and pho-
tographer Lee Miller. Demarco arrived in a period of openness, just as
Ceauşescu became the darling of the West after refusing to send troops
to join the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 (which led to
a split with Moscow and facilitated the Western loans whose repayment
would make Romanian life such a misery in the 1980s).
Bitzan introduced Demarco to further artists on a second trip in
1969, and a long-term relationship with Romanian art and artists was
set in motion by the exhibition of “4 Romanian Artists” (Paul Neagu,
Ion Bitzan, Peter and Ritzi Jacobi) at the Demarco Gallery in March 1969
(figure 9.13). Ritzi Jacobi’s work was described as extending “the concept
of tapestry into ‘soft’ sculpture,” while Neagu’s boxes were compared
to “religious icons, altars and tabernacles.”29 Cordelia Oliver wrote: “I
Edinburgh Arts 237

Figure 9.11 (below)
From left: Michael Pye, Joseph Beuys,
Lesley Benyon, Richard Demarco, with
Beuys’s installation The Pack at “Strategy
Get Arts,” Edinburgh College of Art, 1970.

Richard Demarco and Joseph Beuys at
Edinburgh College of Art during the
installation of The Pack, “Strategy Get Arts,”
238 Chapter 9
know of no one who was not, in some way, impressed by that first exhi-
bition,” asking “who could forget the first effect of Paul Neagu’s room
with its assembly of treasure cabinets, irregular-shaped boxes with se-
cret, hinged doors opening on dark interiors in which things gleamed
and sparkled … created from materials that were without exception
cheap and rough and crude—matchwood, scraps of tin and brass, nails,
streaks of colour” (figures 9.14, 9.15).30 Demarco singled out Neagu’s The
Great Metronome, referring to it as a “multi-compartmented tabernacle.”
“Matchboxes and matchsticks,” he noted, “began to take on a totally
new meaning from that exhibition.” He praised Neagu’s “alchemical
powers to turn ordinary matter into a precious material,” concluding
that “the objects in that room demanded to be considered as recep-
tacles of spiritual energy.”31
Oliver recalled that she only fully understood the inspiration for
these works when she visited Bucharest herself and had the revela-
tory experience of entering a small stone church in the center of the
city whose doors she found open one evening. She was struck by the
Edinburgh Arts 239

Figure 9.13 (below)
From left: Ion Bitzan, Richard Demarco,
Paul Neagu, Peter Jacobi, Ritzi Jacobi, at
the “4 Romanian Artists” exhibition,
Richard Demarco Gallery, 1969. Courtesy
of Demarco European Art Foundation
of Dundee.

Constructions by Paul Neagu, installation
view at “4 Romanian Artists,” Richard
Demarco Gallery, 1969. Courtesy of
of Dundee.

Paul Neagu, The Great Metronome,
1966–1968, installation at “4 Romanian
Artists,” Richard Demarco Gallery, 1969.
Edinburgh Arts 241
“warmth in the rich, shabby rugs (those who worship there spend much
time on their knees); there was theatrical magnificence in the high,
carved and gilded altar screen, and the icons, gleaming with the silver
which all but overlaid the painted images and which was reflected a
hundred times [in] the flickering candlelight; and there was mystery
in the dark space between the light and the roof far above with its fres-
coes, obscured by a centuries-old accumulation of urban smoke and
dust.”32 The sensory experience described by the British critic was one
with which Neagu programmatically infused his art. Over the course
of March-September 1969, he presented his “palpable art” to the Edin-
burgh audience, accompanied by a Manifesto declaring the need for
“one, public, palpable art through which all the senses, sight, touch,
smell, taste will supplement and devour each other so that a man can
possess an object in every sense” (figure 9.16).33 This line of thinking
attained its logical “total” conclusion on the occasion of the exhibi-
tion “Romanian Art Today” (August 1971), where visitors were invited to
participate in a Cake-Man Banquet, consuming traditional peasant gin-
gerbread together in the space of the gallery.34 The exhibition activated
every corner of the gallery space: Neagu painted one of his mysterious
figures composed of cells and cells within cells on the basement patio
(figure 9.17).
Figure 9.16
Paul Neagu, “Palpable Art” at the Richard
Demarco Gallery, 1969. Courtesy of Demarco
Figure 9.17
Paul Neagu drawing in the basement of
the Richard Demarco Gallery as part
of “Romanian Art Today,” 1971. Courtesy
of Demarco European Art Foundation and
of Dundee.
242 Chapter 9
Edinburgh Arts 243
“Romanian Art Today” was the result of three visits to Romania by
Demarco and of protracted negotiations with the National Union of Art-
ists. Eleven Romanian artists were included in the exhibition, including
Horia Bernea, Ion Bitzan, Pavel Ilie, Paul Neagu, and the Timişoara-
based group Sigma 1. The focus was on “mid-career” artists, Demarco
explained, and was not intended to represent the “full spectrum” of de-
velopments in Romanian art but to showcase those whose work “relates
to vital movements in Britain and other parts of Europe and certainly to
the Unites States.”35 By dealing directly with the Ministry of Culture, De-
marco hoped to reproduce, in the context of the socialist world, the fa-
vorable conditions of collaboration he had established through official
channels in 1970 while working with the West Germans on “Strategy Get
Arts.” The exhibition was high-profile as it was scheduled to open just
two weeks before Ceauşescu’s state visit to the United Kingdom, and
extensive correspondence concerning the participating artists ensued,
not least because of the publication of Ceauşescu’s “July Thesis” an-
nouncing new repressive measures in the cultural field. The exhibition
was on the point of being canceled when a compromise was reached,
resulting in the addition to the roster of six artists recommended by
the National Union of Artists. Though one would never know it from
the exhibition catalog, by all accounts the exhibition seems to have suc-
ceeded only by a hair’s breadth, and not in the form originally intended.
Piotr Piotrowski has commented on the lack of political allusions in the
works selected: “Even though it was a very interesting moment in the
history of Romanian art, related to several years of comparative liberty
and distinct signs of change in Romanian cultural policy, the local art-
ists of the period did not … make any attempts at the explicit criticism
of the regime and situated (or wished to situate) their art in a much
wider frame of reference.”36
An interesting feature of the A3 catalog, carried over from the ini-
tial “Strategy Get Arts” catalog, was the inclusion of an interview with
the participating artists, presented in tabulated form. They were asked:
“What do you know about Edinburgh?”; “Can you give me one basic
impulse for your artistic work?”; “What interests you the most in the
tradition of Romanian folk art?”; “What other art forms interest you
244 Chapter 9
and from which can you draw inspiration?”; “Do you think your work
could be defined as essentially Romanian?”; “What are the character-
istics of contemporary British art to you?” The questions presupposed
the possibility of a critical approach to the assumptions of an exhibi-
tion framed in national terms. While the artists had already been po-
sitioned within a national frame, and while assumptions relating to
the specificities of that frame would seem to have been reinforced by
asking a question about the artists’ relation to folk art, for instance,
the interview structure rendered the situation less didactic and more
dialogic. Artists were given an opportunity to situate themselves as they
chose in relation to this frame, as well as being invited to share their
ideas about the framing of British art. As such, the double-page spread
with interview responses undid the otherwise top-down format of a
traditional exhibition catalog, on the one hand, and of a survey show
curated by outside observers, on the other. Bitzan’s response to the
question “What interests you most in the tradition of Romanian folk
art?” turned the assumptions of the question back on themselves. He
replied: “I am very interested in the way men wear their handkerchief,
keep their books, on how they pack bags or luggage, in their manner of
working, in the way they are manipulating objects etc., etc.” In short,
what interested him about Romanian folk art was what interested him
about people in general. In view of the fact that the exhibition was co-
organized with the National Union of Artists, it would seem that there
could be only one correct answer to the question “Do you think your
work could be defined as essentially Romanian?” Radu Stoica offered
a model answer: “I hope my works respond to the needs of Romania
today.” Others were more lyrical: “I hope to hide the secret treasure of
our earth” (Vladimir Şetran), or more ambitiously still “I wish my work
could be Romanian Universal” (Ion Pacea). Only Bernea was more eva-
sive on the topic, saying that his work could not be called “strikingly”
Romanian but that the work was “deeply rooted” in himself.
Demarco’s relationship with Neagu had begun in the studio of
Ion Bitzan, who introduced them in 1968. Demarco recollects being
“conscious of a young man operating effectively outside the main ar-
eas of art activity which created reputations for those leading post-war
Edinburgh Arts 245

Romanian artists … I knew deserved to be known in Britain. … His pre-
paredness to discuss his work beyond Romanian art world terms was
heartening, but I sensed the vulnerability of his position, knowing that
his art implied unacceptable concepts and ideas.”37 Another early en-
counter was captured by Demarco in color, in contrast with the black
and white homogeneity of so many of the other photographic records.
Neagu posed with his sculptures in a series of outdoor construction
sites, their fragile hand-made nature offset by the concrete sewer seg-
ments and piles of red brick that serve as the backdrop (figure 9.18).
Neagu returned to Edinburgh later in 1969 for the Festival, carrying
out a series of performances, including on stilts, and remained in the
Figure 9.18
Paul Neagu with his work in Bucharest,
246 Chapter 9
United Kingdom. Over the course of the years that followed, he became
a regular fixture at the Richard Demarco Gallery and Demarco would or-
ganize a number of his shows (as would the Sigi Krauss Gallery), often
pairing him with another artist whose work he was keen to launch. In
November 1974, Neagu performed a piece entitled Gradually Going Tor-
nado as part of Edinburgh Arts, a six-week program of exhibitions, per-
formances, lectures, theater, and dance, based at several venues across
the city (figure 9.19). His practice having increasingly moved away from
a focus on the object toward a wider analysis of systems and performa-
tive strategies, the artist appeared on roller skates and wrapped every-
day objects dotted around the floor in items of his discarded clothing,
Figure 9.19
Paul Neagu, Gradually Going Tornado,
Forrest Hill Poorhouse, Edinburgh
Arts, 1974. Courtesy of Demarco European
Art Foundation and Demarco Digital
Archive, University of Dundee.
Edinburgh Arts 247

eventually whirling round in circles propelled by the same wrapped ob-
jects now tied to his person with string, having become a tornado, or, as
he put it, “an instrument of ritual which absorbs life-physical facts and
art-spiritual suggestions.”38 Neagu formed a collective, the Generative
Arts Group, whose main concern was with “open-axiomatic art-forms.”
The other five members of the group were fictional. Demarco eventu-
ally helped him to become a naturalized British citizen. Neagu, for his
part, saw Demarco as a whirlwind partner, representing “Ricky,” in the
“quasi-ecstatic” guise of a tornado, whipping up events left, right, and
center (figure 9.20).
In the 1973 edition of Edinburgh Arts, a group of Yugoslav artists
joined more than 100 international artists active across the city, in-
cluding Kantor and Cricot 2 showing at the Forrest Hill Poorhouse
and Beuys delivering his famous 12-hour blackboard lecture at Melville
College, detailing his philosophy by way of a range of diagrams and
drawings. All those involved in the “Eight Yugoslav Artists” events were
associated with the Belgrade Students’ Cultural Centre (SKC): Marina
Abramović, Radomir Damnjan, Nuša and Srečo Dragan, Neša Paripović,
Zoran Popović, Raša Todosijević, and Gergelj Urkom had studied to-
gether and, according to Jasna Tijardović, were “bound together by the
unanimous decision that they existed only within the framework of
what they were doing,” taking as their motto “If you wish to do some-
thing, do it.”39
Demarco visited Yugoslavia in December 1972 on an official invi-
tation from the Federal Institute for International Scientific, Techni-
cal, Cultural and Educational Co-operation, organized via the British
Council. In his “Report” on his visit Demarco commented on how “well
travelled and well acquainted with international developments in the
art world” the artists he met were. He was especially interested in the
programs of the Belgrade International Theater Festival (BITEF), which,
he noted, had seen “most of the world’s great theatre companies under
their roof,” as well as entailing art programming: “BITEF also involves
art events and actions which show that the visual arts and theatre are
moving closer together.”40 Demarco must have consulted Groh prior to
his trip, as he wrote that Nuša and Srečo Dragan “showed me the films
248 Chapter 9
Figure 9.20
Paul Neagu, Richard Demarco and
Edinburgh Arts, drawing, 1976. Courtesy
of Dundee.
Edinburgh Arts 249

which I had been advised to see by Klaus Groh, the West German critic
and authority of East European avant garde art.” His packed tour was
coordinated by John Acton of the British Council and, besides Belgrade,
took in Zagreb and Skopje, with dozens of meetings and studio visits,
culminating in a public lecture about Edinburgh Arts in Belgrade re-
portedly attended by about 150 people.
As part of “Eight Yugoslav artists,” an exhibition and screenings
were held at the Demarco Gallery, while performances took place in the
gymnasium of Melville College. The group of visiting artists from the
SKC in Belgrade coordinated their own event for a rapt audience that
included Joseph Beuys. They would meet Beuys again when he traveled
to Belgrade to participate in the “April Meetings” of 1974 (figure 9.21).41
The simultaneous performances and film and slide projections at Mel-
ville College turned the event into a happening of sorts, with spectators
forced to switch their attention between the activities. Each performer
acted independently within the framework of an event that was pro-
grammatically collective, thereby embodying the ethos of the activities
of the SKC more widely. Marina Abramović presented Rhythm 10 for the
first time outside Belgrade (figure 9.22). Dressed in black and seated
on the floor on white paper before an array of knives, she splayed out
the fingers of her left hand and stabbed the space between her fingers
with different-sized knives, recording the sounds on tape before play-
ing back the recording and trying to demonstrate that “the mistakes
Figure 9.21
Joseph Beuys at the Students’ Cultural
Centre in Belgrade, 18 April 1974. Courtesy
of Marinko Sudac Collection.
Figure 9.22
Marina Abramović, Rhythm 10 at Melville
College as part of “Eight Yugoslav
Artists,” Edinburgh Arts, 1973. Courtesy
of Demarco European Art Foundation and
of Dundee.
250 Chapter 9
Edinburgh Arts 251
of time past and time present can be synchronized” by repeating the
incidents of injury as they occurred on the recording.42
Gergelj Urkom carried out an action entitled Upholstery of a Chair,
and Raša Todosijević and Marinela Koželj presented Decision as Art, an
intense performance involving drinking water, vomiting, and a dead
fish (figure 9.23). Though Koželj was not acknowledged as an equal
participant in this performance, the power play involved in the pair-
ing arguably took center stage. Todosijević would explore the theme
of working in a pair further by organizing a “couples exhibition” en-
titled “1&1,” at the Students’ Cultural Centre Gallery in Belgrade in the
summer of 1974. The exhibition brought together a diverse cross sec-
tion of artists working in pairs (not necessarily couples), 14 pairs in
Figure 9.23
Raša Todosijević, Decision as Art, Melville
College, part of “Eight Yugoslav Artists,”
Edinburgh Arts, 1973. Courtesy of
of Dundee.
252 Chapter 9
total, including Bernd and Hilla Becher from West Germany, Barbara
Kozłowska and Zbigniew Makarewicz from Poland, Shirley Cameron
and Roland Miller from the United Kingdom, and Karel Miler and Petr
Štembera from Czechoslovakia.43
Following a further visit to Belgrade and other cities in 1974 to
make preparations for a major survey of the Yugoslav scene as a whole,
Demarco opened “Aspects 75: Contemporary Yugoslav Art” at the end
of September 1975, hosted jointly by the Fruitmarket Gallery and the re-
located Richard Demarco Gallery at Monteith House on the Royal Mile
in Edinburgh (figure 9.24).44 The exhibition was a collaboration with key
figures in the art worlds of Zagreb, Belgrade, Ljubljana, Sarajevo, and
Skopje. There had been correspondence with cultural representatives
from across the Yugoslav Federation, asking them to select artists for
the exhibition. The show involved 49 artists in total, including, in addi-
tion to the Belgrade group, Ida Biard, Braco Dimitrijević, Goran Trbu
ljak, and Sanja Iveković. Tijardović noted that the selection made by
Demarco aimed to “give the best objective idea about artistic activities
in Yugoslavia which are not restricted by academic rules and attitudes
or styles and manifestos.”45 The Edinburgh experience that summer
was one she would cherish: she wrote to Demarco after the event say-
ing: “It was one of the best time[s] in my life to be in Edinburgh to meet
you.” She said that it had helped her a lot “to have this contact with
creative people all over the world.”46
Abramović performed Hot/Cold at the opening of the show at the
Fruitmarket Gallery, holding her hand under an electric heater on top
of a sheet of glass placed on top of a block of ice for half an hour (figure
9.25). She then uttered a cry and smashed the glass, cutting her hand,
but remained in position without moving while the skin on her hand
began to burn. The exhibition brought together artists associated with
New Tendencies and forms of socialist modernism with others involved
in what came to be known as the New Art Practice. The catalog, de-
signed by Boris Bucan, took the form of a Yugoslav passport, as though
mocking the national framework for the exhibition but also presenting
the Yugoslav national identity itself as no more than a cover for the im-
mense diversity it contained (figure 9.26).
Edinburgh Arts 253

Figure 9.24
Yugoslav artists arriving at Victoria
Station, London, for “Aspects 75.” Courtesy
of Dundee.
Figure 9.25
Marina Abramović, Hot/Cold, performance
at “Aspects 75,” Richard Demarco Gallery,
One of the contributions was by the Šempas Community and in-
cluded a diagram of flows linking various aspects of their lives: 1. Cosmic
Energies; 2. Man; 3. Nature Kingdoms. Providing documentation from
the OHO group work, they added a statement that their community
(representing Man in the schema) lived at one with cosmic energies
and the natural kingdom. They explained: “Many different plants and
animals share this life with us, giving us our ‘daily bread,’” and advo-
cated continuing the “cycle of our love” by showing “gratitude and
care for them.” The group carried out workshops with pure minerals
and other such activities, returning to artistic activities in the form of
a drawing class as of autumn 1974, whose results were included in the
exhibition (figure 9.27).
Todosijević’s contribution was a long list headed “Who makes a
profit of art, and who gains from it honestly?”47 Among the profiteers,
he listed everyone involved with art or artists in any way and all their
workers, clerks, sales personnel, agents etc., including, among others,
All those producing and selling wholesale or retail drugs, sanitary supplies,
and alcohol, contraceptives, cigarettes and sporting goods to artists.
All those collecting taxes on artists’ incomes …
Galleries
Sales galleries and their staff
Non-profit galleries.
Gallery owners, gallery administrators, gallery curators and their personal

secretaries and friends
And a great many more people from all walks of life.48
Following on from his radical performance in Edinburgh in 1973,

Todosijević’s contribution to “Aspects 75” was his strongest denunci-
ation to date of the corruption and opportunism of the capitalist art
world and a powerful reassertion of the rights of the artist. Demarco
had never seen things in such clear-cut terms: having started out as
Edinburgh Arts 255

Figure 9.26 (above)
Boris Bucan, Aspects 75 catalog cover,
1975. Courtesy of Demarco European
Art Foundation and Demarco Digital
Archive, University of Dundee.

Šempas Community, Aspects 75 catalog
entry, 1975. Courtesy of Demarco
256 Chapter 9
Edinburgh Arts 257
258 Chapter 9
“14 Yugoslavs in Dialogue at Motovun
with 19 Edinburgh Arts Participants,”
Motovun, Istria, July 1975. Courtesy of
of Dundee.
Edinburgh Arts 259

a director of a not-for-profit art gallery, he ploughed all funding from
sales of artworks back into all manner of artist-centered activities, for
the artist was at the heart of everything Demarco believed in so pas-
sionately, the only guarantor of the new field of social relations and
international cooperation that he hoped he could help facilitate.
A few months before the arrival of the Yugoslav artists in Edinburgh
at the end of September 1975, 14 Yugoslav artists and 19 Edinburgh
Arts participants met in the small village of Motovun in central Istria
as part of what Demarco called a “dialogue,” an impromptu summer
gathering along the lines of an Edinburgh Arts holiday (figure 9.28).49
Edinburgh Arts was becoming a mobile feast. Demarco’s color photo-
graphs capture the international artists in idyllic conditions engaged
in lively conversation at long tables under a spread of trees nestled in
the hilltop village. Marina Abramović and Raša Todosijević were among
those present (figure 9.29). The entire scene is characteristic of the
sorts of opportunities and encounters that Demarco engineered over
the years, realizing far-fetched ideas by a combination of enthusiasm
and zeal that was designed to win over the widest spectrum of facilita-
tors, achieving the movement of thousands of art objects, remarkably
sponsored by a range of international cultural wings of government
institutions. Under the cover of breathing fresh life into the outdated
idea of the “national school,” which paradoxically held a certain fasci-
nation for ambitious socialist bureaucrats keen to make their mark in
some way, Demarco contrived to bring radical experimental artists to
the forefront by including them in survey shows alongside their more
traditional colleagues.
Keen on the label “event photography,” Demarco’s photographs
capture the artistic life of the 1970s “in the offing.” E. M. Forster’s motto
“Only connect” served as Demarco’s model, emblematic of his declared
“commitment to making every effort to facilitate meetings between
friends and strangers so that Joseph Beuys’ consideration of ‘everyone
as an artist’ can be validated.”50 One of those whom Demarco’s activi-
ties put on the trail of Eastern European art was the Californian artist
Tom Marioni.
260 Chapter 9
10
An American Vision
Tom Marioni had met the Polish critic and gallerist Wiesław Borowski
in Edinburgh in 1973, when he had given an experimental concert at St.
Mary’s as part of Edinburgh Arts. On his return to the United States, he
wrote to Borowski saying, “I would like to have a show in your gallery
of my work.”1 A correspondence began, arrangements were made, and
Marioni’s show at Galeria Foksal opened on 4 October 1975. Entitled
Thinking Out Loud, it took the form of a performance involving drum-
ming with gold and silver brushes; the artist said this was to allow for
the “transmission of visual images by way of telepathy to the receiver
audience if their rhythmic patterns coincide with mine” (figure 10.1).2
He took the opportunity to combine the visit with a tour to neighboring
socialist countries, where he met with artists and sought to get a sense
of the scene.
On his return, Marioni published his observations and comments
in the second issue of his new magazine, Vision, which was devoted
to “idea-oriented art.”3 His aim was to “focus each issue on a different
Chapter
region of the world,” making the magazine a “kind of exhibition in a
publication.” The first issue was devoted to the Californian scene and
set out to explain to readers that while New York was “still a center,”
there were now “many centers.” He wrote: “Artists around the country
and around the world are finding their identities where they are.” Mari- An
oni’s desire to decentralize the map of the art world remained some-
what American-oriented, like Lippard’s Six Years, published a few years
earlier. However, Vision no. 2 serves as a fascinating historical resource
insofar as it reveals a great many often unspoken and underanalyzed
Figure 10.1
Tom Marioni and Koji Kamoji, Foksal
Gallery, 1975. Photo: Jerzy Borowski.
Courtesy of the Borowski family and
Foskal Gallery Archive.
assumptions of the international transactions so prevalent in the 1970s.

His bold commentary and enjoyable storytelling offer real insights
into all manner of mutual affinities among artists, but also convey
a range of misunderstandings, projections, and interesting gossip. In
a research environment characterized by participants whose memories
of the period have been reduced to a set of standard narratives repeated
and refined over the years, Marioni’s represents a rare and coherent
account of an outsider’s experience of the developments that I am
264 Chapter 10
interested in retracing here, recorded while the author still had the ex-
perience fresh in his mind.
Marioni’s later claim that Vision no. 2 “was the first publication in
the West on underground avant-garde artists (such as Tadeusz Kan-
tor and Marina Abramović) of the Soviet-ruled countries of Yugoslavia,
Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland” reveals certain inaccuracies in
his grasp of the field: his publication had been preceded by Groh’s Ak-
tuelle Kunst in Osteuropa; Kantor and Abramović cannot in any strict
sense of the term be classed as “underground” artists (both performed
in state-sponsored venues and had permission to perform internation-
ally); most significantly, Yugoslavia since 1948 had pursued its own path
to socialism and was not Soviet-ruled.
These inexactitudes notwithstanding, Marioni’s claim does show
a drive on the part of an interested Western onlooker to define the
field in geopolitical terms and to attribute to its experimental artists
certain characteristics: those of an underground. This approach per-
sists today, not least because in many cases foreigners have been en-
couraged to see Eastern Europe as a homogeneous unit (in line with
the binary thinking of the Cold War) and to envisage a division be-
tween official and unofficial culture in equally black-and-white terms.
While the situation was far more complex on both counts, such think-
ing was a projection issuing from within the Eastern European scene
as well as one imposed from without. There was a degree of performa-
tivity in the construction of such a view for the benefit of visitors, born
of a desire to network with the Western art world, which in turn af-
fected the internal dynamics of artistic relations among artists within
the Soviet bloc and Yugoslavia, insofar as the various artistic circles
there intersected with colleagues in East-Central European Soviet sat-
ellite nations. Marioni can be seen, then, in many respects as an “in-
nocent anthropologist” who becomes an international transmitter for
the narrative desires of the individuals he encounters on his journey.
He later recalled that he had “met artists and they introduced me to
other artists, and so it’s the best way to find out who the best artists
are … from artists and not from curators. So I learned about the whole
underground art scene.”4
An American Vision 265

The cover for the Eastern Europe number of Vision, by Knížák, fea-
tured a hammer and sickle with hearts on a red ground. Marioni’s in-
troduction was entitled “Real Social Realism,” as though proposing to
demystify for his readers the art world behind the Iron Curtain in a way
that would undo the monolithic myth of socialist realism and reveal a
more authentic “social” realism. This proposal was doubtless baffling
to a majority of the artists with whom his magazine was concerned, for
they were of a generation that had never taken up socialist realism and
for whom it hardly functioned as a reality at this point. Both the cover
and the allusion to official art in the introduction set the parameters for
Marioni’s project in ideological terms, albeit in potentially ironic fash-
ion, with the result that his critique of Cold War assumptions remains
only partial.
The introductory essay included a square reproduction of the NASA
photo from Apollo 8, known as Earthrise; the author wrote that the
world was getting “smaller and smaller.” He staked his position on the
significance of conceptual art in the following terms: “Conceptual art,
an art of the ’70s, as it was developed in America, was a reaction against
the materialism of the ’60s, and records our country’s swing away from
that frame of mind.” He argued: “Intelligent people in America, and
in the world, have become less oriented to personal goods and more
aware of the frailty of our world.” Following in the footsteps of Sol
LeWitt and others, Marioni noted that “the work of art is not the object;
the work of art is the information that is communicated,” and that art-
ists all around the world have since the end of the ’60s been developing
what he called an “art of theory, of aesthetic activity, of proposition
and study as the form, rather than the production of objects as the aim
and purpose of the art.” He wrote that “this is very strong in Eastern
Europe” but for “different reasons” than in the West. While he wrote
that “the fact that Conceptual art is strong in Eastern Europe as well as
in the West shows how small the world has become,” he also argued for
heterogeneity, saying that “individual works being done by artists show
how clearly their culture differs from other cultures in the world.”5 He
saw the shift away from object-oriented practice in Eastern Europe as
being pragmatic as much as anything else:
266 Chapter 10
To varying degrees in Eastern European countries the political system,
through the control of money, does not allow the manipulation of the art ob-
ject as a product that can be merchandized and re-sold, increasing in value
and fitting into a supply and demand system. So the art object is automatically
less important than in the West. And since the making of art objects is scruti-
nized and often controlled by political forces, an artist who wishes to explore
philosophic ideas may be more free to do so in making actions. These may not
be understood by those enforcing repressive political ideas, yet the point will
be made to the art community, and so, perhaps, find its way into the culture.6
Marioni’s Vision no. 2 included Štembera’s text “Events, Happen-

ings and Land-Art in Czechoslovakia: A Short Information,” as well as
a text on artist Radomir Damnjan by Ješa Denegri, Zoran Popović’s text
“For Self-Management Art,” and Raša Todosijević’s Edinburgh state-
ment, “Who Makes a Profit from Art and Who Gains from It Honestly?”
Marioni explained that his encounter with Yugoslav art in Edinburgh
in 1973 had been the first time he “became aware of any real art scene
in Eastern Europe,” and it would be to Yugoslavia that he traveled first
when he visited two years later—first to Belgrade, then Zagreb.7 He
called Belgrade the “Hollywood of East Europe,” describing a “very ugly
city” with strange street stalls selling corn on the cob and tanks parked
outside the War Museum.8 He told a bizarre anecdote about a local man
who loved to dress as a cowboy: “There is a personality, an unusual
character, who lives outside Belgrade on a farm. He has changed his
name to Harry Jackson, the most American name he could come up
with. It’s in the phone book and looks totally out of place among the
Slavic names. He doesn’t speak English, and has never been to America,
but he rides into Belgrade on horseback dressed in a complete cow-
boy outfit like Roy Rogers.”9 Having set the scene in this way, Marioni
made a clear distinction between the official and unofficial art worlds,
explaining that “the official art of Yugoslavia is abstract art, as it is in
most of the Western world,” and that this suits the authorities very well
as “abstract art is no threat to the government; since its content is not
known it couldn’t be critical of the society.” He made interesting links
to the American state of affairs: “I remember Nelson Rockefeller saying

on a TV special that the great thing about abstract art is that you can
see anything you want in it.” He defined “official” art as “paintings and
sculptures that are purchased by the government-run museums, or the
art of artists to whom special favors or allowances are given.”10 The Mu-
seum of Modern Art, he said, was mostly empty of visitors, but “conser-
vative modern art” was shown to “keep the officials of museums happy.”
The artist noted that this was in marked contrast to the “high level
of social life” of artists themselves, who seemed to him to operate in
an altogether different circuit, engaging in many “discussions, lectures,
art-film and theatre festivals.” He was clearly impressed, writing that
“artists travel more and meet with each other more than in other places I
have seen in Europe. There is great communication and political aware-
ness among artists.” He went on to describe a number of performances
by Marina Abramović in detail, adding anecdotally: “She lives with her
mother (who is curator of the academic museum in Belgrade) and her
grandmother.”11 He also singled out Radomir Damnjan’s Misinforma-
tion pieces, in which he photographed his friends and labeled them
with the names of Western art world figures (figure 10.2). It is clear that
Marioni thought Zoran Popović’s year in New York at Joseph Kosuth’s
studio did him no good, explaining: “He now works only with language.
Before he went to New York he was making dance-like gestures with
small lights attached to his fingertips, and in a darkened room could
make forms by moving his arms, drawing in space.”
Moving on to Zagreb, Marioni cited Braco Dimitrijević as the “best-
known Yugoslavian artist” from “a Westerner’s point of view,” provid-
ing a reproduction of his Casual Passer-by I Met at 11.09 AM, Paris 1971.
Marioni interpreted Dimitrijević’s move of elevating ordinary people to
the ranks of the great leaders of the socialist revolution and displaying
images of these anonymous citizens in public spaces in a format usu-
ally reserved in socialist Yugoslavia for portraits of Marx, Lenin, or Tito
as a “perfect example of Social Realism” (figure 10.3).12 His interpreta-
tion, undoubtedly witty, was nevertheless problematic. By calling his
essay “Real Socialist Realism,” Marioni played down the trauma asso-
ciated with the imposition of socialist realism elsewhere in the Soviet
bloc, in a way that had little bearing in nonaligned Yugoslavia, where
268 Chapter 10
socialist modernism constituted the official line. Marioni’s specula-
tion that “for an artist living in Eastern Europe, where there is practi-
cally no support system at all for contemporary artists, it was a logical
conclusion to come to that Fame is only a matter of being in the right
place at the right time” was also problematic, not least because Yugo-
slavia’s status in “Eastern Europe” was itself questionable.13 Neither
Figure 10.2
Radomir Damnjan, Misinformation, 1973.
Courtesy of Marinko Sudac Collection.

270 Chapter 10
Figure 10.3
Braco Dimitrijević, Casual Passer-by I
Met at 11.09 AM, Paris 1971. Courtesy of
the artist. Collection Musée National d’Art
Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou.
did he acknowledge that contemporary artists in Yugoslavia had a re-

markably good support structure. Experimentation flourished within
the framework of the Students’ Cultural Centers, though critics have
subsequently pointed out that the Centers also effectively confined art-
ists within cultural “reserves,” preventing their ideas from having wider
societal resonance.14
Marioni did not stay long in Budapest. He wrote that it “seemed
very much like I imagine Moscow is like—old, short buildings, high,
odd-looking dump trucks, lots of workers on the street all wearing the
same clothes.” Unable to find a hotel as the city was too full of East
German tourists, he said, he called Attalai (“an artist I knew about”)
before taking the late-night train to Czechoslovakia. Attalai must have
given him a particular take on the scene that evening. Marioni claimed
that “Hungarian artists meet secretly to exhibit and see work, in a kind
of speakeasy, which they call (among themselves) the Young Artists’
Club Gallery.”15 In reality, though, the Fiatal Művészek Klubja (FMK), or
Young Artists’ Club, was both a permitted exhibition space and one that
was thoroughly infiltrated by informers. Tamás Szentjóby recollected
that it “must have been established to fill a need at least on paper: a
country needs to have a place like this too, for young artists, like in
the Soviet Union. It was quite practical for the state to operate such an
establishment under the Young Communist League, for it both helped
to let off steam and secured the easy surveillance of people, where they
were all in one place like in a prison. They installed a bunch of moles
and everybody was checked out. So there were two types, like every-
where else: the watchers and the watched.” By the mid to late 1960s, he
says, it “became a regular spot for circles of friends, lone wolves, and

informers. The heavy lid of state power compressed astonishing friend-
ships in this witch’s cauldron.”16
The works Marioni chose to illustrate his account of the Hungarian
context alluded to state repression, particularly Attalai’s photo-docu-
mentation “In Isolation” (When a Man Cannot Get and Give Information),
in which his eyes, mouth, nose, and fingers were all bandaged (figure
10.4). The other Hungarian piece Marioni discussed was a work from
1974 by László Visy, in which grains of wheat were planted and watered
but failed to sprout as a layer of bitumen had been placed over the flow-
erpot. This, Marioni wrote, related to “the government’s oppression of
the people in a very abstract way.”17 It is clear that the American artist
was particularly interested in pieces that engaged explicitly with issues
around social and political freedom and its absence in socialist coun-
tries. When he traveled to Prague, he had an opportunity to collaborate
on a piece exploring this topic himself. While there, he met Jindřich
Chalupecký and Milan Knížák but also Karel Miler, Jan Mlčoch, and
Petr Štembera.18 He and Štembera made an action together which in-
volved drawing two circles with condensed milk and condensed cocoa
across their bodies so that they were joined (potentially signifying a
union between East and West). They let loose a jarful of “hungry ants”
inside the circles, to see what they would do: “Some of the ants moved
off from the center in the direction of the edges of the circles, smelling
the food and perhaps sensing the possibility of escape; however, they
got stuck there. The other ants remained in the center and began to
bite our bodies” (figure 10.5).19 As in the piece by Visy, here too, “in an
abstract way,” the ants may have stood in for the situation of Czechoslo-
vak citizens or artists, weighing the limited options confronting them:
to try to leave (an almost impossible feat) or to stay and try to retaliate.
The Eastern and Western bodies came together to form a circle: the
same limitations applied in both cases, and escape from the sticky
parameters in place across both was equally impossible.
It is clear from his report that Warsaw was Marioni’s least favor-
ite stop on his whistlestop tour of Eastern Europe. His experience ap-
pears to have been clouded by Attalai’s inaccurate claim that “since the
Hungarians and the Czechoslovakians resisted when the Russians took
272 Chapter 10
Figure 10.4
Gábor Attalai, “In Isolation” (When a Man
Cannot Give and Get Information), 1971.
Courtesy of Vintage Galéria.
over, they now have less freedom than the Poles, who only passively
resisted.”20 The Hungarian artist failed to mention that it had been the
brutally suppressed Poznań protests of June 1956 that paved the way for
a peaceful “Polish October,” when the Soviet Union did not intervene
to prevent the return to power of Gomułka (dismissed in 1948) and ac-
ceptance of non-Soviet institutions: private rather than collective agri-
culture and a legitimate place for the Polish Catholic church. Marioni

had been primed to see Polish experimental art as less interesting (as
it appeared to him less hard-won) than that of its neighbors. He added:
The food is mostly overcooked … the only salad you can get is cabbage. Three
out of five days a week they are out of beer and wine in restaurants (and the
beer is the worst) / Poland is the most disorganized country I visited on this
trip. There is no spirit of competition. A waiter in a restaurant sent us away at
the door saying, “We only have chicken and it’s not very good.” He is paid by
the state whether he works well or not. … It takes days to get permission to
do things. The bureaucracy is so thick that communists from the West have
changed to capitalism after visiting Poland. The Russians are accepted in a
melancholy way. They run the show.21
Figure 10.5 (this and facing page)

Petr Štembera, Connection (with Tom
Marioni), 27 September 1975. Courtesy of
the artist.
274 Chapter 10
His assessment of cultural life in Poland was also negative:
Polish artists have more cultural freedom than the Czechs and Hungarians
because of their relatively passive position towards their oppressors. But
they also have less creative spirit. It’s a hell of a thing to say after only a ten-
day visit to Poland. But it looked to me like most of the art is a repetition of
ideas of other very recent art outside the country, sometimes deliberately and
sometimes without the knowledge of the ground that has already been cov-
ered. There aren’t many artists whose work has a distinctly Polish character.
None of the art seems to have a political content. There’s no real competition.
There are at least half a dozen galleries that show exclusively Conceptual art.
The state wants to look modern, so it allows very modern art, even though it
doesn’t support it.22
He conceded that Galeria Foksal was “a very good gallery which

brings artists from Western Europe and other Eastern European coun-
tries for exhibitions.” While acknowledging Kantor’s significance and
status in Polish artistic circles, Marioni arrived at a conceptual impasse:
“His art is theatre,” and “to me, visual art is either reality (sculpture)
or illusion (painting). Theatre is, truly, something else—a collection of
all the other arts.”23 Marioni’s rejection of theater backed him into a
corner which may have been more revealing of the conceptual limita-
tions of American thinking in the wake of the collapse of the modern-
ist paradigm than of Eastern European attitudes to experimental art,
which tended to make considerations of medium redundant. This is
especially surprising coming from the author of the plausibly Eastern
European theory that the greatest of all art forms was the art of “drink-
ing beer with friends.”24 It seems likely that Marioni’s opinion of Kantor
was clouded by gossip, for he wrote, somewhat derisively: “Every day he
gets a massage and he has a French lesson. These two things are very
important to him, before anything else.”25 The implication seems clear:
that Kantor was a bourgeois, fixated on Paris.
Despite flagging up such symptoms of elitist behavior, elsewhere
Marioni was in favor of elitism, provided it was in some way represen-
tative of its place of origin (i.e., was authentic). His trip convinced him
276 Chapter 10
that attempts by peers in the United States to promote an art “of the
people, by the people and for the people” were a blind alley. After visit-
ing Eastern Europe, where “‘people’s art’ is the official position,” he was
convinced that “not only in Eastern Europe but here as well, the elitist
position is the radical one.”26 His enthusiasm for much of what he en-
countered did not appear to have led Marioni to challenge capitalism
per se. He noted the pernicious effects of the absence of “competition”
in the Polish socialist system, proposing that if a lack of competition
leads to shoddy table service in Polish restaurants, then a surplus of
noncompetitive galleries may lead to shoddy art.
Domestically, the situation was interpreted rather differently:
Borowski notoriously dismissed much of the new Polish art, writing
that “our native pseudo-avant-garde … has, of late, legitimized itself
with the authority of the international pseudo-avant-garde.”27 His di-
visive text of 1975 probably said more about his concern to safeguard
Galeria Foksal’s status as the standard-bearer of an authentic (autono-
mous) avant-garde, challenged by a new generation of artists and gal-
leries, than it did about the new spaces and their approach to art. As
Piotr Piotrowski would go on to argue in his controversial book Dekada,
it was not yet clear whether the “de-ideologizing and, at the same time,
occidentalization of the communist state” had produced positive
changes in the cultural sphere, or whether the result was a “lowering
of standards in the Polish art world.”28 One thing is clear: from the per-
spective of networking the bloc, the proliferation of new spaces in the
semi-independent Polish art world produced new possibilities for ar-
tistic exchange and cooperation, opportunities that Czechoslovak and
Hungarian artists were invited to share with their Polish colleagues.

Part III
Convergences
This final part of the book looks at how artists from around the Soviet
bloc converged within the framework of shared exhibitions and events
in the second half of the 1970s. I open with an examination of two
overlapping networks: those of experimental poetry and of performance.
The focus is on the alternative spaces and students’ centers that
emerged to cater to an expanding international field of young artists and
interested viewers, particularly in Poland, where there was an extensive
network of such spaces across the country. I consider the role the new
spaces played in exhibiting and hosting artists directly, but also in
documenting their activities and distributing information about other
experimental artists’ activities to further networks—among others to
visiting exhibition makers such as Jorge Glusberg, the director of CAyC
in Buenos Aires, who returned home with fresh ideas and new contacts
to put on a series of major festivals of Eastern European experimental
art, news of which flowed back to the artists by way of CAyC’s widely
distributed newsletters.
Moving from exhibitions to international artists’ meetings, I dis-
cuss the politics of these from a range of perspectives, comparing the
experiences of Western artists invited to Soviet bloc events with the ex-
perience of artists from the Soviet bloc participating in international
events in satellite countries and in the West. While in many cases,
international encounters were experienced as positive and enrich-
ing—characterized by elation and a sense of creative openness to new
potentialities—in others they were beset by misunderstandings and
mutual disappointments. Some Yugoslav artists, for instance, objected
to being included within an Eastern European framework that seemed
to them at the time to be more like a “ghetto” than a rubric relating to
their working concerns.
The final chapter traces a series of exchanges along the axes
Prague-Milan, Venice-Moscow, and Moscow-Prague. It opens with an
exploration of the role of the magazine Flash Art in representing East-
ern European artists to a wider Western art world public, in part as a
consequence of the relationship between the magazine’s coeditors—
one Italian, the other Czech. The Venice-Moscow axis explores the con-
troversial Biennale del Dissenso of 1977 in relation to the criticisms this
provoked. I close with an account of the unique Moscow-Prague proj-
ect which saw the prominent Czech critic Jindřich Chalupecký work-
ing alongside the young art historian Milena Slavická on a program to
bring many of the Moscow conceptualists to Prague. In returning to
Chalupecký, we come full circle.
Part III
C o n v e r g e n c e s
280 Part III

11
Alternative Spaces and
Experimental Poets
The 1970s saw a rapid proliferation of alternative spaces for the ex-
change of artistic propositions in Poland. Many of these adopted the
model of the “author’s gallery” or operated under the broader frame-
work of students’ clubs or other centers; still others were run on a pri-
vate basis directly from people’s homes or studios. Just as Kozłowski
and Kostołowski had announced in NET, these spaces were “open and
uncommercial,” “private homes, studios and any other places, where
art propositions are articulated” and “presented to persons interested
in them”; they had “no central point [or] coordination,” and “all points
of the NET are in contact among themselves and exchange concepts,
Chapter
propositions, projects and other forms of articulation.” The new net-
work of spaces made the Polish landscape ideally suited to the net-
worked character of the experimental art of the period.
A chronology of “Art in Poland in the 70s” compiled by Grzegorz
Dziamski and Józef Robakowski at the end of the decade listed the Alternative
new spaces:1 1971 saw the founding of the Biuro Poezji (usually given
in French as the Bureau de la Poésie in international correspondence
(Warsaw) and Galeria Permafo (Wrocław); 1972 saw the birth of Galeria
Remont (Warsaw), Galeria Sztuki Współczesnej (Łódź), Galeria Adres
(Łódź), Galeria Akumulatory 2 (Poznań), and Galeria Dziekanka (War-
saw); 1973, Galeria Repassage (Warsaw); 1974, Pracownia Działań, Doku-
mentacji i Upowszechniania (the Studio of Activities, Documentation
and Propagation) (Warsaw) and Galeria Labirynt (Lublin); 1975, Galeria
Sztuki Najnowszej (Wrocław); 1976, Galeria Mospan (Warsaw); 1977, Gale-
ria Foto-Medium-Art (Wrocław); 1978, Maximal Art Gallery (Poznań) and
Galeria Wymiany (Łódź).2 The ethos of the NET manifesto was shared by
all these spaces, regardless of their operational arrangements.
Three of the earliest hubs for the distribution of information
on experimental art spaces in Poland were designed by artists: Jan
Chwałczyk’s Galeria Sztuki Informacji Kreatywnej (Creative Information
Art Gallery) (Wrocław), Ewa Partum’s Galeria Adres (Łódź), and Andrzej
Partum’s Biuro Poezji (Bureau of Poetry) (Warsaw). That each of these
was in a different city was characteristic of the Polish artistic scene’s
decentralization; there were multiple points of experimental exchange
across the country. Chwałczyk’s “gallery” was in fact nothing more than
a bulletin board at the club of his local branch of the Polish Union of
Artists (Związek Polskich Artystów Plastyków or ZPAP), headed with a
white sign stating “Creative Information Art Gallery.” To this he affixed
all manner of “creative information” received in the mail, along with the
envelopes in which he had received the materials, with a view to sharing
his contacts with colleagues. Chwałczyk explained: “it was precisely due
to its visibility, its ‘official’ conspicuousness, that the submitted docu-
mentation was never … confiscated by the authorities.”3 Ewa Partum’s
Galeria Adres also took “cover” in a 4.5 m2 storage room under the stairs
leading to the basement of the Łódź branch of the ZPAP club. She an-
nounced the founding of the gallery on 150 postcards sent out by mail
and invited people to send in projects for exhibition, explaining: “The
Galeria Adres exists as a place, a situation, an occasion, an offer of in-
formation, propositions, documentations, speculations, provocations,
exhibitions of every form of art’s presence and motives of its nondis-
closure”; and all kinds of things began to arrive: “letters, projects, pho-
tographs, documentation, books.”4 Among the artists to respond to her
call were Dick Higgins, who sent her a great number of Something Else
Press publications, and Endre Tót, who showed at Galeria Adres in 1972
and again in 1973. Partum hosted a range of lectures and performances
in the space, in addition to exhibiting the works received in the mail.5 By
the end of 1973, however, she recalls that the ZPAP “stopped tolerating
me. It annoyed them that I was showing works which were not paintings
or sculptures.” After that, she ran the space from her apartment. Both
Chwałczyk and Partum had taken advantage of the official structure of
284 Chapter 11
the ZPAP and carved out a tiny independent niche from within it, dem-
onstrating the interesting slippage between spheres in Polish artistic
life. Andrzej Partum, however, was not a member of the ZPAP, and thus
functioned entirely outside the existing structures.
The Biuro Poezji was located in Andrzej Partum’s bedsitter at
Poznańska 38, in the attic of the Hotel Polonia building. The space be-
came a key hub for experimental art of all kinds over the course of the
1970s, particularly for alternative poetry and mail art. Partum’s drab
walls were covered with mailed poems and artistic propositions from
all over the world. He was a poet and a musician; he had no higher
education or artistic or musical training but had been adopted by the
Warsaw artistic community as an orphaned teenager, reportedly stor-
ing his possessions in a grand piano at the Academy of Music after
sleeping there overnight, and living from handouts and odd jobs. His
situation had thus improved beyond measure when he was allocated
the room on Poznańska, and he lost no time in putting it at the service
of the community that had supported him. More so perhaps than the
previously mentioned initiatives, the Biuro Poezji had pretentions to
professionalism. Like those of NET, Partum’s communications to some
extent mimicked a bureaucratic tone: in a manifesto statement, he gave
information about the Bureau’s efficient mode of operation, offering
a commitment to register “creative facts formed 48 hours after having
reported them to the Bureau of Poetry,” and explained that among the
services offered “If requested by the author it can pronounce its opin-
ion on a conception.”6 He characterized the Bureau as an anonymous
arbiter, writing that “the membership of the Scientific Council of the
Bureau of Poetry is secret.” One of its aims was to “unmask” what he
refers to as “favoring” and to do so in a disinterested manner: “The
Bureau of Poetry is uninvolved in politics, blameworthy and inconve-
nient for common Masters of Art … such as a literary man, an artist, etc.”
Rather, he explained, it was designed to be a “criticosystem, self-regu-
lating abstract conditions in favor of the always-future-information i.e.
of a not thoroughly verified manner of existence, about which the criti-
cism of mind proves itself by means of cognition.”7 This all made things
sound very official and had a certain pomposity to it, but the day-to-day
Alternative Spaces and Experimental Poets 285

management of the place was more free-flowing than the manifesto
implied. Partum reportedly began his day late, rising at around midday
and making his way to the Central Post Office, whence he would return
laden with all manner of packages and letters, both domestic and inter-
national, which he proceeded to open. As neither a qualified artist nor
member of the Union, he lived precariously.
Partum sent out provocative messages to the entire network. He
was soon in contact with Jiři H. Kocman, who wrote to him thanking
him for a text he had received and sending him an artist’s book of his
own in return (figures 11.1, 11.2). Dick Higgins responded to a postcard
he had received reading “You are ignorant of culture and art” with a
humble reply: “This is correct. I am merely another lover of such things.”
Among the respondents to Partum’s 1975 text on the “Incomprehension
of Art” was Walter Zanini, the director of the Museu de Arte Contem-
porânea at the University of São Paulo, who acknowledged the receipt
of the text and noted that it “gives an artist a chance of new response,”
adding “Keep in touch with us!”8
Figure 11.1
Jiři H. Kocman, note to Andrzej Partum, 2
October 1974. Courtesy of the artist.
286 Chapter 11
Figure 11.2
Jiři H. Kocman, My Activity 1965–73, 1973.
Courtesy of the artist and Marinko Sudac
Collection.
Many international visitors passed through the Biuro Poezji over

the years, including Daniel Buren (figure 11.3) and, perhaps most sig-
nificantly, Jorge Glusberg. A successful industrialist and founder in 1971
of the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAyC) in Buenos Aires (figure
11.4), Glusberg’s initial contacts with Poland would doubtless have
been through AICA, of which he was an active member.9 Glusberg spent

288 Chapter 11
Figure 11.3
From left: Michel Claura, Daniel Buren,
Anka Ptaszkowska, Andrzej Partum, Zofia
Kulik, 1974. Photo: Przemysław Kwiek.
Courtesy of KwieKulik.
Figure 11.4
From left: Andrzej Partum, Zofia Kulik,
Jorge Glusberg, 1973. Photo Przemysław
Kwiek. Courtesy of KwieKulik.
a week in Poland in April 1973 and then went on to Czechoslovakia for

a further week. In Warsaw, he met the artist duo KwieKulik (Zofia Ku-
lik and Przemysław Kwiek), whose apartment, like Partum’s, was a key
meeting place for alternative art and its documentation from the 1970s
onward. In a letter to Gerard Kwiatkowski about his visit, Zofia Kulik
wrote that Glusberg had
wanted to find his bearings in the movement and to finalize a list of artists for
his exhibition-festival (the first of its kind) of Polish art in Argentina. Of course
the artists proposed to him by the MKiS [Ministry of Culture and Art] did not
suit him, and he took it on himself to orient himself, and as you will see from
the list which (I think) reached you, he did not do a bad job, he reached every-
where. He visited Partum, who arranged a little exhibition of his materials at
the Poetry Bureau. Partum also called us and put us in touch with him, at a
meeting at this little exhibition. The day before he had been snapped up by
Bogucki and the Foksal people and they organized a meeting for him at the
Bogucki’s, which we also attended. Seeing what was going on—that everyone
was just informing him about themselves, badmouthing others and prevent-
ing them (us) from gaining access to him, we were worried lest he should re-
ceive one-sided information about the “movement” and the real values of our
art, and we decided on an uncompromising hit.10
Kulik’s account captures the degree to which some artists felt that
there was everything to play for and nothing to be lost in such encoun-
ters. The competitive tone of her account of the situation also speaks

volumes about the divisions in the Polish artistic community that had
arisen over the course of the 1970s.11
CAyC’s distinctive newsletter, with its trademark missing corner, of-
ten on yellow paper, reached artists across the Soviet bloc, on a weekly
basis in some cases. The publication carried information concerning the
many exhibitions and festivals of experimental art organized at CAyC as
well as publishing critical texts and artists’ statements devoted to inter-
national developments. CAyC publications were distributed around the
world, including (free of charge) to many artists across Eastern Europe,
and served as a major source of information about artistic developments
and debates of exactly the sort that interested experimental artists in
the satellite countries. As Perneczky commented: “Glusberg could af-
ford to mail complimentary copies of his publications and addresses
all over the world, not necessarily a paying investment.” By comparison,
when Perneczky had a go at publishing his own East-West conceptual
magazine, Important Business, he attracted only one paying subscriber.
A majority of artists’ publications came out in just one or two issues be-
fore folding. Perneczky argues, “the problems were the same all over the
world—many publications were not able to find an adequate number of
readers—they were caught between two moments [as] the material they
offered could no more be considered part of the traditionally conceived
visual arts; and at the same time, they were not yet able to provide what
is known as the popular form of alternative art today.”12
Using the contacts he had gathered in the region, Glusberg put on a
series of events over the course of 1973–1974 devoted to Czechoslovakia,
Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia (figure 11.5). Catalogs were produced
and distributed to participating artists in the form of cardboard folders
containing loose sheets devoted to each artist and standardized accord-
ing to the CAyC model. In a letter to Zofia Kulik inviting her to partici-
pate in the Poland 1973 exhibition, and offering to cover any shipment
expenses, Glusberg explained: “This show will try to include all those
artists who are working in that country’s avant-garde, in what we call Art
Systems, that is, going from the Art of Action up to Conceptual Art.” He
said that the exhibition would open in the CAyC showrooms and then
would be “exhibited, as a traveller exhibition, throughout important
290 Chapter 11
Argentine and Latin American museums.”13 The catalog would eventu-
ally include 44 Polish artists, among them Zofia Kulik, Andrzej Partum,
and Ewa Partum.
In Czechoslovakia, Glusberg asked for the support of Jindřich Cha-
lupecký in distributing the invitation to participate to artists, providing
a list of those who interested him. Glusberg and his Czechoslovak col-
league met through the AICA network, perhaps through Restany: they
were all prominent members of the organization. The exhibition in-
cluded 24 artists, among then Stano Filko, Milan Knížák, Jiří H. Koc-
man, Jozef Kroutvor, Karel Malich, Alex Mlynárčik, Zorka Ságlová, Petr
Štembera, and Jiří Valoch. Štembera and a number of other Czech art-
ists had already been included in CAyC’s important exhibition, “Arte de
sistemas” in 1971. Kocman wrote to Perneczky saying: “I have already
been in contact with CAyC … for a long time. It is organized by Jorge
Glusberg … who is a very good man! I have also participated in a few
of his exhibitions.”14 Endre Tót was also among those to keep up a cor-
respondence with Glusberg over the years (figure 11.6)
CAyC’s Hungarian catalog opened with a statement by László Beke
(for Beke had been the one to select and to collate the materials for the
exhibition at the Budapest end) that tried to find a way to open up the
field of experimental art in Hungary to an uninitiated Argentine audi-
ence. He wrote: “Art is supposed to be international. But it is a question,
whether we can place ourselves into each other’s way of thinking, even
if we know the vocabulary and grammatical rules of such a common
language.” Expressing certain misgivings about the possibility of art
being able to “do something for the future of mankind at all,” he of-
fered the following point of reference to the Buenos Aires public as a
starting point for a possible conversation:
Let them start from the fact that an Argentine artist, Luis Fernando Benedit,
at the 1970 Venetian Biennale exhibited an experimental beehive of which the
bees could have flown out but they couldn’t, because the smell of the artificial
nutrivited [sic] material enticed them back. On the other hand, a year later a
Hungarian artist, Haraszty István, made a cage in which every motion of a
parrot was controlled by a counter-device. At certain movements of the bird,

Figure 11.5 (above)
Newsletter announcing the exhibition
“Festival de la vanguardia húngara”
(CAyC, Buenos Aires, 1973). Courtesy
of Artpool Art Research Centre.

Endre Tót, audiovisual letter to Jorge
Glusberg, stamped “30 Nov. 1973”
by Pierre Restany. Courtesy of Endre
Tót and INHA-Collection Archives de la
critique d’art.
292 Chapter 11
the door of the cage was opened, but it was closed immediately when the bird
tried to fly out. / I think similar analogies between Argentine and Hungarian
works could be drawn, not only in the field of experimental biokinetic art, but
in the other trends as well. So perhaps communication is not totally impos-
sible after all.15
The catalog included works by the most significant artists on the Hun-
garian unofficial scene at the time, and, as had been the case at the Fok-
sal Gallery two years earlier, the selection included many propositions
with a political twist.
In the spring of 1974, Beke and Maurer collaborated to curate an
international exhibition under the title “Kép/vers. Visual/Poem” at the
Fiatal Művészek Klubja (Young Artists’ Club), where Beke had begun
to work on a volunteer basis in 1973 on the exhibitions program.16 The
space had become an important exhibition and meeting space for ex-
perimental artists in Budapest after the closure of the Chapel Studio.
Klaniczay explains that “artists could apply to do personal shows, and if
someone had an idea for a program … you could discuss it so there was
not an official application.”17 There was a room in the club for perfor-
mances, lectures, or screenings, as well as two exhibition spaces. The
FMK’s capacity was substantial, with openings attracting hundreds of
guests. Only members of the club were permitted, but they could each
bring a guest. Women did not need to have a membership card but
could not bring guests.18 Szentjóby notes that every guest’s data was
“recorded in a book by the Young Communist on duty at a little desk by
the entrance which also had a dirty black phone with a direct line to
the police.”19 There were a range of other university clubs at the time
running their own events programs, but the FMK was the only one that
“had a restaurant and a bar,” which, people recall, was probably what ef-
fectively made it “the only club.”20 Szentjóby describes it as having been
no more than a “tragic snack bar of wine-beer-brandy and bread and
lard” to begin with, later replaced by a “bean-soup-tripe kind of restau-
rant with a small, awkward bar.”21
Under Beke’s watch there were also solo shows of Western figures
such as Ken Friedman (1975) and Robert Filliou (1976). Maurer recalls
294 Chapter 11
that Beke “invited many significant artists of international reputation
for exhibitions, actions, and lectures/performances … and he made
possible the organization of occasional events and screenings of Hun-
garian artists in the central site.”22 Having remained in contact with
Beke since he first added him to the NET appendix, Kozłowski was in-
vited in 1975 by his Hungarian colleague to have an exhibition at the
FMK.23 Kozłowski’s recollections suggest that the material situation of
the club in Budapest was significantly worse than that of Akumulatory
2 in Poznań, despite its being a much larger venue. He recounts that
the walls at the club were dirty and that it was impossible to buy white
paint to produce a clean surface for his conceptual work. He tried to
clean up the holes with toothpaste, with the result that the exhibition
wound up smelling like a dental surgery. He recollects that many peo-
ple came to the opening, though, and that there was an atmosphere
of “healthy curiosity.” The work he showed was Lesson, and concerned
“the translatability of various languages—visual and non-visual.” It
explored the aesthetics and structure of an English-language primer
through photography, drawing, and text, pitting the different modes of
communication against one another in a thoroughly analytical man-
ner that simultaneously exposed the myriad cultural dimensions of any
transmission of basic information for educational purposes, thus un-
dermining these structures through a collision of registers (figure 11.7).24
In their introductory text to “Kép/vers. Visual/Poem,” Beke and
Maurer defined experimental poetry as “the point of reference of basic
human communications systems,” providing a diagram of the interre-
lationships between painting, poetry, music, image writing, voice and
speech. The exhibition included both Hungarian and international in-
stances of the poetic in the visual and the visual in the poetic, along
with audio recordings and “historical antecedents,” which they traced,
by way of a slide show, back to antiquity, via Apollinaire and Moholy-
Nagy. The diversity of experimental poetry was foregrounded and a long
list of the “more common” trends offered: specific poetry, visual poetry,
specialism, objective poetry, readership, phonetic poetry, sectarian po-
etry, permutational poetry, cybernetic poetry, action verses, do-it-your-
self poetry, anonymous poetry. “Last but not least,” they stressed that

there were a number of “experiments that are very early in the socialist
world and are of considerable international significance,” singling out
Andrei Voznesensky from the Soviet Union, Jiří Kolář, Ladislav Novák,
and Jiří Valoch from Czechoslovakia, Miroljub Todorović’s signalism
from Yugoslavia, and Carlfriedrich Klaus from the GDR. The exhibition
demonstrated the sheer wealth and diversity of experimental poetry in
the socialist world.
Contacts with East Germans in the experimental field were rela-
tively limited in the 1970s: Robert Rehfeldt and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt,
296 Chapter 11
Jarosław Kozłowski, The Lesson, 1975.
Carlfriedrich Klaus, and Jürgen Schweinebraden were the main figures

participating in the alternative cultural life of neighboring Soviet sat-
ellite countries: the experimental poetry and mail art circles provided
the main basis for many of these exchanges. Carlfriedrich Klaus exhib-
ited at Akumulatory 2 in May 1974, attending in person and bringing
with him rolled-up, blown-up photographic prints of his works, while
his gallerist, Klaus Werner from Galerie Arkade, smuggled the origi-
nals in his suitcase.25 In some cases, Beke served as the link figure: he
was familiar with the work of East German colleagues from the Soviet

bloc biennial circuit, as he served a number of times as a jury member
for the Graphic Art Biennial in Kraków and the Biennial of Drawing
in Wrocław. Schweinebraden regularly visited Hungary to attend music
festivals, as his wife was a classical guitarist. As of 1974, he also ran
Galerie EP, a unique private gallery, out of his apartment in Prenzlauer
Berg, which extended into two neighboring apartments that he squat-
ted in the same building.26
A high point in these exchanges was to be Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and
Robert Rehfeldt’s joint exhibition at the prestigious Galeria Studio, di-
rected by Józef Szajna in the Palace of Culture in Warsaw, in 1975.27 That
major exhibitions of female artists remained rare at the time was made
all too clear by a misprint on the invitation as wystawa Rutha Wolfa, de-
clining the artist’s name as though it were a masculine rather than a
feminine proper noun, so that uninformed visitors must have imag-
ined that they were being invited to an “exhibition of works and docu-
ments from the creative activity” of two men.28 The opening included
film screenings and presentations of art publications as well as a meet-
ing with the artists themselves. A key attraction was an installation by
Wolf-Rehfeldt with a typewriter (figure 11.8). The public was invited to
use it to make their own pieces. In an artist’s statement concerning
her 1970s linguistic-visual texts, called “Signs Fiction,” Wolf-Rehfeldt
explained that she had used various existing signs to make her own
fictional signs. Her “Type your own art” proposition was a “special invi-
tation to people wanting to express themselves in an artistic mode for
the purpose of becoming, living and altering facts more consciously.”29
In addition to the invitation to collaborate and to peruse a selection of
books, there was an interactive wall for the public to co-create using
available “paper, newspapers, glue, paint, brushes, etc.”30
Robert Rehfeldt’s graphic pieces were installed in a manner resem-
bling a theatrical set: the exhibition contained a subsection on mail art
with more than 50 participating artists (among them Beke, Groh, Koc-
man, and Szombathy and “all the participants in the Ostenica Plener”)
(figure 11.9). A corner of Rehfeldt’s installation was given over to a col-
laboration with the Argentine artist Horacio Zabala, whose well-known
slogans concerning mail art as the only alternative to “jail art” were
298 Chapter 11
Figure 11.8
Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, Type Your Own Art,
1975. Installation view of exhibition at
Galeria Studio, Warsaw, 1975. Photo: Jerzy
Mańkowski. Courtesy of Galeria Studio
Archives, Warsaw.

incorporated by the East German artist into an installation of packing
tubes (figure 11.10).
Rehfeldt attributed the citation “Everyone is an artist” to V. I. Lenin,
explaining that this was “a postulate concerning the society of the fu-
ture, which lives in the conditions of the socialist system” and meant
that the task of every artist was to develop a creative attitude among
other people, the better that they should be able to avoid the temp-
tations of consumerism. In another variation on this theme, Rehfeldt
announced: “ART IN CONTACT IT’S LIFE IN ART! OUTSIDE THE OFFI-
CIAL CIRCUITS AND FOR A DIFFERENT VISION OF THE DIMENSION
OF REALITY,” opposing consumption and competition and instead
advocating that “creative contact replaces the severe idea of competi-
tion among artists by a friendly one, possible because of the commu-
nity of their interests, aims and ideas.” He explained that “creative
contact is getting in touch producers of art with other producers and
with consumers of art, as well nationally as internationally.”31 The vi-
sion Rehfeldt was propagating with his “Art in Contact” was a leftist
and collective one: “creative contact gives way to joint art actions, no
matter which styles or methods are involved. It tends to abolish the
exclusive forms of an art d’élite, and can be the basis of a big collec-
tive of artworkers for the realisation of human aims and ideals.”32 The
tone of Rehfeldt’s text, then, was antibourgeois, and, in theory at least,
in line with official Party policy. The couple were committed socialists,
who chose freely to remain in the GDR when many others emigrated. If
Rehfeldt’s activities were accommodated within the cultural framework
of the GDR, though, this was also because he knew how to play by the
rules: his primary experimental medium was the kleingrafik, a medium

Robert Rehfeldt, Environment, 1975.
Installation views of exhibition at
Galeria Studio, Warsaw, 1975. Photos:
Jerzy Mańkowski. Courtesy of Galeria
Studio Archives, Warsaw.
300 Chapter 11
artists were authorized to print in an edition of no more than 99 copies,
provided they had the right official approvals.33
The day after the opening at Galeria Studio the Rehfeldts visited
KwieKulik, along with Schweinebraden, Martin Hoffman, Ewa Par-
tum, and others (figures 11.11, 11.12). KwieKulik prepared one of their
trademark color slide presentations for the occasion, showing visitors
documentation of their own work and that of their colleagues. The War-
saw artists remained in contact with the couple in subsequent years
and exchanged letters and postcards. The Rehfeldts’ postcards were
typically jampacked with galvanizing slogans of solidarity. The front of
one, from 1975, featured Rehfeldt in Lennon glasses and white T-shirt
superimposed with his CONTART motto—a signature compound of
CONTACT and ART that was taken up around the world and resonated
in many forms throughout the mail art network but could always be
traced back to Rehfeldt, who was one of the most extensively connected
and committed mail artists of his day. Other messages emblazoned on
the card included “Everyone is artist, say Mr. Lenin” and another of his
staple exhortations: “Make a creative world.” On the back, he wrote to
Kulik and Kwiek in a mixture of Polish and English saying “life is art!”
(figure 11.13).
Figure 11.11
Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt (right) at the opening
of the exhibition at Galeria Studio, Warsaw,
1975. Photo: Jerzy Mańkowski. Courtesy of
Galeria Studio Archives, Warsaw.
Figure 11.12
Robert Rehfeldt (left) and Ruth
Wolf-Rehfeldt (center, with back to the
camera) visiting the Studio of Activities,
Documentation and Propagation in
Warsaw, 1975. Courtesy of KwieKulik.
302 Chapter 11
304 Chapter 11
Robert and Ruth Rehfeldt, postcard to
KwieKulik, 1975. Courtesy of KwieKulik.
The belief that “life is art” was one shared by all the most active
participants in the network in this period, Štembera and Valoch among
them. Though Štembera and Valoch lived in different cities and made
very different art, they regularly informed one another of international
calls and other networking opportunities. Over the course of the 1970s,
both were involved in a great many projects and exhibitions in the
many new alternative spaces in Poland. After Štembera’s exhibition “in
absentia” at Akumulatory 2 in 1972, for instance, Valoch was also in-
vited, in 1974. Kozłowski wrote: “You are warmly invited to organize
an exhibition of your works, projects, poems, concepts and so on.” He
explained that the aim of the gallery was to “present new tendencies

in art” and that “exhibitions are accompanied by published flyers and
posters. The gallery is relatively large (c. 50m2). All exhibitions last a
week. Please let me know what you think about this proposal. If you
agree, send me your proposal for a flyer. It can be a word, a short text, a
drawing or a photo.”34 The 25 March 1974 Valoch exhibition at Akumu-
latory 2 consisted of a series of typed one-line poems with the general
title Sculptures VI. Kozłowski recollects: “Valoch came and he brought
the works. They were cards with which we papered the walls of the gal-
lery, they were conceptual notations.”35 The works were all in A4 format
and were attached to the walls with pins. Valoch also made thirty-sec-
ond blind drawings, stating: “during the thirty seconds spent making
this drawing I thought only of Jarosław Kozłowski.” As part of the exhi-
bition, he gave a lecture entitled “Marginal Observations” which was
subsequently reprinted in the journal Sztuka (no. 5, 1974).36
Valoch and Kocman also showed with Grzegorz Dziamski at the
Maximal Art Gallery in Poznań in April 1976. The exhibition, entitled
“Current Tendencies in Czechoslovak Art,” consisted of work from the
collection of Andrzej Partum, who arrived with the exhibition in a
folder, all ready to go. Dziamski recalled that he had no contact with the
artists himself and that Partum had their permission to do the show
“because at that time it mattered to artists that someone should see it,
that it be shown anywhere at all.”37 Still more significantly, and presum-
ably in part as a result of the major interest in the show of his work put
on by Partum, later that year Valoch was invited by Józef Robakowski to
be part of the commissioning team for “Oferta 76” at Galeria Labirynt
in Lublin, run by Andrzej Mroczek. Valoch was put in charge of the mail
art section and invited around 100 artists from around the world. Roba-
kowski noted that this had been “the first EXHIBITION—COLLECTION
of this sort of artistic activity designed on such a large scale to be pub-
licly shown in a socialist country.”38 As Mroczek recounts: “The artists
whom Valoch invited sent their works here. Each of them was allowed
to send an A4 page in a small package. Of course Valoch came here
and personally presented his part of this. That was when I met him in
person. Everything was sent to the address of Galeria Labirynt. Every
day some large or small envelopes would arrive. Valoch organized this,
306 Chapter 11
sorted it out, made a big beautiful exhibition of it.”39 He then officially
asked that the works be donated to the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź.40
Interest in experimental poetry continued to intensify in Poland
over the course of 1976–1977. A Visual Poetry Seminar and an exhibition
of work opened on 13 April 1976 at Galeria Sztuki Najnowszej (Gallery
of the Most Recent Art) affiliated with the Socialist Union of Students
and the Akademickie Centrum Kulturalne “Pałacyk,” in Wrocław.41
International participants included Kocman, Todorović, Tót, and the
Laboratorio de Comunicaćâo Experimental em Arte de Idéia e do Ideal.
The following year, the gallery hosted an International Day of Visual
Text Congress (4 February 1977), whose international guests were listed
first and foremost in the announcement, showing the interest they
commanded. They included visitors from Czechoslovakia (Jiří Valoch,
Gerta Pospíšilová, Jiří H. Kocman, and Jan Wojnar), from Hungary
(Endre Tót and Gábor Tóth), and from the GDR (Robert Rehfeldt). The
packed program of events opened with film screenings by Tót and Tóth,
followed by a “theoretical confrontation” with Jiří Valoch and Gerta
Pospíšilová, and an “active reaction” by the Film Form Studio (an exper-
imental group operating under the aegis of the science club at the Łódź
film school), after which there were to be two hours of “active time,”
three manifestations by Jerzy Bereś, and a final hour of discussion, at 9
pm. The International Day of Visual Text was bursting with performa-
tive elements and the boundaries between poetry and action were very
fluid, as was the flow of participants between these and other interna-
tional experimental circuits.

12
The Students’
Club Circuit
In 1974, the Czech performance trio Štembera, Miler, and Mlčoch were
invited by László Beke to exhibit at the FMK in Budapest. This would
be the first in a series of international exhibitions for which they trav-
eled and performed together. Mlčoch arrived in town by train from
Prague to Budapest with earthworms strapped to his chest under a ban-
dage (figure 12.1). He had placed a layer of earth in the bandage next
to his body—smuggling live cargo across the border without being ap-
prehended by police. He unwrapped them upon arrival in the gallery.
Despite being fed water by way of a syringe throughout the trip, the
earthworms did not survive their ordeal.1 When Marioni later explained
to Mlčoch in Prague how he had heard the story of the worms from At-
talai, the Czech artist had “laughed, and said that the Hungarians are
very politically oriented, and they would see the work as being full of
intrigue and mystery. As far as he was concerned, the work was about
his relationship with the worms.”2 Rivaling his colleague’s deadpan at-
titude to his art, Miler arrived in Budapest with a bag full of stones,
which he swallowed. The stones he exhibited at FMK a few days later
were these same stones, having passed through his digestive system.3
Štembera performed a version of his piece Narcissus No 1.4
Szentjóby remembers the event and says that “he ate or burned sac-
rificed fragments of his own body—nails, hair, ear wax, urine etc. It
was a significant act, almost like an initiation. … We were just stand-
ing there, watching the whole operation with enormous empathy and
tacit agreement—we felt one with the flow of history.”5 The first incar-
nation of this black-magic-like ritual, performed the previous year, had
Chapter 12
Figure 12.1
Jan Mlčoch, Zig-Zag-Wiggle-Waggle,
Prague-Budapest, 27–28 February 1975.
The Students’ Club Circuit
been described as follows: “After looking at my portrait (photograph)

on an improvised ‘altar’ lit by candles, my assistant took some blood
from my vein with a syringe. This I mixed with my urine, hair and nails
which I had cut off. I then drank this potion, again my eyes fixed on
the ‘altar.’”6 Such pieces signaled a deepening of his interest in perfor-
mance and the body, initially explored through prosaic works such as
the Daily Activities. Štembera outlined his relationship to the use of his
body in an interview with Helena Kontova. He explained that he had
given up painting only a year after having taken it up, in April 1968: “In
May I went to Paris, and there I realized that painting no longer had any
meaning for me.” While in Paris, he spent ten days without food as he
310 Chapter 12
had no money. This proved to be a formative experience, making him
aware of his existence in a way he had not previously considered.7 “I
became aware of my body, and actually that the body is more important
than what I do. The reason why the body can become material for some
activities is because it is capable of taking some stimulus (for example,
pain) from outside and because it is capable of expressing internal ex-
periences.”8 He began working outdoors:
In the landscape, one is aware of one’s body—and it’s more important for him
than what he makes. I read that in an interview with Oppenheim, who began
working with his body for the same reasons as I did. The purpose of using your
own body for self-torment is to show people that there exists another approach
to things besides the rational one. Intellectuals feel their body as something
inferior. For me, my body is a medium through which I may come to know the
world. … My self-torment is an expression of the fact that our relationship to
the world is painful. No relationship is free. The artist must have the courage
to present his obsessions, his anxiety to an audience sensitive enough to be
aware that they are their obsessions as well and to come to terms with them.9
When asked in an interview “Do you mean to say that your art can serve
as a kind of psychiatric cure for fear?” he replied: “Yes, of course.”10
Taking his performances to the edge was a feature that would develop
in his practice after 1975, when he and his friends were regular visitors
in Poland.
The proliferation of student-run spaces in Poland produced oppor-
tunities to tour from one place to another. Valoch, for instance, recol-
lects: “From time to time we go on a sort of tour by car with friends,
which might end up in Warsaw, for example.”11 Czech performance art-
ists became regular participants in the Polish alternative scene, both
showing documentation and visiting to perform at different venues and
events in person, creating a stir in artistic circles with presentations un-
like anything Polish artists were doing at that time. A November 1974
show of performance documentation by Štembera at Anna-Maria Po-
tocka and Józef Chrobak’s Galeria PI in Kraków (a “private” gallery, es-
tablished in their apartment) led to further invitations. In October 1975,
The Students’ Club Circuit 311

Mlčoch visited and carried out a piece he called Fiery Door. He sprinkled
a flammable substance onto an iron sheet positioned in front of the
door of the apartment and set fire to it. He then asked an assistant to
nail the door shut and had himself blindfolded before walking toward
the door, stepping onto the burning metal sheet, finding the nail and
pulling it out of the door, and walking out of the room.12 Potocka recol-
lects that in addition to Mlčoch burning himself terribly by walking on
the hot metal, the door to the apartment caught fire and the fire bri-
gade had to be called following panic among participants and smoke so
thick nobody could see anything.13 Earlier that day, Mlčoch had set up a
stall in the street and sold items that reminded him of his friends (the
photograph shows him selling canvas shoes and jewelry) (figure 12.2).
While this event pointed to asceticism insofar as it involved trying to
let go of any emotional connections to objects (an endeavor with obvi-
ous implications for the ongoing shift of emphasis in artistic activities
more widely at the time), the performance in the apartment alluded to
the Buddhist practice of firewalking, an important test of mind control
and self-sacrifice.
In 1976, the Czech trio had a group show at Galeria Remont—part
of the Riviera Club of the Warsaw Polytechnic branch of the Socialist
Union of Polish Students (SZSP), whose exhibitions program was run
by Henryk Gajewski.14 They carried out performances in situ. Mlčoch’s
was entitled Emigrant’s Suitcase—Across the Sea and alluded to the fact
that the Baltic coast in Poland was a key route for defectors from the
Soviet bloc at the time. His proposal suggested that he was keeping
his options open: “I brought a suitcase to Warsaw which was installed
in the exhibition, including its contents. Among other things, it con-
tained: a suit, jacket, trousers, shoes, a mirror, shaving equipment,
comb, scissors, hair dye and a small amount of Polish money. / After
Figure 12.2
Jan Mlčoch, Remembering P., Kraków,
7 October 1975. Courtesy of the artist.
312 Chapter 12
the exhibition the items were placed back in the suitcase which was
sent to the left luggage office at the port of Gdańsk. It was kept there for
an indefinite period.”15
A slim catalog of the Remont exhibition was produced, opening
with a photograph of Miler with the caption “Being smelt by fresh grass”
and accompanied by a statement “My photographs are no documents”
(figure 12.3). The caption explained that it is not the artist who is the
agent of the action but nature. Aligning his body with the curves of
the earth, Miler adopted a position of humility. The catalog included
textual descriptions with photographs by Vladimír Ambros of two ac-
tions carried out by Mlčoch in Prague, Hanging—the Big Sleep (1974) and
Tarzan (1976), and a photograph of Štembera’s performance Extinction,
in which he set fire to a piece of string tied to his arm and extinguished
the flame with his own blood. Four short philosophical citations con-
cerned with the body as an essential mediator with the world provided
a theoretical context for the work.
While in Warsaw, the trio visited KwieKulik, whose apartment was
home to an important unofficial institution they called the Studio of
Activities, Documentation and Propagation (Pracownia Działań, Do-
kumentacji, i Upowszechnienia or PDDiU). The studio was a unique
space of unofficial sociability, and the couple played host to many of
the international visitors passing through Warsaw (figure 12.4). Such
meetings were rare opportunities for artists who had hitherto only
met sharing the pages of international publications to exchange ar-
tistic thoughts and propositions around the kitchen table. KwieKulik
were well known for their exceptional collection of documentation of
experimental activities and would put on color slide projections for
visitors, taking them through recent developments on the Polish art
scene.16 Jiří Kovanda and two friends visited them in August 1976 and
again in October that year (figure 12.5).17 The two sets of visitors from
Prague—the performance trio and Kovanda and his friends—had never
met and were unaware of one another’s activities, so KwieKulik passed
Štembera’s phone number to Kovanda who made contact on his return
to Prague. Štembera later wrote to his Polish colleagues from Prague,
saying: “It’s really peculiar and extraordinary that people from one city
314 Chapter 12
Figure 12.3
Karel Miler, Felt by Fresh Grass, 1976.
(Prague) must be making acquaintance through abroad, but symptom-

atic for our situation to make only for a circle of 20–30 friends.”18 His
comment highlights the extent to which Czechoslovak unofficial art-
ists remained domestically isolated, despite the range of international
contacts they had established.
KwieKulik also put Kovanda in touch with their friend Tomasz
Sikorski, who had recently opened Galeria Mospan (like Remont, this
too was under the auspices of the Warsaw Polytechnic), and Sikorski
gave Kovanda and Pavel Tuč (the photographer he worked with) their
first exhibition (22–27 November 1976). He later published an interest-
ing review in which he discussed the relationship between action and

316 Chapter 12
Figure 12.4
Clockwise from left: Jan Mlčoch, unknown,
Paweł Kwiek, Marek Konieczny, Karel Miler,
Petr Štembera, and Andrzej Partum at
the Studio of Activities, Documentation and
Propagation (PDDiU), Warsaw, 1976.
Photo: Zofia Kulik. Courtesy of KwieKulik.
Figure 12.5
Andrzej Partum, Jiří Kovanda, unknown,
Ivan Vacík, Paweł Kwiek, Maksymilian
Dobromierz Kwiek, and Przemysław Kwiek
at the Studio of Activities, Documentation
and Propagation (PDDiU), Warsaw, 1976.
Photo: Zofia Kulik. Courtesy of KwieKulik.
documentation in their case (figure 12.6).19 Sikorski explained that the

Czech artists were interested in addressing “questions relating to the
analysis of photographic registration,” as well as “taking advantage of
the photographic technique solely as a means of registration and com-
munication.”20 His review included a series of illustrations, including
a diagram detailing the relationship between the “idea” and “art,” rep-
resented in the form of two boxes linked by an arrow labeled “creative
process.” The piece was a script for Kovanda’s Waiting for a Telephone
Call, reading “idea: today someone will call me / creative process: I wait
for the phone call / art: x (illegible) calls me,” with the date and time of
the action. The review included three photographs of Kovanda sitting
at a desk with a telephone.
KwieKulik were committed to documenting the experimental art
of their times and to sharing their documentation with as wide a circle
of people as possible, in line with one of the core missions of their stu-
dio as a space for “propagation.” Visitors to the studio included Goran
Trbuljak (1974), editor of Flash Art Giancarlo Politi, who subsequently
asked KwieKulik for Polish contacts for Art Diary (1975), Ulises Carrión
(1977), László Beke (1977), Jiří Valoch and Gerta Pospíšilová (1977),
Alison Knowles (1978), and Tomislav Gotovac, who had a screening of

Figure 12.6
Tomasz Sikorski, “22.XI–10.XII 76
Galeria ‘Mospan,’” Linia 02/03 (1977).
318 Chapter 12
his experimental films at Galeria Dziekanka in November 1978 (figure
12.7). KwieKulik compared the Studio of Activities, Documentation and
Propagation to an “ambulance” whose primary function was to save the
lives of artistic activities, not just their own but also those of their peers.
When Kwiek was accorded an additional 35 square meters as workspace
in 1971, in line with the state policy that graduates of the Academy of
Fine Arts enrolled in the Union of Artists could apply for studio space,
the extra room in their apartment became a multifunctional space for
living, work, exhibiting, and meetings with other artists (figure 12.8).
KwieKulik defined “activities” as “processes, actions, events, activities—
what an artist does before artistic activity becomes closed in the form
of a work” and stressed the need to “treat documentation as a work too,
because it is the same thing.”21 All three modes (activities, documen-
tation, and propagation) required equal attention, creativity, and care.
Experimenting with different forms of documentation was a time-con-
suming and costly affair—calling for investment in a range of expensive
recording equipment. A bureaucratic struggle to secure state funding
for the project became central to the couple’s work. From 1973, they
initiated a protracted campaign to secure state support, documenting
their correspondence with state organizations about financing the stu-
dio’s activities. The “case” of the Studio of Activities, Documentation
and Propagation exposed the biopolitical machinations of the late so-
cialist state and its demoralizing strategies of permanent deferral.
KwieKulik’s concern with the problem of documenting contem-
porary artistic endeavors was in step with official thinking in the mid-
1970s. The keynote speaker at a special meeting of the Artistic Council
of the Polish Association of Visual Art dedicated to addressing the
problem of the documentation of contemporary art practices noted
that it was “no secret that only a small part of Polish visual art is made
lasting through documentation, just as only a minute percentage of
works enter State collections. The great majority slips by unnoticed.”22
He highlighted as an area of particular concern “the case of works sent
abroad. They often do not return to our country—bought by private
collectors or for national collections—whereas we do not even have
evidence of a trace of them. The disproportion between the efforts of

320 Chapter 12
Figure 12.7
Clockwise from left: Tomislav Gotovac,
Łukasz Szajna, Zofia Kulik, Charles Ahearn,
Andrzej Partum, and unknown at the
Studio of Activities, Documentation and
Propagation (PDDiU), Warsaw, 1978. Photo:
Przemysław Kwiek. Courtesy of KwieKulik.
Figure 12.8
Przemysław Kwiek and Zofia Kulik at the
Studio of Activities, Documentation
and Propagation (PDDiU), Warsaw, 1976.
artists and our knowledge about creativity is widening.”23 If the situa-

tion was getting out of hand, he also observed that centralized archives
documenting contemporary artistic life as a whole were also lacking in
other countries. He noted the need to capitalize on the work of existing
institutions and to consider what other types of bodies specializing in
documentation ought to be created. He declared himself in favor of set-
ting up a new institution dedicated to coordinating existing institutions,
while warning that “any documentary activity is extremely expensive,
requires expensive equipment and a specialized group of workers.”24 A
representative from the Art Department of the Ministry of Culture and
Art brought the discussion to a close, stating that there was no money
available for setting up a new institution for documentation in the
next five-year budget. Instead, she suggested that existing institutions
should expand and modernize their methods. The speaker mentioned
that two proposals for centers of documentation had been received by
the Ministry, one of them from Przemysław Kwiek, but said that the
Department was waiting to hear back from the Arts Fund about these
proposals, effectively kicking the proposal into the long grass. KwieKu-
lik’s exchange of letters with the authorities over the matter dragged on
for more than seven years, bringing no results. Although their project

was, in theory, approved at every stage, on each occasion a new set of
bureaucratic obstacles prevented any money from ever being released
to them. As Zofia Kulik put it, the only thing that increased over the
years was “the volume of paperwork associated with the proposition.”25
KwieKulik carried on with their documentary activities indepen-
dently, supporting their efforts as best they could. One branch of
this work was developed within the framework of a series they called
“parasite art,” where they intervened in the work of other artists and
redistributed it as work of their own. A series of props left at their
apartment by Štembera after a performance on the occasion of one
of his visits became the basis for one such proposition. They photo-
graphed Štembera’s items (a pack of dried peas and some candles)
and sent them out to their distribution list with a message of their
own (figure 12.9). That same summer of 1977, after performing at Gale-
ria Repassage (which operated under the auspices of Warsaw Univer-
sity and the Socialist Union of Polish Students),26 Štembera wrote to
his friends from Prague asking whether they could send him a few
negatives of the piece, explaining: “a friend of mine from California
is preparing a retrospective of my actions.”27 He was referring to per-
formance artist Chris Burden.
Burden visited Štembera in 1977 (figure 12.10), and in 1978 orga-
nized the exhibition “Three Europeans: Richard Kriesche, Gina Pane,
Petr Štembera” at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, which
then traveled to San Francisco. Štembera attended in person. As Maja
Fowkes has pointed out, Burden’s opening remarks at the exhibition
showed “how deeply perceived was the divide between the artists on
opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, and that the political situation was
inextricably attached to the reception of the Czech artist, even though
his practice aimed at avoidance of such readings.”28 She cites Burden’s
statement that “We cannot view the work of Štembera except in terms
of his political situation, that of a socialistic structure that discreetly
encourages consumerism and capitalism. … Štembera is an ascetic,
and both his performances and his daily living habits seem to be a com-
ment on the hypocrisies of the socialist system he lives in.”29 Burden
suggested that the main thing wrong with socialism was that it was too
322 Chapter 12
Figure 12.9
KwieKulik, Materials left on 4 May 1976
by Petr Štembera at the PDDiU. It turned
out that he did not use them for the activity
planned that night, 5 May 1976.

Figure 12.10
Chris Burden in Prague. Photo: Petr
Štembera. Courtesy of Petr Štembera.
324 Chapter 12
capitalist. This may have been indicative of a line of dialogue used by
Štembera in developing relationships with artists around the world and
communicating with them in terms that they could understand and
empathize with (i.e., anticonsumerism). He was adept at finding com-
mon ground with colleagues from both East and West; to the extent
that this was possible, the community to which he belonged sought
to overcome ideological barriers by way of the shared language of per-
formance. Štembera also met Allan Kaprow in Los Angeles. His inter-
national networking was not confined to corresponding with artists
abroad and traveling abroad himself; he invited significant foreign art-
ists to Prague, who would stay at his place when they came (Abramović
and Ulay may well have met in person for the first time in Štembera’s
apartment, after deciding to meet in Prague because it was halfway be-
tween Amsterdam and Belgrade).30
The Czechoslovak performance artists’ work resonated with young
Polish audiences, and one invitation kept leading to another. Despite
the repressive political situation, travel to Poland remained possible.
The director of Maximal Art Gallery, Grzegorz Dziamski, explained:
“They came as tourists, there were no problems, we sent an invitation,
because they asked us to send them something like that. We sent of-
ficial invitations on letterheaded Socialist Union of Polish Students
paper; the point was to show that it was an institution that was doing
the inviting, that was our procedure.”31 Štembera performed in nearly
all the alternative venues that operated under the auspices of different
branches of the Union, returning to Poland year after year to participate
in their programs. When Dziamski put together a two-part symposium
under the heading “New Art in Search of Values” in Jankowice, outside
Poznań (April 1978, followed by a second meeting in October 1978), re-
viving a tradition of officially sponsored retreats for artists and critics,
he invited Štembera.
Štembera arrived in Jankowice together with Kovanda, for whom
this would be his debut performance in Poland. Kovanda’s action
took place in the park under a tree. He subsequently described it as
follows: “I lay on my stomach within reach of a pile of stones. And
then I began to very slowly pull the stones toward me with one hand”

(figure 12.11). Štembera’s performance was later described as follows:
“With my hands tied behind my back I crawled through a pile of earth
and a pile of sugar, mixing them with my breath (during exhalation and
inhalation) and the movement of my body. My assistant poured strong
acid on the ground in my wake which also seeped into the cords I had
tied to each toe” (figure 12.12).
Czech visitors played an important role in the debates held, pre-
senting distinct theoretical arguments for discussion. These were pre-
sented eloquently by the philosopher Petr Rezek, trained in the Czech
phenomenological tradition, who was closely associated with the per-
formance circle and contributed a text for the event. He argued that a
search for new values was a symptom of nihilism. He explained that
following the turn away from art to “activities” initiated by Kaprow and
others, there had been a new emphasis on “the search for values,” but
he contended that the emphasis should be not on values but on the
seeking.32 He proposed that although there might be no answer to the
question of art, or of value, the search itself should be the focus, empha-
sizing “pure presence” and the idea that “life is unfolding here—irre-
spective of the there / irrespective of value.” Rezek’s position was in line
with the immediacy of the actions that were presented to the Polish
public by the Czech performance artists.
Though many of his Polish performances reflected Štembera’s spe-
cific interests in testing the limits of his body as a way to explore his
relationship to the world, there were also others that entered into dia-
logue with the Polish political context (and, by extension, the domes-
tic context in Czechoslovakia). His work began to take a more political
turn in the years following the signing of Charter 77. At Galeria Nad
Fosą in Wrocław, on 31 January 1979, he positioned a live chicken be-
tween a radio and a TV and returned it to its place whenever it tried to
get away, feeding it scraps of newspaper. The performance continued
until the chicken stopped seeking to escape, perhaps thereby proving
that even a chicken eventually would let down its resistance to ideologi-
cal indoctrination through multiple media, that even animal instincts
of survival could be broken down.33 While in Wrocław, he also carried
out a piece at Galeria Foto-Medium-Art (opened in 1977 by Jerzy Olek)
326 Chapter 12
Figure 12.11
Jiři Kovanda, xxx, Jankowice, 25 April 1978.
“I lay down on my stomach within reach
of a pile of rocks. Then I started bringing the
rocks up very close to my body with one
hand …” Courtesy of the artist.
entitled The History of Poland (figure 12.13).34 The artist’s description

of the event reads: “lying naked on the floor tiles under a heavy cur-
tain, with the aid of a torch I read into a microphone a chapter from
a book entitled The History of Poland dedicated to the Polish romantic
resistance movement. This I did as long as my breath would allow. In
one corner of the gallery, two assistants, Czech and Polish, read pas-
sages from Czech and Polish newspapers on the political activities in
both countries from that time.”35 Piotrowski has argued that the perfor-
mance was produced in a spirit of solidarity, for it staged a “collision

328 Chapter 12
Petr Štembera, Untitled, Jankowice,
26 April 1978. Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 12.13 (below)

Petr Štembera, The History of Poland,
Wrocław, November 1979. Courtesy of
the artist.
between the language of the impulse to independence and the wooden

language of the communist press, but also with the naked body of the
artist, speaking the ‘truth’.”36 As such, the piece served as a reminder
that the voices of opposition could still be heard despite the ideological
din of contemporaneity.
The crowning event of these and the other individual visits to Po-
land by artists from Czechoslovakia over the course of the 1970s was the
comprehensive “Presentations of the New Czechoslovak Art,” which

traveled from Wrocław to Galeria Dziekanka in Warsaw where it opened
on 5 December 1979 (figures 12.14, 12.15). There were lectures, discus-
sions, performances, installations, film screenings, slide projections,
and an exhibition of photographic works by several dozen artists. The
event was coordinated by Jaroslav Anděl who delivered a lecture on the
current situation in Czechoslovak art as part of the program. The idea
was to create a platform for the exchange of information by artists, the-
oreticians, and critics in the two neighboring countries. Artists from
both parts of the Czechoslovak federation took part, some by send-
ing works, others attending in person: Peter Bartoš, Ján Budaj, Róbert
Cyprich, Vladimír Havrilla, Július Koller, Jiří Kovanda, Jan Mlčoch, Petr
Štembera, and Rudolf Sikora. An opportunity for the public to “meet”
the artists was billed as part of the opening.
Štembera’s Yogi performance and several others were described in
detail by Kwiek and Kulik in their personal notes on proceedings. In
preparation for Yogi, the artist shredded Communist Party newspapers
and then returned to the room in a pink swimming cap, his lower half
undressed save for a diaper suspended with red and white braces. He
then stood on his head and chewed and swallowed pages of newspapers
for around 7 minutes, before repeating the headstand with new scraps
of paper in his mouth around four times, until he could not stand on
his head any longer (figure 12.16). If the first part of the performance
addressed the issue of infantilization by ideology, the second alluded
to the division of Europe. Returning 5 minutes later, now dressed, he
put up a board saying “Europe” and placed two aerosol cans before it.
Wearing swimming goggles, he tied rope around his neck, the other
end of which was held by his friend who slowly let the rope out so that
he leant ever closer to the sign until his hands landed on the spray cans,
which gave a few weak hisses, ending the performance.
Films were screened (including one by Knížák), Sikora gave a slide
presentation, and an abundance of projects and documents by the
leading unofficial artists of the day were on display, among them a giant
poster in the form of a conceptual calendar by Róbert Cyprich introduc-
ing 1979 as “RED YEAR”—an “International Festival of Socio-cultural
Processual Feasts,” to take place “with the creative cooperation of 365
330 Chapter 12
“Presentations of the New Czechoslovak
Art,” Galeria Dziekanka, Warsaw,
1979 (installation views). Courtesy of
Tomasz Sikorski.

Figure 12.16
Petr Štembera, Yogi, performance at
“Presentations of the New Czechoslovak Art,”
Galeria Dziekanka, Warsaw, 1979. Courtesy
of Tomasz Sikorski.
friends from all over the world” (figure 12.17). Cyprich’s collective invita-
tion to this “Pseudo-Festival” built on the tradition of Filko, Mlynárčik
and Kostrová’s Happsoc I of 1965 (in which the trio had declared that
Bratislava and all its inhabitants and contents would be a work of art
for the first week of May, a period circumscribed by the official holidays
of Labor Day and Czechoslovak Liberation Day). He took the idea of the
readymade happening to new levels of fantasy, inviting readers to join
in the festive spirit of international art all year round: “LET EACH DAY
BECOME FEAST FOR YOU,” making a mockery of state festivities by
declaring the whole year as Red Year.
332 Chapter 12
Figure 12.17
Róbert Cyprich, 1979 Red Year, 1979.
Courtesy of Jana Želibská.

334 Chapter 12
The Czechoslovak exhibits were arranged professionally yet casu-
ally on large white boards, some of which were propped up on chairs
in the exhibition space. Štembera’s photographs were simply mounted
on cardboard (figure 12.18). Such solutions were typical of the ad hoc
arrangements under which many of the independent spaces were ne-
gotiated from the Socialist Union of Polish Students, showing a com-
mitment to presenting the work to a high standard while navigating
practical limitations. Anděl wrote to Kulik and Kwiek the month before
the show opened, letting them know that the Czech artists would be
coming to Warsaw and saying: “We would like it if some Polish artists
take part in performances, discussions etc. I hope the exhibition could
help to find better understanding and interaction of the Czechoslovak
and Polish artists.” He wrote that he was looking forward to seeing the
work and added: “Would it be possible for two or three artists to sleep
in their sleeping bags at your studio?”37
Given that the ongoing political “normalization” at home meant
that experimental Czechoslovak artists had to perform in abandoned
houses or after hours in their workplaces, the different world across
the border gave them unique access to an audience. They traveled to
Poland throughout the 1970s, soaking up news and information and,
on occasion, participating in state-funded international events.
Figure 12.18
Petr Štembera, documentation for
“Presentations of the New Czechoslovak Art,”
Galeria Dziekanka, Warsaw, 1979.

13
International
Artists’ Meetings
Poland had a strong tradition of state-funded so-called plein-air meet-

ings at which artists would gather during the summer and combine a
holiday with making work that would often be donated to a local enter-
prise or institution after the event.1 Though such events were for the
most part intended for Polish artists, artists from abroad were also
sometimes invited, by way of personal contacts with other participants
Chapter
or the organizers themselves, and became part of the events circuit.2
British performance artists Shirley Cameron and Roland Miller be-
came regular visitors to Poland from 1978, with their twin daughters,
who formed part of their “artistic group,” participating in several of the
plein-airs (figures 13.1–13.3). Their first contact with Poland had been a International
meeting with the artist Zbigniew Warpechowski at a performance fes-
tival in France, and they maintained a lively correspondence. Through
Warpechowski, the couple were invited to Plener Miastko ’78 in Warcino,
in the Kępice district in northern Poland, organized by Jan Fabich from
Słupsk and Andrzej Kostołowski from Poznań. The participants rep-
resented a wide cross section of tendencies from around Poland: the
artists Jerzy Bereś and Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Paweł Kwiek, Andrzej Par-
tum, and Warpechowski, as well as the theorist Jerzy Ludwiński and
other painters and sculptors. Cameron and Miller performed a piece
entitled Inspection Pit, taking as a starting point a concrete pit located
in the grounds of the Warcino estate. They turned the pit into a per-
formance space and presented two variations to the audience. In the
first, Miller lurked in the pit dressed in black while Cameron was above.
Miller crawled toward a black box and released a container full of white
338 Chapter 13
Shirley Cameron, Roland Miller, and their
twins at Plener Miastko ’78, Warcino, 1
978. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of
the artists.

Shirley Cameron, Inspection Pit, Plener
Miastko ’78, Warcino, 1978. Photographer
unknown. Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 13.3 (above)

Shirley Cameron and Roland Miller
(in Inspection Pit performance costume)
at Plener Miastko ’78, Warcino, 1978.
the artists.
International Artists’ Meetings 339

butterflies. In the second, Cameron was below, dressed in green, and
released green frogs from a bowl, while Miller was above, with bulging
white sacks on his legs. The organizers of Miastko ’78 clearly valued the
foreign visitors’ participation, as a substantial portion of the catalog is
devoted to the documentation of their performances.
While there, Maria Pinińka-Bereś installed a very high tree-house-
like construction with a long ladder and an arrow pointing “to the ob-
servation point of changes in art” (figure 13.4). Jerzy Bereś carried out
a manifestation (he preferred this term to performance) called Monu-
ment of an Artist, walking through the streets carrying a flag reading
“the artist’s soul,” with wooden boards hanging from his neck read-
ing “the artist’s body,” and pulling behind him a cart reading “artist’s
monument” (figure 13.5). He stopped and lit a fire, after which he in-
vited members of the public to share a shot of vodka with him.3 There
were also readings, such as one by Andrzej Partum on the topic of the
“Sadness of Progress.” Stano Filko, who was the only other artist from
outside Poland participating in the event, read aloud the White Space
Manifesto and showed documentation of White Space in White Space, a
joint project with Miloš Laky and Ján Zavarský.4 Kostołowski wrote that
the character of the event had been open, and that many questions
had emerged—questions which, he believed, could only be answered
on a “supra-individual basis.”5 Photographs record Miastko ’78’s re-
laxed setting and convivial atmosphere, showing artists outdoors in
the sunshine, playing chess and engaging in discussions in the can-
teen (figure 13.6).
Figure 13.4
Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Observation
Point of Changes in Art, Warcino, 1978.
Photographer unknown. Courtesy
of Fundacja im. Marii Pinińskiej-Bereś i
Jerzego Beresia.
340 Chapter 13
Figure 13.5
Jerzy Bereś, Monument of an Artist,
Warcino, 1978. Photo: Ireneusz Wojtkiewicz.
Courtesy of Fundacja im. Marii Pinińskiej-
Bereś i Jerzego Beresia.
Figure 13.6
Plener Miastko ’78, Warcino, 1978.
Andrzej Kostołowski.
Cameron and Miller’s trip had been partially funded by the British
Arts Council, following confirmation from the Polish partners that they
were official delegates and would receive board and lodging while there.
Miller tended to be the one to record and publish their experiences.6 He
recollected that they were struck by “the status enjoyed by Polish art-
ists, and by the consequent ease with which we could present our own
(performance) artworks.” He explained that at such events “artists have
their accommodation and food provided free, with money for materi-
als. In return the work produced at the Plener is donated to the local
community, who have paid for the Plener.” It is clear from his positive
reports about his experiences in Poland, published in a range of British
publications on this and other occasions, that he saw the situation of
artists in Poland in very favorable terms. Cameron and Miller were es-
pecially impressed by the intellectual dimensions of these meetings, re-
calling that discussions “ranged over the problems of aesthetics, which
in Poland means the social application of art, as well as the philoso-
phy of art practice.” Miller argued that “philosophy is more relevant
in a Marxist state than it is in a capitalist society.” Though he referred
to Poland as “oppressively barren” and “totalitarian,” he appears to
have been convinced that the Artists’ Union, the ZPAP, created excel-
lent working conditions for its members. The ZPAP, he wrote, allowed
artists “to maintain economic independence, and a degree of creative,
if not political freedom,” as well as working to develop “its own theo-
retical workbase.” Arguably perceiving Polish reality though rose-tinted
spectacles, he reported that the Union “has more than 10 000 members,

all earning a living, at better than average wage. Polish artists are paid
by organizations (for examples factories …), to serve their community
with their art. Some paint murals on the sides of the blocks of flats
where they themselves live.” He even speculated in 1981 that “ZPAP was
an independent trade union long before Solidarity was created in the
summer of 1980,” a notion that many members of the artistic commu-
nity in Poland would doubtless have contested, viewing ZPAP member-
ship in terms of plain existential necessity.
Arguably, Miller’s positive interpretation of the situation showed
that the Polish authorities’ cultural strategy could serve as a successful
propaganda tool. It is clear that he was taken by the cultural model in
Poland and saw lessons in it for the British context. In a text on “Live
Art Works,” he advocated for the power of performance: “Because per-
formance art has the potential to stand outside the market place (that
it does not always do so is a tribute to the power of commercialism)—it
can embody a singularly clear and objective view of society.” He argued
that performance art is “a direct, largely spontaneous genre, with an
unusually high degree of public accessibility”; as such, he proposed in
the summer of 1981, “in the current social and political context, with
many, many unemployed, disenchanted, bored and frustrated people
of all ages (but especially young people) who are out of touch with di-
rect, live creativity; performance art is most apt.” His “realist proposal”
ran as follows:
I suggest that performance artists should be recruited to work in towns and

cities. Their brief would be to make their art performances in public places—
with modest publicity and maximum information and accessibility. This
would be a rescue attempt. To try to save people in towns and cities from the
deadness of industrial decline and mass-produced entertainment; by sharp-
ening perfections, by illuminating the nature of “work,” the uses of leisure,
the meaning of entertainment, and the value of individual experience. The
artists would be articulating and giving form to the human need for first-hand
creativity. Such a scheme would, ideally, begin to dismantle the iron curtain of
intellectual elitism and star-system acts. Such a thawing of the cultural cold
war (in which only the well-educated and the well-off gain admittance to the
world of art) would be a revolution indeed.7
344 Chapter 13
Miller’s application of Cold War terminology to the problems of Brit-
ish class society under Thatcher (“the iron curtain of intellectual elit-
ism”) makes for a heady mix. International encounters and creative
exchanges necessarily brought ideological differences to the fore: Pol-
ish artists were at times shocked by the vulgar Marxism of some of their
UK counterparts (Stuart Brisley being a case in point, by Jerzy Bereś’s
account).8 Cameron and Miller, for their part, seem to have been uncon-
cerned by any political aims potentially underpinning the Polish state’s
generosity toward artists.
Cameron and Miller reciprocated the hospitality they had received
by inviting three of their Polish friends to perform and lecture at ven-
ues around the UK in autumn 1979. The “Anglo-Polski Tour: Art and
Performance” took place over the course of the month of October; the
invitees were Bereś, Kostołowski, and Warpechowski. Their itinerary
took them to Grantham, Nottingham, Liverpool, Leicester, Loughbor-
ough, Wolverhampton, Cardiff, and Oval House in London, finishing at
the newly opened Third Eye Centre in Glasgow.9 The tour was financed
from a number of public sources, including the Visiting Arts Unit of
Great Britain and the Arts Council. Documentation of performances
by the two artists was on display in the various venues, and they per-
formed live in the evenings. Bereś performed works from his Mystery
series, among others; Warpechowski’s performances included Half-
champion and Short Electric Love Story.10
Kostołowski gave a series of lectures on a range of topics. In one of
these, called “Birth of the Star—Art and Society,” he presented a star-
shaped diagram that was designed to demonstrate the networked, in-
terconnected nature of the relationships (numbered in the diagram)
between individual experience, ethical channels, artistic propositions,
a virtual audience, and the changing status of society, noting differ-
ent ways in which these variables related to form part of a whole sys-
tem (figure 13.7)11 The terms of the diagram and the transactions it
mapped were further defined in a photocopied catalog produced for
the Anglo-Polski Tour. According to the diagram, the “virtual audience”
constituted “the ‘avant-garde’ of society … sensitive to social evolution-
ary movements and to the propositions of art.” Point 14, meanwhile,

346 Chapter 13
Figure 13.7
Andrzej Kostołowski, Birth of the Star /
Art & Society, 1978. Courtesy of the artist.
represented the passage from artistic proposition to the changing sta-

tus of society—utopia. While all the points were connected to one an-
other, Kostołowski cautioned in his lecture that “it may be dangerous
to make such a direct confrontation between the Ethical Channel and
the Changing Status of Society, especially in those cases where the eth-
ics accepted by normal society differ very much from the ethics of art-
ists—even if the ethics of artists may be a sort of future possibility.”12
The Anglo-Polski tour catalog also carried translations of a selection
of Kostołowski’s Theses on Art. Thesis no. 25, “On a Map of Art” (figure
13.8), explained: “A map of art is comprised of two layers: a: the hid-
den network of vectors, indicating connections and influence—the so
called network of induction. b: the field of relations between points
described by the names—of styles, tendencies, movements, actions,
propositions, projects, people, etc.” He argued that this could serve as
a basis for a “science of art” consisting of the study of art systems more
widely, echoing Lawrence Alloway’s identification of the art world as a
system, though approaching this in plural terms.
While aspects of Polish cultural life appeared to outsiders to model
good state practice, repressive strategies remained in play. Some initia-
tives received a level of funding that made it possible to cover foreign
participants’ expenses; others were denied access to resources. KwieKu-
lik, in particular, complained of double standards, and were intent on
making the Polish state’s pernicious mechanisms apparent. These
strategies became a focus for their performative “activities.” After grad-
uating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Kwiek and Kulik took
work on state commissions but were disappointed to find themselves
condemned to working as “hacks” and barely able to scrape together a
living from intense physical labor (their experience contradicts Miller’s

Figure 13.8
Andrzej Kostołowski, Theses on Art. 25:
On a Map of Art, 1973. Courtesy of the artist.
348 Chapter 13
positive comments concerning Polish artists’ pay). Although they were
free to continue to develop the sorts of open-ended experimental prac-
tices that they had pursued while studying under Oscar Hansen, an ex-
perimental architect and author of the theory of open form, they found
combining these with their paid work and raising their child extremely
difficult. When they corresponded with state authorities about receiv-
ing state funding for the activities of their Studio of Activities, Docu-
mentation and Propagation, they were met with a wall of silence for
some 18 months (as of 1975); it transpired the couple had been black-
listed as a result of what they called the “eagle affair.”
KwieKulik had sent images from their series Commentary Art for
publication in an exhibition catalog, entitled Seven Young Poles, in
Malmö in 1975. Officials took issue with a photograph in the catalog
showing Kulik beside a stone memorial plaque that the artists were en-
graving for a state commission in honor of Home Army soldiers killed
by the Germans. Two balls of clay, one marked with an x, lay on top
of the unfinished plaque, and the Polish national emblem, an eagle,
made in plaster by another artist, was propped up in the background.
The image was annotated: “A bird of plaster for bronze in the Slums of
the Fine Arts”—a play on the name of the Workshops of the Visual Arts
which had commissioned the memorial plaque (figure 13.9). The pho-
tograph showed Kulik “looking sadly at the unknown ‘x.’”13 Although
the duo had to make their living producing hackwork on commission
for the monopolistic state Visual Arts Workshops (PSP), they also con-
tinued to engage in experimental “Activities,” arranging configurations
of elements such as “concepts (sentences, words, letters, the symbol
of the unknown ‘x’),” objects, and other materials together with mate-
rials from the official commissions.14 Insofar as the Visual Arts Work-
shops were responsible for the regime’s visual presentation, providing
monuments, banners for demonstrations, medals, decorations, and so
on, for KwieKulik they were “a symbol and instrument of the subor-
dination of artists.”15 To make matters worse, the Swedish editor had
published the image of Kulik and the eagle on a double-page spread
across from a 1968 student-day portrait of the Director of the Visual
Arts Workshops produced by Kwiek, showing an unfinished clay figure

Figure 13.9
KwieKulik, page layout in catalog of the
exhibition “7 Young Poles,” Malmö
Konsthall, 1975, including photograph
with the eagle called A Bird of Plaster
for Bronze in the Slums of the Fine Arts,
placed by the Swedish designer next to
Przemysław Kwiek’s Man-Dick, both
pieces from the Commentary Art series.
350 Chapter 13
resembling a phallus, to which, in 1973, KwieKulik had added the com-
ment “Man-Dick.”
The discovery of the Malmö photographs by Polish officials led to
the artists being called in for questioning and accused of “excesses”
with the national emblem on foreign territory. While the questioning
steered clear of the directly inflammatory nature of their commentar-
ies—the fact that they dared to call the state workshops “slums” and
their director a “dick”—the artists were still banned from traveling
abroad for the foreseeable future and starved of access to financial sup-
port. The authorities were informed of this indecent juxtaposition, and
the couple were summoned by telegram to the Ministry of Culture and
Art in February 1976 to discuss the images. The minister informed them
that they were now prohibited from “representing Polish art abroad.”
KwieKulik spent many months preparing for a 1978 Behavior Work-
shop in Arnhem in the Netherlands, an experimental interdisciplinary
event modeled on workshops at Joseph Beuys’s Free International Uni-
versity at the 1977 Documenta 6, only to find their passport applications
refused two weeks before their planned departure.16 In one of their let-
ters of appeal to the passport office, they explained that the prestigious
invitation was the cumulative result of three years’ efforts and that they
were to receive honoraria of $200 each for participating, which they in-
tended to spend on the purchase of equipment that was indispensable
for their studio.17 They concluded by remarking that they intended to
give the Arnhem organizers an honest account of the reasons for their
nonattendance, implying that the state’s violation of their post-1975,
post-Helsinki Agreement right to travel would arouse international
condemnation. These were not easy times in Poland, and KwieKulik’s
financial commitment to the activities of the studio left them so out of
pocket that they relied on baskets of food from Kulik’s mother, which
she fetched twice a week from the other side of town.
KwieKulik wrote to the organizers of the event requesting that their
allocated slots be kept for a performance in absentia, offering a script
with instructions. They proposed that one of the organizers sit at a
large table in the auditorium, bring a kettle of water to a boil and turn
it off as soon as it began to boil, in a parody of the artists’ treatment by

the authorities.18 They also asked that their letter be read aloud to those
gathered in Arnhem, and that a group of artists and art workers who
knew their work be invited to sit at the table and discuss their work.
Members of the audience would then be invited to fill out a postcard
each with their name and address and any comments, to be collected
and sent back to Warsaw for exhibition at the Studio of Activities, Docu-
mentation and Propagation.19 They received many postcards as a result,
many deriding censorship and offering words of encouragement, of-
fering signals of solidarity from the international creative community.
After their passport applications were rejected, KwieKulik decided
instead to attend the state-sponsored All-Polish Biennale of Youth Art
at the Bureau of Artistic Exhibitions (BWA) in Sopot that autumn. It
was an invitation they had initially marked “for the trash.” Explaining
that for bureaucratic reasons they would now be able to attend after
all, they promised the organizers “an original performance (our rule:
always make something new … ).”20 The piece was Monument without a
Passport (8 October 1978) and was a public response to the state’s refusal
to issue them passports (figure 13.10). An early series of sketches and
notes for Monument without a Passport refers to the piece as a “monu-
ment to bureaucratic hatred.”21 The notes explained that “objects have
passports (?) but one object (the monument) does not. Monuments
do not travel, so why should they have passports … a living person
as a monument—can’t move, can’t travel.”22 The circular logic of this
stream-of-consciousness commentary saw KwieKulik ultimately fail to
make sense of the mechanics of socialist bureaucracy.
For the performance in Sopot spectators were divided into two
groups, the first restricted to those known personally to the artists, the
second reserved for anyone else. This strategy enabled the artists to
Figure 13.10
KwieKulik, Monument without a Passport in
the Salons of the Fine Arts, 1978. Courtesy
of KwieKulik.
352 Chapter 13
address two audiences in different registers—highlighting the politics
of a context in which only an intimate circle of friends could be trusted
with the whole story. Entering the space, the first group saw Kulik with
her head through a table, signaling that the work was part of the cou-
ple’s Activities for the Head series. Kulik then read aloud the letter that
the couple had written to the organizers of the Arnhem festival. The
second group were offered a different version of events when they en-
tered: Kulik leaned forward, turning the table into a screen for projec-
tion, the lights went out, and spectators were shown slides from an
official summer meeting for Young Sculptors at Legnica in 1971, com-
bined with audio playing English language lessons for beginners. Offi-
cial-style images of collaboration between industry, art, and socialist
youth, paired with the English lessons, conspired to produce an uneasy
sense of the Polish People’s Republic’s state-sponsored cultural pro-
vincialism. When the lights came back on, Kwiek made a rectangular
mold around Kulik’s feet and poured in plaster, placing her in the situ-
ation of a “double bind,” with her head in a table, mimicking primitive
methods of public humiliation such as the stocks, and her feet rooted
to the ground. Once everyone had waited for the plaster to dry, Kwiek
revealed Kulik’s feet encased in plaster, and her conversion into a living
sculpture with the required adjunct—a base. She was then carried onto
a podium and her base joined to another base housing the legs of a
chair. She held aloft a folder marked “Ideas for Arnhem.” Kwiek, mean-
while, turned to a large gray roll of paper on the wall behind them and,
cutting a string, revealed a painted sign reading “Monument without
a Passport in the Salons of Visual Art.” The reference to the Salons of
Visual Art suggested an ironic correction to their earlier, controversial
“commentary” on the “Slums of the Fine Arts.” On the one hand, the
duo were playing at having rehabilitated themselves, while still clearly
remaining unable to travel. On the other, they were measuring their
persistence and commitment to critical art, taking their message from
the slums to the salons. KwieKulik remained immobile in front of their
sign for ten to fifteen minutes.23
KwieKulik exhibited the documentation of the Monument without a
Passport a few weeks later, at the major international “Performance and
354 Chapter 13
Body” meeting at the Galeria Sztuki LKD Labirynt in Lublin, 12–14 Oc-
tober 1978.24 They were friends with the director, Andrzej Mroczek, and
had recommended that he invite Tibor Hajas, Petr Štembera, and Jiří
Kovanda, in particular, to participate in the event.25 They carried out a
series of three actions based on their Activities for the Head (figure 13.11).
Those entering the gallery were asked to wear small red flags behind
Figure 13.11
KwieKulik, Activities for the Head,
1978. Photo: Andrzej Polakowski. Courtesy
of KwieKulik.

their ears. They first found KwieKulik with their heads imprisoned in
the seats of chairs. In part 2, Kulik’s head was trapped in a bowl which
Kwiek filled with water. He washed his face, his armpits and his feet,
adding more water to the dirty contents so that it reached above the
level of Kulik’s mouth. He then pointed a knife at the back of her head
and yelled at her “say something, whore, say something … , you can’t,
what … ?!” In part 3 the pair sat with their heads inside buckets and as-
sistants filled the buckets with rubbish found in the gallery bins. Such
aggressive actions marked a new turn inward in KwieKuik’s practice
in which they worked through the violence of the state toward them,
as though internalizing the dynamic of that same violence and stag-
ing its extremity for others to see. Sadism was played out within the
dynamic of the couple to become a form of masochism. In the con-
text of this international artists’ meeting on Polish soil, they pointed
to the state’s hypocrisy: while the Polish authorities had permitted a
major three-day event to which a host of foreign guests were invited,
they would not let their own artists out of the country to participate in
a similar event abroad. The irony ought not to have been lost on inter-
national participants, such as Cameron and Miller, Valie Export, Hajas,
Miler, Mlčoch, Štembera, and Raša Todosijević. The second part of the
piece had interesting crossovers with Todosijević’s performance Was
ist Kunst?, Marinela Koželj (1977), in which he yelled viciously at his girl-
friend/muse while slapping her repeatedly across the face with paint
on his hands while she remained mute and turned the other cheek on
each occasion.26
One of the most significant international events of 1978 was the In-
ternational Artists’ Meeting (I AM) held 29 March–6 April at Galeria Re-
mont in Warsaw and organized by Henryk Gajewski (figure 13.12).27 The
authorities’ blacklisting of KwieKulik had contributed to their social
marginalization domestically, and they were not invite to perform at
the event, though they did attend. KwieKulik also contrived to have the
foreign participants in the event visit their studio. Some of the guests
were accompanied to KwieKulik’s place by the art historian Piotr Ryp-
son, who was working as a translator at the festival. I AM followed from
an international conference in 1977 on the topic of “Art in the Context
356 Chapter 13
Figure 13.12
Henryk Gajewski at I AM International
Artists’ Meeting, Galeria Remont, Warsaw,
1978. Courtesy of Henryk Gajewski.
of Reality,” at which Jan Świdziński’s idea of “contextual art” was pre-

sented and social aspects of art were discussed. Foreign participants
had included Hervé Fischer and Jorge Glusberg. The conference had
resulted in factionalism and infighting in the Polish context, though,
and Gajewski, its organizer, would note that “this was my first lesson in
world art and manipulation in the context of reality. I suddenly realized
that this was not the point. I understood that art, maybe culture as a
whole, is a form of being together, and the artistic object and work are

only a pretext for social intercourse. Performance seemed to me to be
the best way of realizing this conception.”28
I AM was attended by around 25 Polish artists and 50 artists from
15 other countries. LOT Polish airlines funded two of the international
flights and the student travel bureau Almatur covered accommodation
at the Hotel Forum, while the Students’ Union covered the rest. Many of
the Polish participants were from the youngest generation of artists, in-
cluding Tomasz Sikorski and the group Akademia Ruchu; visitors from
other Soviet bloc countries included Bartoš, Erdély, Hajas, Štembera,
and the Slovak art theorist Tomáš Strauss, among others; other visitors
included the Fluxus artist Alison Knowles, the Dutch group Video Heads,
and the founder of the legendary Amsterdam art bookshop Other Books
and So, Ulises Carrión.29 Carrión took the opportunity to introduce him-
self as Post Master, launching his Erratic Art Mail International System
(E.A.M.I.S.), an “Alternative to the official post offices.” He explained:
“By using the E.A.M.I.S. you support the only alternative to the national
bureaucracies and you strengthen the international artists’ commu-
nity,” adding that items would be returned to the sender if they had not
been delivered to the designated recipient within three years (!). The I
AM program included 24 hours of performance, video screenings, lec-
tures, and discussions, with “Music Workshops” held every night, after
midnight, featuring, among others, the first ever punk rock concert in
Poland, by the British band the Raincoats.
Bartoš carried out a Ritual of Releasing Pigeons as part of his wider
Zoomedium project (figures 13.13, 13.14).30 Erdély was by his side at the
Figure 13.13
I AM International Artists’ Meeting,
Galeria Remont, Warsaw, 1978. Courtesy
of Henryk Gajewski.
Figure 13.14
Peter Bartoš and Miklós Erdély beside
Zoomedium box, I AM International Artists’
Meeting, Galeria Remont, Warsaw, 1978.
Photo: Ján Budaj. Courtesy of Peter Bartoš.
358 Chapter 13
moment of release, and Bartoš recalls that his Hungarian colleague
embraced him as the pigeons flew out of their box and into the sky.
Bartoš noted that each breed of pigeon had a different way of flying and
traveled at a different speed. The sole aim of the activity was to “give
pleasure to the breeder, who carries out the action in his ‘free time’”
and who, according to the artist, “participates in thought, flies with
his pigeons,” thereby experiencing the same liberation as they experi-
ence.31 He took the fact that the project did not go as planned to be a
bad omen: in the room with the props for the festival “someone had
stepped on one of the three pigeons. … I brought the pigeons from a
breeder in Poland. I was looking for a special breed of pigeons—Hun-
garian or Budapest high flyers, that can fly into infinity. They start in
a spiral and fly high, the spiral circle get smaller and smaller until the
pigeon is so high in the sky that you can’t see it anymore. I put all three
pigeons (A—B—C) into the box but I knew one of them would not fly at
all.”32 Bartoš later wrote that the action also had a specific meaning in
view of the “destruction of ecological space and other natural phenom-
ena of life,” and had to do with “the ethical value of defending living
things.” He referred to the survival of the tradition of pigeon breeding
in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the USSR, Romania, Bulgaria, Yu-
goslavia, West Germany, Italy, and England as a tradition of an “essen-
tial and humanist value.”33
Another key performance was the Hungarian artist Tibor Hajas’s
Dark Flash. The artist was blindfolded and suspended by his arms from a
rope in a darkened room, holding a camera with a flash. The performance
consisted in his trying to release the shutter at the same time as a flash
in another part of the room, which had been set to shoot by time delay.
Given the radical nature of so much of Hajas’s work, it is hard not to read
the work as an active meditation on the phenomenon of creative delay
and the desire for synchronicity with developments elsewhere, as expe-
rienced by artists encumbered with all manner of impediments. Hajas’s
performance was also in the tradition of ascetic self-training—along the
lines of Štembera’s leaps into spilled acid (figure 13.15).
The whole event was high-profile, carefully stage-managed and
coordinated, and filmed by Telewizja Polska (figures 13.16, 13.17).
360 Chapter 13
Figure 13.15
Tibor Hajas and Miklós Erdély at I AM
International Artists’ Meeting, Galeria
Remont, Warsaw, 1978. Courtesy of
Henryk Gajewski.
Performances were discussed at a concurrent international conference

at the Palace of Culture and Science.34 A book based on the confer-
ence materials entitled Performance appeared a few years later, edited
by Grzegorz Dziamski and published by the Młodzieżowa Agencja
Wydawnicza, including a wide range of international critics’ responses
to the question “What is performance?” as well as artists’ statements.
The contacts forged at I AM contributed to the program for a major
show at De Appel in Amsterdam the following year, “Works and Words,”
in which performance and conceptual artists from Eastern European
were brought together with Dutch colleagues. The initial research
was divided between Josine van Droffelaar and Aggy Smeets who both

Figure 13.16
Artist’s pass for I AM International Artists’
Meeting, Galeria Remont, Warsaw, 1978.
Courtesy of Henryk Gajewski.
Figure 13.17
International Conference on Performance
at the Palace of Culture as part of the I AM
International Artists’ Meeting, Warsaw, 1978.
Courtesy of Henryk Gajewski.
362 Chapter 13
traveled extensively, one to Yugoslavia and Hungary, the other to Poland
and Czechoslovakia. In each country the De Appel curators connected
with local curators who put them in touch with people and helped to
coordinate information, among other things providing catalog essays
and chronologies. In Czechoslovakia, these networkers (for this is es-
sentially the role that the “consultants” played) were Strauss, Štembera,
and Jaroslav Anděl; in Hungary László Beke and Lóránd Hegyi; in Yugo-
slavia Ješa Denegri and Marijan Susovski; in Poland Józef Robakowski,
Kostołowski, and Kulik. Smeets wrote to KwieKulik that she would be
visiting Prague, Poznań, Lódź, Wrocław, Lublin, Kraków, and Warsaw,
before meeting Droffelaar in Hungary. She explained: “I will be travel-
ling to see work, artists but also to live the context of those countries so
that I can work from within also.”35
KwieKulik were granted their passports to attend the De Appel
show only at the last minute, after being invited to Amsterdam from 18
September to 3 October 1979. They later described their contribution to
the event to a friend: “We have shown 10 years of our activity in form of
environment + performance. It was entitled ‘The light of the dead star.’
We wanted to transmit in a metaphorical way that our art-production

always reaches the West with delay. And this delay does not give possi-
bility for our work to work in the context of art-phenomena simultane-
ously appearing there.”36 The issue of time was one they had picked up
on in their correspondence with Gerrit Jan de Rook, of the technical
school in Eindhoven, who had proposed an exhibition entitled “The
New East European Art.” They wrote to him asking why it should be
called new and for whom it was meant to be new, explaining that it
seemed clear to them that it was only new to those people who had
not previously been aware of it but was not in itself new, as the artists
themselves had been involved in these sorts of activities for many years.
De Rook later organized an exhibition entitled “Oosteuropese Concep-
tuele Fotografie,” so it seems that he may have taken their point.37
None of the Czech artists received permission to travel to Amster-
dam. Several sent instructions for artworks to be carried out, however.
Mlčoch’s instructions were for a Hostel, as he later explained: “I was
given the opportunity to work or exhibit in the famous DE APPEL Gal-
lery. I asked the staff there to turn the exhibition space into a free hostel
during the allotted period. Beds, blankets, a table and chairs were also
installed. The kitchenette and hygiene facilities were also made avail-
able. The lights were dimmed every night from 10 pm to 6 am. The hos-
tel was fully used by visitors from the town for the whole duration.”38
An advertisement outdoors read “Gratis Slapen / Free Dormitory in De
Appel,” giving the opening times as 22.00–8.00 daily. Mlčoch’s action of-
fered an interesting microcosm of the power dynamics he perceived in
the exhibition structure itself, effectively testing the extent of the gen-
erosity of the hosts by asking them to open their doors to those less for-
tunate than themselves tout court, not limiting the good will toward the
less fortunate East European “other” of the art world but asking that it
be extended to those on De Appel’s doorstep.
According to Marga van Mechelen, “Works and Words” was in many
respects “a semi-failure, but an interesting failure nonetheless.”39 She
recollects that certain artists were unhappy about the way in which the
exhibition was framed and that Hungarian and Yugoslavian artists in
particular were critical of the way the event brought artists together in
relation to stereotypical assumptions about “Eastern Europe,” rather
364 Chapter 13
than presenting the work in relation to developments in the interna-
tional art world at large. They “wanted to be judged on the merit of their
work and not on their geographical origin. … Some of them felt a greater
affinity with Western European and American artists and their work
than with the work of their own countrymen.”40 Such late 1970s debates
around individualism and internationalism revealed the complexity of
seeking to overcome the pernicious effects of Cold War divisions in ar-
tistic developments. It also highlighted the complexity of the position
occupied by Yugoslavia as a nonaligned country which, while socialist,
was neither part of the Soviet bloc nor cut off from the West. In his
catalog essay on “The Situation of the New Art in Yugoslavia,” Denegri
noted: “In a world so distinctively divided (into political and military
blocs; into countries ranging from highly developed to extremely un-
derdeveloped ones), one should not cherish the idealistic myth about
the alleged internationalisation of art, but neither should the reasons
for the socio-political separation be automatically transposed onto the
cultural level. … Some real chances to establish corresponding rela-
tions within the area of art still exist, not only between individuals but
also between different social environments.” He objected to a Western
tendency to reduce the new and experimental art from “the countries
of ‘real socialism’” to the status of a “political epiphenomenon.”41
One of the features of the new art which Denegri identified as be-
ing potentially shared across systems was the fact that “in all the so-
cial systems in the modern world, art has been brought—in different
ways—into the state of marginality and of manipulation.” He conceded
that this was also the case in Yugoslavia, where “there are develop-
ments which indicate the marginal position of the representatives of
the new art: mainly they gather around students’ and youth cultural
centers, and have scarce opportunities to influence activities within the
art system on a wider scale.” Nevertheless, he writes, “such art does not
require any kind of paternalism: the fundamental issue for the artists
engaged in the innovative art is working out and developing their own
work.” He concludes: “despite all the sociological determinants, art to-
day still is (and to an increasing extent) a problem of the individual

identity of the persons involved, and only in this respect one can come
to understand it in a right and adequate manner.”42
Goran Đorđević also wrote to the organizers forcefully outlining
similar objections to participating under the proposed rubric. He ex-
plained that he believed the organization of any “exhibition of artists
from ‘East Europe’ (with Yugoslavia) or ‘East Europe and Yugoslavia’”
was “not justified” because of the different social and cultural “context
in which they work and their relation to the present art practice in the
world.” He argued that an exhibition of this sort served to reaffirm the
myth of the freedom of the West and of its “universality” and that the
“significance of such ‘ghetto’ exhibition is, mainly, reduced to its po-
litical dimension (dissident exotic), while the nature of the work them-
selves, their problematic character and significance are pushed into the
background.” He proposed that the emphasis should be on particular
problems rather than on geopolitics, and that “a much more interest-
ing thing would be to organize an international exhibition / meeting of
the artists whose work (because of its radical attitude towards the exist-
ing art praxis or its [critique] of bourgeois consciousness and morals)
meets more or less expressed resistance and refusal in the milieu in
which they work and live.”43
For the Dutch organizers, the design of the show had been moti-
vated by a sense that “the art world at that moment was dominated by
the United States and this one-sided orientation had to be broken.”44
The De Appel staff had sought to conceive of the event as showing “the
existence of a cross-border international avant-garde.”45 Van Mechelen
recollects that “artists complained that whenever attention was devoted
to them and their work it was always couched in terms of nationality of
groupings, and never as individuals worthy of the same attention en-
joyed somehow automatically or by default by Western artists.” Efforts
were made “to ensure personal contact was as vibrant and dynamic as
possible—just as it had been during I AM, by organizing communal
dinners at De Appel in the evenings and by putting up the guests from
abroad in the homes of people from the Dutch art world.”46 Despite
the reservations of many of the participants about aspects of the event,
overall Van Mechelen concludes that the exhibition “certainly served
366 Chapter 13
to encourage mutual communication between the artists of a greater
Europe.”47 De Appel’s interest in seeking to foster a model of interna-
tionalism that overcame the relatively limited circulation of informa-
tion about developments in Eastern European art was in part inspired
by other, earlier initiatives designed to produce an international field.
One of the channels by which information on Eastern European art had
reached De Appel had been the magazine Flash Art, published in Milan.

14
Prague-Milan /
Venice-Moscow /
Moscow-Prague
Flash Art was founded in Rome in 1967, edited and published by

Giancarlo Politi, and based in Milan from 1971. Characterized by its
“journalistic tone and emphasis on information,” it soon established
itself as a leading magazine on contemporary art.1 The magazine’s pro-
file was politicized early on by virtue of Politi’s publication of Germano
Celant’s “Notes for a Guerrilla War” at the end of 1967. Celant proposed
that artists take on “the system,” which was rigged in such a way that
anyone could “criticise, sabotage, demystify, and propose reforms, just
so long as he stays inside the system.” He argued that the artist should
turn “from an exploited tool into a guerrilla activist” and seek to “select
the place of combat, to maintain the advantage of mobility, to surprise,
and to strike.”2 The magazine also aligned itself with socially engaged
and critical artists such as Hans Haacke and Joseph Beuys early on,
publishing a letter of protest at the Guggenheim Museum’s cancella-
tion of Haacke’s show of 1972 in its May-July issue that year. Besides
the magazine’s openness to radical thinking and critical practice, the
determining factor in Flash Art’s relevance for experimental artists in
Central and Eastern Europe was its commitment to internationalism.
As the editors later reflected, from 1970 the magazine became ever more
outward-looking, “concentrating on foreign artists and publishing di-
rect reports from the artists’ native countries.” The idea of “reporting”
rather than analyzing was a sign of the times, marking a shift in the
status of an art criticism potentially rendered redundant by the pace of
change and artists’ new concerns and leading the editors to speculate
that “the informative nature” of Flash Art went “hand in hand with the
avant-garde’s now predominant ideas on the end of interpretative criti-
cism.”3 In this way the magazine presented itself as a vehicle for artists
rather than a mouthpiece of criticism, becoming a space for artists to
present special projects to a public directly, effectively bypassing the
infrastructure of galleries that characterized the Western art system.
Artists across Central and Eastern Europe were soon sending their
work to Politi hoping to be featured on its pages. Art from Czechoslo-
vakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia began to appear in the maga-
zine as of 1973. The earliest instance was Flash Art 41 (June 1973) which
included photographs from Gábor Attalai’s series Process of Balding
(1970) and several images of his “self-actions,” including one in which
he pressed a painted aluminum star against his arm for an hour, brand-
ing himself with the decoration “for socialist culture” (4 April 1972). The
date of the work coincided with the major communist public holiday
marking the Soviet liberation of Hungary. The December 1973–January
1974 issue (Flash Art 43) gave over a page to work by the painter A. R.
Penck, who “at the time was still living in East Germany and known
only to a very few specialists in the West.”4 From April 1974 the maga-
Chapter zine changed its format from 14 tabloid to magazine and began to include
a range of special sections for England, France, Germany, the United
States, and Eastern Europe, in some cases with the support of corre-
spondents in these locations. Artists were contacted and invited to
send in submissions and to share their proposals for further “young
Prague-Milan / Venice-Moscow / Moscow-Prague
good artists” to contact (figure 14.1).
Flash Art 44–45 (April 1974) featured documentation of the actions
Limit, Drawing, and Watching by Karel Miler, while Flash Art 46–47 (June-
July 1974) had on the cover Braco Dimitrijević’s Casual Passerby I Met at
2.55pm, and a “Flash Art Eastern Europe” section inside featuring art-
ists from Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. Politi had visited Yu-
goslavia several times and included Abramović, Damnjan, Dimitrijević,
Nuša and Srečo Dragan, OHO, and Trbuljak. The Czechoslovak sec-
tion showcased Filko, Miroslav Halas, Štembera, and Valoch. The Pol-
ish selection included some of the best-networked artists of the times
but also less well-known emerging artists, ranging from Kozłowski
to Dobrosław Bagiński, Janusz Haka, Jolanta Marcolla, and Zdzisław
370 Chapter 14
Sosnowski.5 A further edition of “Flash Art Eastern Europe” appeared
in the autumn of 1974, this time including work by Tót, Natalia LL, and
Stanislav Kolíbal (figure 14.2). Over the years that followed, many is-
sues presented works by Eastern European artists as well as informa-
tion about relevant events and exhibitions; issue 64–65 (May-June 1976)
Figure 14.1
Flash Art, letter to Jiři Valoch, 1 April 1974.
Courtesy of Marinko Sudac Collection.
Prague-Milan / Venice-Moscow / Moscow-Prague 371

Figure 14.2
Flash Art International Review of Arts
48–49 (October-November 1974),
including Flash Art Eastern Europe,
cover with Endre Tót. Courtesy of Helena
Kontova and Giancarlo Politi.
372 Chapter 14
advertised a group show including Lakner in Brussels, a forthcoming
Video Meeting in Zagreb, and a Krzysztof Wodiczko exhibition at Gale-
ria Foksal.
Flash Art provided Eastern European artists with a significant new
visual platform. One of the boldest instances of the magazine harness-
ing the iconicity of its Eastern European contributors was the cover of
issue 60–61 (December 1975–January 1976). Only the third time the cover
of the magazine had appeared in color, this featured a photograph
from Natalia LL’s Consumer Art series (figure 14.3).6 The cover presented
the new face of Eastern European art as edgy, erotic, and full of post-
structuralist/postconceptual ambivalence designed to resonate with an
international audience.7 Although in general the approach of the mag-
azine was that “it was more interesting to document what was going
on—not to comment on it but to publish the artists’ explanations and
artists’ texts,” textual engagement with the Eastern European content
was nevertheless provided by Helena Kontova, who began contributing
to the magazine in 1976.8 Kontova had studied art history at Charles
University in Prague in the early 1970s and had won a prize in the form
of a four-month study trip to Italy. After completing her diploma she
worked at the National Gallery for six months, sharing a workroom in
the museum with Karel Miler who was responsible for the academic
oversight of the museum deposit. Štembera was working at the Mu-
seum of Industrial Design around the corner. These official workplaces
inevitably became lively sites of unofficial exchange: “Every day some-
one would come to our office—an artist or a critic or a theoretician. Petr
Rezek was part of the group … they were always bringing translations of
new essays … from Avalanche and other magazines.” Kontova recollects,
“My colleagues Karel Miler and Petr Štembera and so on were already in
touch with Giancarlo and they were showing me the magazine in our
small, let’s say, underground, library.” Štembera and the others were
especially interested in American art at the time: “Štembera had a big
network of contacts and was definitely trying hard to be recognized …
one of the goals was obviously also to be published in Flash Art.”9
Kontova chose to go to Milan in part because she already knew
about Flash Art and was keen to meet all the “most important people

Figure 14.3
Flash Art International Review of Arts 60–61
(December 1975–January 1976), cover with
Natalia LL, Consumer Art, 1975. Courtesy of
Helena Kontova and Giancarlo Politi.
374 Chapter 14
in contemporary art at that moment.” While in Milan, she contacted
Flash Art and met with Politi: “We started to talk about different things
and he started to ask me what was happening in Prague. He knew many
things, but had never visited. He was already in touch with Chalupecký
and with Miler and all those people … he started to say that he would
like to go to Prague and things like that … he invited me to a Chris
Burden opening the next day here in Milan.”10 Kontova and Politi were
soon involved and he invited her to contribute to the magazine on a
regular basis. Issue no. 66–67 (July-August 1976) carried “A contribution
to the question of late cubism in Czech painting” by Kontova—an aca-
demic text on the Czech avant-garde that lent an interesting, if in some
respects tangential, historical depth to Flash Art’s existing engagement
with contemporary artistic developments in Czechoslovakia. The same
issue included a five-page section entitled “Czechoslovakia: Informa-
tion” and featuring Knížák, Miroslav Klivar, Vladimír Ambroz, Mlčoch,
Juraj Meliš, Štembera, Dalibor Chartny, and Miler.11 The centerfold was
given over to Tót. Issue 68–69 (October-November 1976) carried a two-
page interview with Kolář and a page each about Miler, Mlčoch, and
Štembera, with extracts from interviews and artists’ statements. Over
the course of 1977, further Czechoslovak artists were presented, in col-
laboration with Kontova, who conducted a substantial interview with
Knížák accompanied by images documenting his actions, and another
with Kolíbal.12 These initiatives were symptomatic of the rise of the “art-
ist’s interview” format at the time, and served to further pioneer the
trend of firsthand accounts of their art by artists themselves, arguably
a trend that was particularly valuable in relation to the presentation
of international artists from contexts such as Eastern Europe which
remained all too unfamiliar to a Western readership. The interviews
made it clear that, despite functioning within a different sociopolitical
context, these artists’ concerns and interests were far from isolated or
obscure but ran very much in parallel with developments and experi-
ments elsewhere.
Issue 76–77 of Flash Art (July-August 1977) carried an unexpected
centerfold filled with reproductions of black and white contact sheets of
photographs taken at a lively wedding (figure 14.4). Politi and Kontova

376 Chapter 14
Figure 14.4
Flash Art International Review of Arts
(July-August 1977), centerfold with contact
sheets from Helena Kontova and Giancarlo
Politi’s wedding in Prague, 1977. Courtesy of
Helena Kontova and Giancarlo Politi.
had been married in a castle outside Prague in April 1977, and the pho-
tographs served as a visual record of the event. Chalupecký and Knížák
were their witnesses. Knížák had presented the couple with a specially
designed wedding dress and organized a performance the preceding
day—Wedding Ceremony for Helena and Giancarlo. Part dress, part jump-
suit, the curious outfit was red with appliquéd plastic flowers, joining
the two into a single, socialist unit with a sprinkling of flower power
(figure 14.5). Photographs taken by Knížák show the couple modeling
their new Aktual clothing in a field, wearing striped socks. A ceremony
followed, involving singing and drinking red wine mixed with drops of
one another’s blood. Kontova recollects that their wedding feast that
night was a great social occasion: “We had dinner in this small restau-
rant at Loretánské náměstí in Prague and all those guys were invited—
Mlčoch, Anděl, Kovanda, Štembera, Miler—all the most experimental
artists were there, some 15–20 people … Jiří Kolář, Stanislav Kolíbal, Mi-
lan Grygar … it was very interesting because some of them met for the
first time.”13 Here again, as in the meeting between Kovanda and the
Prague performance trio in Warsaw, an occasion involving guests from
abroad served as a means of bringing together compatriots who had
not previously been in touch.
Chalupecký and Politi would go on corresponding for many years.
Politi brought international materials for his Czechoslovak colleagues
whenever he visited. In one letter of 1977, he wrote that he would shortly
be coming to Prague and mentioned that he would bring a copy of Lucy
Lippard’s Six Years.14 In another, he asked whether Chalupecký would
like any more books and explained that he was coming by car so would

378 Chapter 14
Figure 14.5
Helena Kontova and Giancarlo Politi, Flash
Art editors: Wedding Ceremony, dressed
by Milan Knížák. Prague, April 29, 1977.
Photo Milan Knížák. Courtesy of Helena
Kontova and Giancarlo Politi.
also bring wine, asking which Italian wines he liked and saying he was
looking forward to having dinner together.15 He also wrote to say that
he was going to be sending Chalupecký a book on Hermann Nitsch and
a cassette tape with an interview between Duchamp, Richard Hamilton,
and George Ricke, asking whether Chalupecký had a tape recorder and
offering to bring him one if not. In the same letter, Politi commented
on the feverish pace of art world life: “We are very tired,” he wrote; “In
the last five days, we have travelled by car for 2,600 km Milan, Kassel,
Dusseldorf, Bochum, Munich etc. We are really at the limits of our
strength. Helena much more so than me. I hope that this life will not be
too stressful for her.”16 Apparently not; Kontova became official coeditor
of Flash Art. She recalls: “Since the beginning I was trying to learn as
much as possible. I found it really incredibly interesting to be in con-
tact with the reality of the art scene and every day be in contact with
very stimulating individuals, to have the possibility to compare many
different ideas—not just be closed in one room and study in the books
and archives. I really enjoyed being in direct contact with art and the
real objects of art and performances; being in touch with all this and
having the possibility to talk to the people who create these things and
are the protagonists of certain moments. Obviously for me that was the
most exciting thing I could imagine.”17
Kontova recollects that there was a sense of Eastern Europeans
sticking together and showing one another support: “I think there was
a kind of solidarity involved a little bit. I guess, for me personally, it was

certainly exciting to see artists from Eastern Europe. Also it was impor-
tant to see how this art can prove itself, be important and interesting
for other people as well … there wasn’t really an art system that would
support it … so people were creating things without any real possibil-
ity of success.” She characterizes Eastern European art of the period as
a “moment of authenticity” lacking in Western art at the time, despite
being “perfectly academically researched.”18 That she mentions the lack
of an “art system” to support the work being presented is significant in
view of the degree to which Flash Art itself increasingly came to serve
as a substitute for many of the functions of a system always ultimately
geared toward distribution. Flash Art not only distributed reproduc-
tions of artworks, published artists’ statements, and offered informa-
tion about exhibitions; it also served to promote attempts on the part
of Eastern Europeans, whether at home or as émigrés, to contribute to
the development of a new art system. Among the significant initiatives
of this sort were announcements for the EP Galerie in the GDR and the
founding of the Vitrine sur l’Art Actuel in Paris, by Anka Ptaszkowska,
which showed a smiling photograph of the founder and offered con-
gratulations: “good work Anka!”19
In 1975, Politi launched a further groundbreaking initiative: Art Di-
ary. The World’s Art Directory. Perneczky refers to it as the “first printed
version of the network” and explains that the Italian editor was the first
to “recognize the international significance of the address lists” cir-
culating among artists in the 1970s and to “make capital out of their
business potential.”20 Art Diary served to further cement the position
of Eastern European art and artists on the Western art world map. The
pocket-book-sized publication appeared in an updated version each
year and listed artists’ names and addresses in countries around the
globe (arranged alphabetically). It also provided a good deal of other
information designed to make art-related travel as painless and pro-
ductive as possible. The focus was on artists and critics, then museums
and galleries, but there were also myriad categories that varied from
place to place as appropriate, including publishing houses, photogra-
phers, archives, bookshops, hotels, bars, restaurants, taxis, and even
emergency phone numbers. Perneczky concludes: “Superb service, I
380 Chapter 14
would say.” He had firsthand experience of this formalization of the
hitherto informal practice of art-related traveling and networking: “I
still remember the days when, bashfully clutching copies of the Art Di-
ary, certain unknown mail artists, or critics from some noted papers, or
even some young and ambitious museum hands knocked on the doors
of those lucky (or luckless) people who were featured in the Politi list.”21
In a letter to the organizers of the Venice Biennale in which he de-
nounced their profligacy, Politi described Art Diary as “a nice and prac-
tical little agenda (furthermore, very efficient and it costs only L.3.000),
compiled right here in my office by a girl during breaks from her edito-
rial work,” asking rhetorically: “If we have managed with very limited
means, to put together 5,000 addresses, employing an artisan-like sys-
tem, and with an expenditure of 100.000 Lire ((120$), that’s right, one
hundred thousand), I cannot understand why, after years of work, hun-
dreds of millions of Lire and the help of some graduate technicians, you
still haven’t concluded anything, while without my agenda you wouldn’t
even have been able to invite the artists to the Biennale, since you only
knew their names (in many instances misspelled) and not their ad-
dresses.”22 His diatribe reveals the chasm separating the experience and
financial means of the diverse cultural spheres whose connection the
“agenda” accomplished, for it connected artists unable to even afford a
magazine subscription to a lavishly funded institutionalized structure
too sclerotic to keep pace with contemporaneity. Kontova recollects:
“People were using it like a bible. If you were in, people would drop on
your door, they called you. Giancarlo had his own diary with addresses.
At a certain moment he decided he would publish it, so it started as his
own diary … then there came this idea that it has to be in your pocket,
invented I think by our friend the British artist James Collins.”23
Politi soon began to delegate the compilation and updating of the
lists to local artists. György Galántai and Júlia Klaniczay, for instance,
collaborated on compiling the Hungarian section in 1980, after meeting
Politi on a trip to Italy: “First we met [Ugo] Carrega and he took us to an
opening in the evening and there he introduced us to Politi. He had al-
ready heard about Galántai and heard about the chapel and he remem-
bered maybe from the material we sent, maybe from others, and he

immediately asked us to help him produce the next issue of Art Diary and
to add Hungarian names to it.” Clearly, there was a good deal of power
that came with the task of acting as local editors. Klaniczay recalls that
she and Galántai came into conflict with Beke as a result: “We diluted the
Hungarian avant-garde. … He had an exclusive list while we added every-
one that was active at the time.”24 Needless to say, those included could
not afford subscription fees. In theory artists who wanted to be included
had to pay, unless they were already on Politi’s list, but in the case of the
Eastern European listings he waived the fee. Indeed Politi was apparently
willing to come to a range of agreements: Klaniczay recollects that he of-
fered to send them a subscription to Flash Art in exchange for a famous
Hungarian brand of hair loss shampoo. Klaniczay echoes Kontova: “Art
Diary was the bible of the artists of the 70s and 80s.”25
Politi had established himself as a champion of Eastern European
artists at home and abroad, and his publications played a significant
part in supporting many in launching international careers. His com-
mitment to less well-known artists put him at loggerheads with col-
leagues in the official Italian art world, however. In his letter of protest
addressed to the organizers of the Biennale, Vittorio Gregotti and Carlo
Ripa di Meana, calling readers to complete a form to demand their res-
ignation, he wrote that the list of artists invited to participate in the
Biennale was “laughable, painful or perhaps comical, and once again
we feel ashamed of the level of culture expressed by our official struc-
tures.” He ridiculed the committee’s selection, saying that “all these
gentlemen had arrived with the list of their friends in their pockets.” A
substantial part of the letter is given over specifically to raising the is-
sue of “East Europe.” Politi notes: “You who profess to be democratic
and progressive, have invited 6 artists to represent 4 countries (Czecho-
slovakia, East Germany, Poland, Hungary) as if art and research did not
exist in those countries; but you invited 23 American artists, 16 Italian,
10 French, 7 German, 5 Swedish, 4 English, and others. HURRAH! ART
EXISTS ONLY IN THE CAPITALISTIC COUNTRIES,” he exclaimed indig-
nantly. He pointed out that “3 of these 6 artists do not live in their own
countries, and one, Penk, lives in East Germany but deals exclusively
with West German galleries and museums.” In short, he summed up:
382 Chapter 14
“your selection was made (what a coincidence) only among refugees.
THIS IS BAD FAITH, POLITICAL PROVOCATION, MISINFORMATION,
since incidentally, the most interesting and up-to-date artists, and
anyway those who might interest us for an analysis of a socio-political
context, are still over there, in those countries, once again forgotten and
discriminated against by you.”26
Politi expressed in the strongest terms his disappointment at the
Biennale’s selection of artists, asking that the organizers be removed
from office “for reasons of inefficiency and waste of public money.” His
letter is a rare instance of a high-profile Western figure making a public
case for East European art in such strong terms, and though the initial
response of the addressees was to sue Politi for defamation, it seems
that his critique touched a nerve, for the following year Ripa di Meana
was to put on the controversial, month-long Biennale del Dissenso—
the Biennale of Dissent—in the winter of 1977.27
Ripa di Meana had taken up his term as president of the Biennale
in 1974 and had sought to chart a new course for the event, devoting his
first edition of the Biennale to an attack on Pinochet and announcing
in March 1977 that he was planning an Eastern European dissidence
event.28 The Soviet ambassador in Rome was vocal in his condemnation
of the project: “If you pursue this idea of giving undue importance to
‘dissent,’ we will lodge a strong protest. Eastern countries will join us.
We consider this emphasis on dissent a provocation. It will not be good
for you,” he warned.29 Presumably concerned to remain on good terms
with the Soviet authorities and to retain strong trade ties, the Italian
government suspended the Biennale’s funding, resulting in a delay to
the schedule. The event opened in November. As the Estonian art histo-
rian Maria-Kristiina Soomre recounts: “Within thirty-one chilly autumn
days there were seven different conferences, three exhibitions, and an
endless list of concerts, recitals, film screenings, debates and semi-
nars in Venice. The events attracted 220 000 visitors and included 350
participants from 24 different countries.”30 The day of the opening saw
Solzhenitsyn denounced in the Roman press, and the mayor of Rome,
Giulio Carlo Argan, called the Biennale a “Solzhenitsyn parade.”31 An-
drei Sakharov published a response entitled “The Archipelago of Lies”

and recorded a special greeting, played at the opening event. Other
highlights included a lecture by György Konrád on dissidence in litera-
ture. As Katarína Lichvárová has pointed out: “The inclusiveness of the
Biennale of Dissent was problematic. … It comprised three exhibitions,
each focusing on art, literature and film. The exhibitions on literature
and film included works from all over Eastern Europe but the art exhi-
bition showed only (or overwhelmingly) Russian art.”32
The curator and art historian Enrico Crispolti was invited to curate
the visual exhibition program, together with Gabriella Moncada.33 Re-
sponses to the event were inevitably influenced by the internal politics
of the Italian left at the time, and with the centrist-oriented Italian So-
cialist Party’s attempt to challenge the Communist Party’s monopoly
on mainstream opposition in Italy. Despite his Italian Communist
Party credentials, Crispolti’s efforts to engage in a dialogue with cul-
tural representatives in the USSR and the satellite countries failed, for
he was interested in alternative art while Soviet cultural representatives
pretended that such art did not exist.34 Works were regularly smuggled
out, however, and the exhibition was sourced from Western collec-
tions and émigré artists.35 None of the invited artists from the Soviet
bloc were permitted to attend. Soomre argues that the Italian political
context made Crispolti’s position a delicate juggling act: “Acting as a
middleman, Crispolti tried to reconcile Western leftist criticism of the
‘dissent’ positions with the apolitical nature of the art presented, re-
minding Western viewers of the specific conditions this art was created
in.” She notes that because of his affiliation with the Italian Communist
Party, he had to take a “decisive position on the question of ‘dissent’”
and to defend the politicized context of the exhibition and the Bien-
nale as a whole. He did so by arguing that political positions should be
“balanced and equally alert to the dangers of Western society.”36 Ripa di
Meana, himself a member of the Italian Socialist Party, read out loud
a list of names of those denied permission to travel to the Biennale.37
The main exhibition was entitled “La nuova arte sovietica: Una
prospettiva non ufficiale” (New Soviet art: An unofficial perspective),
and held in the basement of the 1960s Palazzetto dello Sport in the
Arsenale, as the usual venues reportedly refused to rent space to the
384 Chapter 14
organizers, given the controversy around the event.38 The exhibition
was organized thematically and installed in a modular, labyrinthine
structure. In addition to several sections devoted to figurative work, it
included one on kineticism devoted to the group Dvizhenie to which
Lev Nusberg belonged (figure 14.6), a section on “Irony and the Every-
day,” and another on “Conceptual Mediation, Actions and Happening,”
as well as a number of historical avant-garde works and documentary
slide presentations.39 Sculptures by Ernst Neizvestny were featured
prominently in the exhibition, and the artist’s presence in person un-
doubtedly represented an important statement in view of the fact that
Figure 14.6
Lev Nusberg and the Dvizhenie group,
Artificial Environments, late 1960s,
installation in “La nuova arte sovietica:
Una prospettiva non ufficiale,” Biennale del
Dissenso, B77 Venice, 1977. Photo: Mark
Edward Smith. Courtesy of Fondazione La
Biennale di Venezia–Archivio Storico delle
Arti Contemporanee.

he had emigrated the year before. His presence, like that of exiled East
German acoustic guitarist and singer Wolf Biermann, was seen as a
coup for the organizers.
Among the experimental artists included were Collective Actions,
the Gnezdo (Nest) group, Komar and Melamid, and the Mukhomor
group. Indeed, Collective Actions reportedly took their name from the
exhibition catalog, where their activities were first described as “azioni
collettive.”40 Komar and Melamid had a hand in putting the organizers
in touch with the Gnezdo members, who contributed for the occasion
their deadpan diagram Let’s Become One Meter Closer!, proposing that
citizens of East and West pick up their shovels and begin digging, put-
ting a materialist spin on the idea of rapprochement.
Viktor Skersis recalls laconically: “In the USSR most of the art was
just plain paintings. If they wanted something dissident and at least
looking modern, there was not much to choose from. We were con-
tacted through Komar/Melamid. The artworks were smuggled.”41 Be-
sides those artists who voluntarily contributed works to the exhibition
upon request, there were others whose works were borrowed directly
from foreign collectors, often without consultation. As a result, Edit
Sasvári explains, 43 of the Soviet artists “sent protest letters to Venice,
objecting to the misuse of their works, acquired from private collec-
tions, at the ‘anti-Soviet’ exhibition.”42 Tiziana Villani has argued that
only two explicitly antisocialist works were included, however, so the
artists were more tainted by the tone of the occasion than incrimi-
nated by their works.43 Sasvári notes that “the West-German press aptly
pointed to the organizers’ blunder: had the Biennale organizers re-
sponsibly considered what consequences participation at the Biennale
would have for East-European artists? Or had they at all contemplated
whether or why dissident artists should want to sacrifice a hard-won
status quo back at home for the role of the extra offered to them within
such a clumsy political game?”44 She concludes that the Biennale spoke
more to the Western need to perceive creativity behind the Iron Curtain
as “dissident” than to the real concerns of Soviet or Eastern European
artists themselves, despite taking place in the context of détente follow-
ing the Helsinki agreements of 1975.45
386 Chapter 14
In addition to the exhibition program, which Ripa di Meana sub-
sequently treated as rather marginal in relation to other aspects of the
festival, the schedule contained a wide array of colloquia and other
meetings. Ripa di Meana wrote to Chalupecký in August 1977 inviting
him to take part in an event scheduled for 15 November–15 December,
which was to be “entirely devoted to the art and culture of the countries
of Eastern Europe.”46 He proposed that Chalupecký host a two-day col-
loquium on the theme “Qu’est-ce l’art de ‘Europe de l’Est?,’” with the
aim of focusing on “the problem of the lack of any art worthy of this
name represented by the status quo in all domains,”47 although he also
later claimed that it had not been intended to be “a crusade against the
Soviet system.”48 Klaus Groh spent a week visiting the Biennale, along
with Géza Perneczky. He recalls that the event was “perfect” in orga-
nizational terms, with “simultaneous translation in … 10 languages. …
[Wolf] Biermann was sitting there on the stage and there was an Italian
singer singing next to him. It was excellent. It was impossible. I think it
was just a big information, about what was happening.” He mentions
a gathering organized by Peter Spielmann at which he lectured while
“everyone was telling any activity he did concerning dissident work. It
was not a workshop. It was just information. It was not in the Bien-
nale Centre. It was in the town hall or somewhere … Lev Nusberg was
there, and there were some Russian journalists.”49 Perneczky bumped
into Dieter Honisch, the director of the National Gallery in Berlin, at
the airport in Milan, en route to Venice, and together they made their
way to St. Mark’s Square by vaporetto in the pitch black. In the morn-
ing, Perneczky met Groh while registering at the offices of the Biennale;
they were soon joined by Honisch and arguing about whether Malevich
was a cubist or not over grappa and red wine. “What a clique!” Perneczky
reminisces.50
The most interesting person Perneczky says he met was Lev Nus-
berg. He recollects that his Russian colleague was in love with Venice,
pointing up at washing lines strung between the windows of the streets
and exclaiming in transnational European to his newfound Hungar-
ian friend: “Amore! Eine große Liebe. Cette constructiones!” Perneczky
later speculated: “He had been in Paris for a year and had not woken up

from the first amazement. His fame preceded him, and he was accepted
everywhere as a prince.”51 Honisch took the opportunity to arrange
an exhibition of Nusberg’s work in Berlin, and the “clique” wandered
about “from restaurant to restaurant, from cheese to red wine, from
red wine to Italian cheese and grappa.” Perneczky describes a memo-
rable evening of cheese and wine when they were joined by Restany and
his wife. Nusberg and Restany had already met, and Honisch and Groh
were introduced to him. When Perneczky’s turn came, he recalls: “Res-
tany looked at me over his glasses and patted my hand. ‘He’s very nice.
What about Endre Tót, a Hungarian, my very good friend, you know
him?’ he said in French, and when he saw that I was not sure if I un-
derstood it, he replied in German too slowly, with the words ‘Der Tót
ist mein Freund, ein-Freund-von-mir, was ist mit ihm?’ I told him I had
received a letter from him, but he wrote it all with zero: 0000 … nothing
came out of them. ‘Vrai! C’est vrai! Mon ami, Tót!’, he chirped. Then he
leaned back and looked amazed: ‘We’ve come from Bombay.’ Nusberg
explained: ‘Pierre is a grand gourmand. Großer Gurman!’ Nusberg was
enthusiastic. Then he turned to me: ‘Très sympathique! Vous—no! Tu,
tu! Du-bist-sehr-simphatique!’”52
Nusberg’s participation in the Biennale of Dissent was considered
problematic by some; his status as an unofficial artist was highly un-
certain in view of his regular employment on state commissions and
prominent contributions to major official events, such as the 1966 cele-
bration “Fifty Years of Soviet Power.” Dvizhenie had regular exhibitions
and were permitted to travel and to participate in international events,
representing the USSR at Documenta in 1968, among other places. David
Crowley has rightly noted that Nusberg “was a well-connected and skill-
ful operator, adept at persuading the Soviet authorities to support the
group’s projects.”53 Indeed, part of Dvizhenie’s importance consisted in
its ability to “disseminate abstract art into a Soviet public sphere that
was infested with Socialist Realism.”54 The poet and collector Alexander
Glezer was one of those who saw the choice as a problem, and wrote
to Ripa di Meana to explain why he felt the inclusion to be inappropri-
ate.55 Many of the works on display were from Glezer’s collection; he
may have seen Crispolti’s direct communication with Nusberg and his
388 Chapter 14
inclusion of works from the artist’s personal archive as a threat to the
integrity of his collection. Soomre rightly notes that such exchanges
show how high emotions ran among those invested in the production
of narratives of “dissident” Soviet art, proposing that “the ‘true’ nature
of ‘new’ soviet art was beginning to be designed by the interested par-
ties themselves, and relatively neutral foreign middlemen served little
purpose in this process of branding and history writing.”56
Recalling key moments from the conference in which they all par-
ticipated, Perneczky noted the passion with which Restany spoke about
parallels between American pop and socialist realism and the dema-
terialization of art in the years after 1966.57 Groh reportedly gave a lec-
ture arguing that if everyone was a dissident then no one could be, and
Perneczky talked about the legacy of Malevich’s square and Lissitzky’s
circle for the Eastern European avant-garde, citing for example Pauer’s
Pseudo Cube. Glezer recounted the history of unofficial exhibitions in
the Soviet Union. Perneczky recalls that while “the Russians were en-
thusiastic,” others, such as Spielmann (who was a Czech émigré), saw
the biennial as “just a big attempt to sell the emigration.”58 Many con-
sidered Ripa di Meana’s undertaking to have been a fiasco. It resulted
in Socialist countries boycotting the 1978 edition of the official Biennale
(Hungary and Czechoslovakia returned in 1980, and the USSR in 1982).
The Russian exhibition at the Palazzetto dello Sport caught the visi-
tors’ imagination, however. Perneczky recalls: “Just at the end of the
show, somewhat obscured, in front of a series of photos, I felt that there
were really modern works, concepts, performance photos and films of
similar style.” He describes feeling amazed by one Kabakov painting in
particular, “a huge white canvas, intact, as tight as the Russian winter”
(figure 14.7), and another that was “hard, straight, blue like an icon.”
Honisch was reportedly “in a fever: ‘Concept icon!’, he shouted. ‘I’ll buy
it!’” But it was not for sale. Perneczky claims that Nusberg “noticed that
although Honisch had invited him to exhibit, he had found Kabakov
more demanding.”59
Artists in the USSR developed extensive international networks via
émigré colleagues, foreign collectors, and visiting diplomats. Among
those smuggling Moscow conceptualists’ works out of the USSR early

Figure 14.7
Ilya Kabakov, Bagel, 1970, installation in
“La nuova arte sovietica: Una prospettiva
non ufficiale,” Biennale del Dissenso,
B77 Venice, 1977. Photo: Mark Edward
Smith. Courtesy of Fondazione La
Biennale di Venezia–Archivio Storico
delle Arti Contemporanee.
on, prior to the wave of emigrations, had been the Hungarian art his-
torian Éva Körner. Tamás Szentjóby recalls: “When everyone was still
trying to get to Paris [Körner] was already passionately travelling to
Moscow to check out contemporary art there; she knew and she hoped
that the wind was blowing from the east … she even smuggled things,
Kabakov’s drawings, for instance, disguised as tablecloths.”60 Körner
was an editor at the Corvina Press in those years and was working on
the Soviet avant-gardes, smuggling in images for reproduction in the
exhibition catalogs that could only be published on condition that they
were not translated into Russian:
390 Chapter 14
The Fine Arts Society had an exchange program with the Russians, and at every
Christmas there were leftover trips, this is how I traveled to Moscow between
’69–’81, until the death of Larissa Zhadova. It may sound terrible for someone
familiar with the situation, but I was happy and free in Moscow. There, sur-
face life was wonderfully distinguished from the cellars and the attics, and
life had much greater dimensions than in Hungary. The first journey was an
official mission in ’69, I was supposed to give a talk for the 50th anniversary of
the [Hungarian] Republic of Councils with Nóra Aradi. However, I went to see
János Mácza, whose address I received from Kassák. They were happy because
they finally got their apartment—previously they rented a flat together with a
former convict sentenced for armed robbery and murder. … Later it was the
Rodchenkos who introduced me to the younger artists, Yankilevsky and Kaba-
kov, who in turn introduced me to the others. All this happened in an instant:
it was an incredible, wireless transport system.61
Körner later explained that she and Kabakov had been friends since
she visited him in Moscow in 1969: “I bought drawings from him but
he gifted me with this portfolio. We both had hoped that before long I
would be able to arrange an exhibition both for him and his artist friends
here in Hungary, or at least get a publication printed. It didn’t materi-
alise.” She did, however, manage to put on a one-day show for Kabakov
at the Fővárosi Művelődési Ház in 1974 and tried to put on another at the
Bartok 32 Gallery in 1977, but this was banned before opening. As she
explained: “In order to host any living Soviet artist’s exhibition, the Soviet
Federation’s permission was required.” She says that when she went “to
the country of Malevich … the Russian absurd that I found there was not
just disconnected from the big Russian suprematists, constructivists: it
was alien to me. The smiling, playful generosity that covered the stifling
ravine (Kabakov), the undisguised rough distortion (Yankilevsky)—this
was something different, something very Russian: embittered yet unwav-
ering and hopeful … they had to reckon with a much more immense pros-
pect for constrained reality, compared to us. They settled in for a lasting
internal resistance that could only be survived with irony.”62
Flash Art 76/77 (July-August 1977) carried a ten-page special feature
surveying the experimental art scene in the USSR, as well as a feature

on Documenta 6. Its cover took the form of a grid of 12 apparently
random images, one showing Knížák dressed in red with a red stripe
painted across his mouth. Another showed members of the Collective
Actions group standing in the snow in front of their installation of the
1977 piece Slogan, which announced: “I do not complain about anything
and I almost like it here, although I have never been here before and
know nothing about this place” (figure 14.8). The coeditor of the fea-
ture was a young woman named Ilaria Bignamini, and the materials for
the issue were reportedly brought to Milan from Moscow by an Italian
professor she knew.63 Bignamini provided a short introduction to the
survey in which she thanked “I.M.” for providing the texts and pho-
tographic documentation, much of which, she wrote, had arrived on
microfilm or in negative form. She prefaced the presentation by saying
that the material “is not homogeneous and does not represent Soviet
dissent. It can be viewed only as a collage of individual experiences which
are each very different from the other.” It is clear, then, that she was
keen that the work be considered on its own merits, divorced from a po-
liticized interpretation. She stresses that the material presented “does
not promote hidden and troubled cultural-political motives, but sim-
ply wishes to give information—increased information—about what is
happening in the art world.” She believed that the time was “right, both
in political and cultural environments, to be more respectful toward
History and the differing destinies of the individual. … To respect (both
in the East and the West) the works of Francisco Arana Infante; Rimma
Gerlovina; Valeri Gerlovin; Ivan Cuikov; Leonid Sokov; the group work-
ing with Nikita Alekseev, Georgy Kizeval’ter, Andreij Monastyrsky [Col-
lective Actions], Genady Donskoi, Mikhail Roshal’ and Skersis’ group
[Nest] and all the others whose work and texts I hope will be published
in the immediate future.”64 In the pages that followed, the artists and
their works were presented by way of illustrations, biographical dates,
lists of exhibitions and projects, and the definition of their key con-
cerns (figure 14.9).
The Flash Art special feature on the USSR marked a significant con-
tribution to the rise in the visibility in the West of Soviet unofficial art
in the second half of the 1970s. This increased prominence may in part
392 Chapter 14
Figure 14.8
(July-August 1977).
Figure 14.9 (following pages)

(July-August 1977). Special issue on
Documenta 6. Courtesy of Helena Kontova
and Giancarlo Politi.

be traced to the international publicity surrounding the so-called “Bull-
dozer” exhibition of 1974, as well as to the wave of artists’ emigrations
following the 1975 Jackson-Vanik amendment of the Trade Act of 1974,
which “required that non market economy countries comply with spe-
cific free emigration criteria as a prerequisite for receiving economic
benefits in trade relations with the United States”—effectively remov-
ing barriers to emigration for Soviet Jews.65 Lichvárová has read these
processes and the exhibitions of Soviet artists in London, Paris, and
Washington, as well as Venice, as crucial forerunners in a process of
“self-institutionalization” on the part of the artists themselves. This was
in part initiated by the publication from Paris of the magazine A-YA, by
émigré artists in collaboration with their colleagues in the USSR.66
Flash Art 80–81 (February-April 1978) featured an essay entitled
“Moscow 1977” by Chalupecký.67 The Czechoslovak critic reported on a
series of exhibitions in Moscow and the surrounding area, noting that
Moscow and Leningrad were not the only places of interest: “If one is to
form a true picture of what is happening in Soviet art, one really ought
to travel the vast distances of the Soviet Union.” He recapitulates the
well-known story of the “Bulldozer” exhibition: “protest exhibitions
were held by a group of Moscow and Leningrad artists in the fall of 1974
on an empty plot of land in a Moscow suburb. They were broken up
by the police and a fortnight later, in a sensational decision, the same
artists were granted permission to hold a similar exhibition for [exactly
four hours] in Izmailovsky Park in Moscow.”68 But he did not stop there,
for Chalupecký’s engagement with the Soviet art world was longstand-
ing and ran deeper. He went on:
What is not known, however, is that many years before that, liberalizing ten-
dencies had already appeared in the Ministry of Culture and the Union of Art-
ists in Moscow. In 1967, I myself was invited by Polevoy, who was then the
official in charge of art in the ideological commission of the Central Com-
mittee of the [Communist Party of the Soviet Union], to give a lecture at the
Institute of Art History of the Russian Ministry of Culture on the latest trends
in contemporary world art—which at that time was Fluxus and happenings. In
the well-informed discussion that followed, the term “socialist realism” never
once came up … internal exhibitions for the purpose of discussion were held
396 Chapter 14
featuring several artists who were working quite outside the bounds of the
socialist realist aesthetics. And significantly, these artists were no longer being
stigmatized or harassed. Today [1978] they can make a living at their art; they
work in book illustrations, animated films or stage design.69
Chalupecký painted a picture of an increasingly open, dynamic art

scene. However, he added, “in spite of this relaxation, there are many
things that remain unexhibited, and it is precisely the most important
work of all. And so I spent my time in Moscow as I usually do, in the
studios—with Kabakov, Yankilevsky, Steinberg, Veisberg, Pivovarov,
Gorokhovsky and Infante.” He explained that further artists had joined
their ranks and that “a strange world is forming here. It would be dif-
ficult elsewhere to find so lively and intense an intellectual ambience
as among these artists. At times one feels that one has landed in the
middle of the Romantic Germany of 1800, so frequently do they con-
verse about the great mysteries of art and life.”70 The Czech critic was
tremendously impressed by the intellectual climate pervading the art-
ists’ studios, though his visits were not always without conflicts. Milena
Slavická recounts that “contact with the artists was not always idyllic at
that time. Chalupecký was influenced by existentialist philosophy, such
as that of Sartre. The opinions of the European intellectual, Marxist Left
caused no more than ironic laughter in the environment of the Russian
nonconformists, for the naivety it grew out of was too obvious for them,
and even Jindřich Chalupecký had to face hitherto unexpected forms of
knowledge.”71 It is clear that he saw the intellectual climate of the USSR
as unique. Lola Kantor-Kazovsky cites Chalupecký’s melancholy com-
mentary in his “Moscow Diary” on the emigration of Mikhail Grobman
to Israel: “An artist who grew up in the Soviet Union, living in Israel or
in Western Europe—how can he live there, for what? However parallel
the artistic development in both parts of the world, the moral coordi-
nates of artistic experience there and here are different.”72
At the end of the 1970s, Chalupecký worked on helping the artists
whom he had met to visit Czechoslovakia—his Moscow-Prague Proj-
ect in which he was assisted by Slavická over the course of 1977–1981.73
Slavická notes that Chalupecký had been the first among the Czech

critics to recognize the significance of Russian “non-conformist” art
and to seek to “forge relations between the Prague and the Moscow
independent scenes.”74 Developments in Russian art were covered ex-
tensively in the Czechoslovak art periodical press of the 1960s: Slavická
says: “At a glance, from 1960 to 1970 alone there appeared more than fifty
articles about Russian art in Výtvarná práce, Výtvarná uměníe, in the mag-
azine Domov, in Literární noviny, the magazine Plamen, in Knižní kultura,
Bratislava’s Kulturní život and in Kulturní tvorba, as well as international
publications on the subject by Jiří Padrta and Miroslav Lamač.”75 She
points out that this critical interest was initially centered on Nusberg
and the kineticists, as well as on the artists explicitly criticized by Ni-
kita Khrushchev at the Manezh Exhibition Hall exhibition in Moscow
in 1962, Ernst Neizvestny and Vladimir Yankilevsky, who became no-
torious as a result, and were invited to show at Galerie Bratří Čapků
in Prague, among other places. Although this interest waned after the
post-1968 clampdown, Chalupecký sought to maintain the connection.
Slavická argues that Chalupecký’s support for the artists of what
he called the Sretensky Boulevard group, after the street where many
of their studios were located, was a form of moral support: “he did not
have a gallery or money, he couldn’t buy anything, nor ‘arrange fame.’
It was a support manifested by acknowledgement and respect. To those
he believed in he said they were good, as good as ‘those celebrated in
the West.’ Today this sounds ridiculous, almost absurd, but this is what
it was like at the time. Those artists could measure themselves against
the official scene at home, but they didn’t know what they meant in an
international context. Of course, showing acknowledgement alone in
this isolated situation would not have been enough. Chalupecký was
able to follow their work systematically, was continually interested in
what they did, personally reacted to their work, to their ‘monologues.’”76
The critic clearly saw this as central to his role, explaining in a letter
to Restany: “Who are we, Pierre? Serious men instituted by goodness
knows whom to judge publicly the work of artists? Wasted writers who
for lack of talent parasite on artists? Improper combinations of dubi-
ous knowers and illegible journalists? But perhaps the public activity of
the one we call the art critic is secondary. What matters are the contacts
398 Chapter 14
he pursues with artists, his participation in their life and work. It is he
who often comes first into the studio and sees new works, even unfin-
ished ones; and if his spirit is sufficiently open, he can encourage the
artist at the point when he is not himself sure, he can open intellectual
horizons to his at first unreflective world, he can and should help to cre-
ate a living, stimulating ambience in this world of art and artists, always
open to unexpected possibilities.”77 Arguably, Chalupecký considered
the most important function of the critic to be that of the networker.
In the case of the Moscow conceptualists, the Czech critic provided an
important source of information on the Soviet avant-garde as well as
on developments in the West, welcomed by the majority of unofficial
artists in the USSR who had at that point never traveled abroad, even to
a satellite country.
Slavická’s observations about the significance of these meetings
for artists is confirmed by Boris Groys’s assessment of the roots of the
particular dissatisfaction with Soviet unofficial life experienced by the
Moscow conceptualist circle. He explained: “The Soviet state created
a huge reservoir of the forbidden and the excluded—and the Russian
intellectuals or artists of that time exploited this reservoir as far as they
could and were happy about it. They built the networks and circles and
black markets that are present in all the major cities of the country.
One could live and survive in these networks without having any need
to deal with anything ‘Soviet.’ The majority of unofficial artists of that
time were satisfied with this lifestyle. Only the circle of Moscow Con-
ceptualists was unsatisfied, because the members of this circle asked
themselves a disturbing question: How does the art production of the
unofficial Russian scene look in the international context?”78 Like art-
ists elsewhere, the Moscow conceptualist artists nourished ambitions
to connect with like-minded individuals, to exist internationally and
to be informed of international developments, although this narrative
came to be sidelined in much that has subsequently been written about
their art.79
Slavická began studying art history in 1969 and describes herself as
a member of a “lost generation” who “experienced the Prague Spring
as teenagers … but didn’t understand what was happening … let alone

contribute … as we were having our final exams, the tanks came and
my whole class emigrated. … As soon as we started to understand what
was happening around us, normalization began.”80 Her thesis was on
the relationship between Soviet avant-garde art in public space and
“happenings and public art” of the 1960s. She began working for the
National Gallery and recalls: “Nobody there was interested in traveling
to Moscow. So when I applied for it, they immediately gave me their per-
mission. But my intention was to explore unofficial art. I knew it had ex-
isted from Chalupecký and he gave me … addresses. This was extremely
important, because without those addresses it was impossible to reach
artists. It was practically impossible. They [artists] were vigilant and un-
less you had some way in, you would not be able to contact them. When
I arrived, I called Steinberg and it turned out that they were celebrat-
ing—they used to celebrate every holiday: Catholic Easter, Orthodox
Easter, Jewish Passover; essentially anything that could be celebrated;
they were a mix. … I remember joining them in the evening. I met not
only Steinberg, but also Viktor Pivovarov, Kabakov, Chuikov. They were
all sitting in Chuikov’s kitchen, because that was their meeting place. …
So I was very lucky to become acquainted with them and started visiting
their studios. Every day of my stay, I visited at least two or three studios.
Later I traveled to Leningrad where I also visited several artists.”81 When
she returned, Chalupecký asked Slavická to become his assistant on the
project to bring the artists from Moscow to Prague. Chalupecký was
open to young people and interested in her trip: “He heard about my
travels and my enthusiasm and looked for me. Only much later I came
to appreciate his spontaneity and openness … he told me about his
project and asked if I wanted to help. I knew the language (Chalupecký
could not speak Russian himself) and had a suitably large flat in Pru-
bezny Street in Prague 10. Incidentally, the flat belonged to František
Janouch, the chair of Amnesty International, who was not allowed to
return there from his house in Sweden. I lived there with my three-year-
old daughter, as it were illegally, and this is where almost all of our Rus-
sian guests stayed.”82 The artists were invited on a personal basis, via a
process that was bureaucratic but not overly arduous on the Czechoslo-
vak side, consisting of undertaking to support one’s guests oneself. The
400 Chapter 14
reciprocal procedure on the Russians’ part was more complex, Slavická
recalls: “They had enormous difficulties. It took them at least half a
year to go through this process. I invited at least three or four people
personally … it took a long time and they had to find two people who
would vouch for them. It was a really difficult process.”83
Five artists and their wives visited as part of the project: “Yanki-
levsky with his wife [Rimma Solod] … Ilya Kabakov who had family here
(his wife at the time, Viktoria Mochalova, had a sister here, she mar-
ried a Czech) so he stayed with them … Chuikov came with his wife; he
stayed with me. Then Viktor Pivovarov; he also stayed with me. Then
Erik Bulatov arrived with his wife Natalia Godzina. … I do not know
who invited the Zhigalovs, but I arranged for them to stay at Ján Sekal’s
place. … Prigov came last … I think he stayed for a whole month. So
that was a long time.”84 Slavická recollects that “the program for the
artists was completely planned out, it was a marathon through Prague
studios, about five a day. For me this was a priceless experience, be-
cause overnight I got to know the work of almost all the artists of the
sixties. For the Russian guests it was sometimes exhausting, almost all
of them were abroad for the first time, their wives often protested, but
Chalupecký was relentless. He called me every evening to check what
we had achieved and inquired in detail: ‘What did they say … ’ To any
attempts to change the program he responded with the words: ‘They
are here to work, not on holiday.’”85 The visitors had a full program:
“Chalupecký made an insane itinerary for them. … I served as a guide …
because I could speak Russian and so I was translating for them. Cha-
lupecký did not join us. He was an older man by then; he would not
have been able to keep up with us. But he called in every evening, de-
manding to know exactly where we went, what we talked about, who
said what, and so on.”86
Among those artists whose Prague studios they visited were
“Kafka, Malich, Demartini, Dlouhý, Pištěk, Beran, Nešlaha, Načeradský,
Šimotová, Janoušek, Sýkora, Kubíček,” and they also met interested
critics such as Jiří Šetlík and Jaromír Zemina.87 Slavická notes that
while these exchanges were always amicable, there were also marked
differences:

I strongly realized just how different Russian cultural traditions and thought
were, how different the criteria in contemporary Russian and Czech art were
in comparison. During Kabakov’s visit, Chalupecký organized a seminar in
Hugo Demartini’s studio. The misunderstandings there were remarkable. Ka-
bakov talked about his work, about the situation at home, and when it came
to the questions Chalupecký asked him how he understood the personal re-
sponsibilities of an artist. Ilya tried to respond, but Chalupecký refused all his
attempts. For Kabakov, such an idea was too ideological, too simple. … The
other artists silently watched their struggle. … The atmosphere was … strained
and the evening fell short because of this bitter misunderstanding. Jiří Šetlík
rescued the situation when he invited Kabakov and some others to his house
afterward, where good food and drink lightened up the dreary mood.88
She concludes: “It might seem strange, but Muscovites were more
advanced than Czech artists.” The Czechoslovak artists whose studios
they visited
not only were “not” conceptual artists themselves, but actually didn’t like con-
ceptualism. … Karel Malich and Adriena Šimotová were the only ones to ex-
press a genuine, deep interest in [Moscow] Conceptualism. Their studios were
also the most interesting. Karel Malich was totally delighted and Šimotová de-
veloped personal relationships with these artists; she was highly interested in
their work. … Adriena had been already interested in action art back then. She
had already finished her first installations. So she could see it differently. And
Malich was a very open person. He was also very interest in the avant-garde,
in Malevich in particular, so he could relate through the avant-garde and have
more meaningful and interesting conversations.89
Malich also made an impression on Kabakov, it seems. Slavická recalls:

“When Ilya arrived here, he immediately recognized his ‘brother in un-
seen things,’ he recognized Malich’s drawings, which he had described
and drawn in his album THE FOURTH DIMENSION … Adriena Šimotová
was a success among almost all the Russians. For Ivan Chuikov, the
most important meeting, I think, was with Stanislav Kolíbal. Bulatov
402 Chapter 14
was excited about everything, largely Prague, he used to walk around
with a little notebook and constantly draw different corners of the city.”90
Slavická recollects that the younger generation of experimental art-
ists in Prague such as Štembera “were absolutely not interested in Rus-
sians and had no intentions to meet any Russians. They were strongly
opposed to this and by far preferred American artists, or at best Polish
or Hungarian artists … they didn’t want to have anything to do with
Russians.” Soviet troops had continued to occupy Czechoslovakia af-
ter the invasion of 1968, and Russophobia ran deep. Slavická retrospec-
tively speculates that “the whole project was one-sided. Chalupecký had
assumed that interest or a certain taste [for the exchange] would arise
on the Czech side for artists or critics to go to Moscow, but the con-
cerned parties never went. … Jiří Šetlík, Jaromír Zemina, Karel Miler,
and František Šmejkal, equipped with relevant addresses, traveled to
Moscow eventually, but returned discontented—in short, they did not
like it there. Of all the artists only Ján Sekal … and Jiří Sozanský came
back from Moscow with excitement.”91 For the most part, it seemed that
“the natural intention of the postwar generation of Czech artists was to
integrate as fast as possible into the art of Western Europe, that their in-
terest was directed at exactly the opposite side of the world. And it also
seemed as though there was no tradition of contact with Russian fine
arts, in contrast to theater as well as literature. And, finally, it seemed
that the differences in artistic language and the very motivations and
goals for the creative process were too great.”92
The Russian visitors found a more positive reception in Brno and
Bratislava. Slavická accompanied them to Bratislava and recollects that
“they managed to establish far better relations” with their Slovak col-
leagues than with their Czech counterparts, for they were able to visit
conceptual artists. “We went to see Rudolf Sikora’s studio. We visited
Filko and Koller. It was very spontaneous. There was a guide and he
would take us around Bratislava, so for the most part, we didn’t even
know where we were … it was very exciting for all of us. … A lot of the
artists could speak Russian, unlike here [in Prague]. Here almost no-
body could speak Russian. Slovaks could speak to them directly, it was
easier.” In Brno, they met Valoch, who took them around artists’ studios.

Figure 14.10
Marriage of Milena Slavická and Viktor
Pivovarov, 1981. Courtesy of Milena
Slavická and Viktor Pivovarov.
Figure 14.11
Viktor Pivovarov and Ilya Kabakov, Prague,
1982. Courtesy of Viktor Pivovarov.
“Yankilevsky donated a series of his etchings to the graphic cabinet of

the National Gallery as a sign of gratitude. Of course, he should not
have done this—not only did no one ever thank him, his works also
stayed hidden somewhere, and somehow they were still not recorded
in the collection by 1990.” Slavická’s interest in asking for donations
from the Russian artists for the National Gallery in Prague received no
official support: “I phoned Jiří Kotalík, who refused to talk about the
matter altogether. The fear of unofficial Russian art was even greater
than that of Western art. My attempts to organize exhibitions for the
Russian artists at the gallery in Karlový Vary and at Dům umění in Brno
also failed.”93
The presence of the Soviet artists in Prague had not passed unre-
marked by the authorities, despite the fact that they had been invited
on a private basis. Chalupecký had arranged for Slavická to give a lec-
ture on Russian art. For some ill-advised reason, this was held in a
room of the high-end Hotel Evropa on Wenceslas Square. Slavická re-
calls that it was not clear what the reaction of the audience was to the
material: “Chalupecký gave me some photographs and transparencies
from his archive. Because he did not have material from the conceptual
performances that had taken place in Moscow in the early seventies, I
asked Honza Sekal, who had documented them, to show them. After
my talk it stayed quiet, nobody said anything. When Sekal started to
show the transparencies from the performances, artists left the room
for the hallway, where they talked among themselves, I don’t know
about whom or what. About five people stayed. Only when everything
had finished and conversations began to flow freely, Karel Malich came
404 Chapter 14
up to me and said that all this information was very interesting and
important to him; he showed great interest, as did Milan Kozelka, who
was largely interested in the conceptual performances. But I personally
do not know about any other reactions by Czech artists.”94
The consequences of the event were predictable, Slavická notes: “It
could not have ended any other way than with a summons to the police
station on Bartolomějská, where, of course, even my, until then safe,
address was recorded. … For the police on Bartholomew Street, who
read the garbled names of the Moscow artists to me (someone had writ-
ten them down badly), a lecture ‘about Russian dissidents,’ as they were
told, organized in Hotel Evropa, was an absolutely crazy, inconceivable
event, which they could not quite believe.”95 She recalls that it was clear
that the names “meant nothing to them … they would not know their
names, which were entirely misspelt. Kabakov was ‘Krabakov’ and Bu-
latov was ‘Fulatov.’ I didn’t correct them.”96 The visits ceased in 1981 and
were rarely discussed in artists’ autobiographies, even though it was
after his trip to Prague that Kabakov wrote his landmark text “On Emp-
tiness.”97 Even Victor Pivovarov, who married Milena Slavická in 1981
and moved to Prague the following year, does not discuss the project
(figures 14.10, 14.11). Reflecting on the experience as a whole, Slavická
concludes: “I do not know today if it really gave anything remarkable to
Czech or Russian artists. In its time, it was an altogether bold, unique
and very peculiar project—a private exchange of artistic information
and energy, in unsettling times, when the world knew hardly anything
about Russian or Czech art.”98
406 Chapter 14
Conclusion:
Networking the Bloc
The study of international exchange among unofficial artists from dif-

ferent countries of the former Soviet bloc was at first neglected in the
wake of post-1989 independence for two main reasons. Firstly, because
art historians from the former East often sought to write new nation-
ally framed art histories. Secondly, because some overidentified with a
“peripheral” position to the extent of seeking to “catch up” with Western
art history and theory, relinking, after a period of supposed separation,
to the “center.” As the Hungarian art historian Éva Forgács has argued, Conclu
after the transition of 1989–1991 in the Soviet bloc, “the agents of the
respective art scenes of these countries faced a near-impossible dual
task: on the one hand, to construct a national narrative of scattered
fragments and contradictory story-lines, and, on the other hand, to
keep up with the current trends and concepts of the unfolding global Conclu
scene.”1 Forgács notes that while the early 1990s marked “this region’s
comeback to the international scene,” there were attendant expecta-
tions on the part of the West: “An unequivocal picture of the dramatic
historical changes was demanded: exhibitions of ‘before and after’ …
echoing the destruction of the Berlin Wall: On November 8, 1989 it was
still there, but on November 9 it was gone,” and the West was fascinated
by this “dramatic scenario of liberation.”2 And yet, she argues, in real-
ity “there was no spectacular ‘before and after’ story even if there were,
indeed, a few ‘before and after’ exhibitions.” Rather, the “crumbling
of the communist state and the loosening of its grip on the art and
culture was a gradual process throughout the 1980s, and as local op-
position to the system had gained ground, at different speeds and in
different ways, it was more and more clear that opposition groups were
a complicated mix of liberals and conservatives, internationalists and
nationalists, … who would never accept each other’s long cherished, or
newly constructed historical narratives.”3 The obfuscation of regional
dialogues of the period examined in this book was one side effect of
these processes of change.
In the 1990s the curator Iara Boubnova listed the difficulties of re-
thinking “Eastern European” art following the transition of 1989–1991.
She issued a call to specificity. In an article entitled “Post-What? Neo-
How? For Whom, Where and When?” she wrote: “If … in the beginning
of the 1980s the problem for the periphery was how to invade the centre,
now, in the 1990s, when presumably there is no more centre, the ques-
tion is what after all are the specific national characteristics of a quite
universal art discourse.”4 The Slovene curator Zdenka Badovinac also
recalls having had a strong sense that the formation of “local bodies of
knowledge, including the genealogies of local avant-gardes” should be
“a precondition for establishing any planetary negotiations.”5 When she
and her colleague Igor Zabel sought to rethink the project of Moderna
Galerija in Ljubljana and began to ask themselves “how a museum can
move forward in its work when it has been primarily dedicated to a na-
tional art,” they felt that
for us, the imperative of contemporaneity became the idea that we ourselves
would be the producers of our own knowledge and, as much as possible, that
we would stop being the passive recipients of Western ideas. In this process
we relied, right from the start, on the experiences of artists and small non-
institutional spaces that had, especially in the Eighties in Slovenia, developed
particular strategies for self-organization, alternative networking and operat-
ing internationally, and were significantly more successful at doing this than
the official cultural policy was. I could say, then, that in our future operations
we would use knowledge that came “from below,” and in doing so, we often
refused to heed the demands and expectations that came not only from the
official cultural policy but also from a certain general standard of institutional
behavior.6
408 Conclusion: Networking the Bloc

They looked to the past for relevant historical models. Moderna Galerija
was transformed into a key hub for historicizing “East European art,”
through the 2000+ ArtEast collection and an ambitious exhibitions pro-
gram. It remains the most significant public-owned collection devoted
to East European art to date.
Over the past 20 years there has been a surge of exhibition and pub-
lication activity relating East European art, accompanied by moves to
begin to write global histories of art.7 “Global Conceptualism: Points of
Origin, 1950s–1980s” (Queens Museum of Art, New York, 1999) marked
an important turning point in approaches to the art of the ’60s and
’70s. One of the organizers of the exhibition, Jane Farver, later recalled:
“Each of us had our own reasons for wanting to do such an exhibition.
When I recently asked Luis [Camnitzer] to tell me his reasons, he wrote
to me that he wanted ‘to decenter art history into local histories and
put the center in its right place as one more provincial province’ so
that other areas, and particularly Latin America, could, as he says, ‘do
local analysis to help assume local identities that were unmolested by
the hegemonic watchtower.’”8 The exhibition contributed significantly
to this liberatory ambition, including a substantial selection of works
from Eastern Europe and an important survey essay by László Beke.
The publication of East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Eu-
rope in 2006 marked another watershed moment. Like Moderna Galerija,
the artists’ collective Irwin has been central to the construction and
definition of a history of “Eastern European art” that includes Yugoslav
developments, reestablishing a link that had been broken in political
terms in 1948 when Tito split from Stalin. One of the aims of East Art
Map, Irwin wrote, was to “present art from the whole space of Eastern
Europe, taking artists out of their national frameworks and presenting
them in a unified scheme.”9 They sought to organize the “fundamental
relationships between Eastern European artists where these relation-
ships [had] not been organised.”10 Given its enormous scope—includ-
ing Yugoslavia, the USSR, and the Soviet satellite countries within the
framework of “Eastern Europe,” as well as taking on board develop-
ments both before and after the events of 1989–1991 and the wars of the
1990s—it was understandable that this remarkable artist-run project
Conclusion: Networking the Bloc 409

was collaborative and involved delegating research to a selection of lo-
cal experts.
One part of that book offered a survey of local and national scenes
but conveyed little sense of the connections between the key players in-
troduced in the texts. The experts had been invited by the artists’ collec-
tive to each select 10 key artists or events that they considered to have
been formative for the development of artistic discourses in their city
or nation, but also to “note and define the influence and relationships
between the selected artists, both locally and internationally.” This re-
quest was designed to yield sets of lines that could link points on a map.
In the event, however, the experts mostly failed to answer the second
question, relating to connectivity: 14 of the 23 selectors limited them-
selves to their chosen case studies, without providing a framework for
thinking about interrelationships between these. The result was that
when the map itself came to be produced, Hungarians would only be
linked to other Hungarians, Jarosław Kozłowski, despite being the au-
thor of NET, appeared as an isolated individual, and only four “broader
movements” connected balls floating in a black abyss: Moscow Con-
ceptualism, Sots Art, Anonymous art, and the Retro-Avant-Garde. This
was indicative of a certain research bias in favor of the USSR and Yu-
goslavia and the underarticulation of the other trends that could have
been mapped, such as concrete poetry, mail art, or performance.
Networking the Bloc has been in part a response to this, and an at-
tempt to work through and establish further connections that might
one day be plotted on another map of this sort. I have sought to weave
together a wide selection of minor narratives challenging the idea that
experimental artists in the Soviet bloc operated in isolation. By revisit-
ing personal dialogues, exchanges, and meetings of the 1960s and 1970s,
I hope to have captured something of the connectivity that fueled ex-
perimental art in the region, working with participants in the events of
those years, and with their personal archives, to offer an art history of
Eastern Europe “from below.” While my ambition was to plot a topogra-
phy of experimental exchanges within the Soviet bloc, the scope of the
material made it necessary to extend my focus beyond the borders of

the Soviet satellite countries to include contacts with the USSR, Yugo-
slavia, Western Europe, the United States, and Latin America.
The emergence of an international field of experimental art relied
on the endeavors of a range of cultural agents, from critics to publish-
ers, from representatives of galleries and museums to diplomats and,
most importantly, artists themselves. This book has introduced some,
though by no means all, of the pioneers and publications that fostered
and facilitated exchange. It has highlighted the places that served as
hubs for personal encounters among artists and artistic propositions;
the events that brought art and artists together in new constellations;
artists’ accounts of their excursions abroad; and the experiences of
émigré artists who played a part in facilitating international collabora-
tions and the circulation of materials in the Soviet bloc after decamp-
ing to the West. East-East relations often took detours via Western way
stations; as Beke recollects, “a Czech avant-garde artist could meet a
Serbian colleague more easily in Paris, or even through a West German
publication, than in Prague or Belgrade.”11
I began this research in part in order to counter the limitations of
national frameworks for art history. As Robert Filliou explained: “The
artist must realize that he is part of a wider network, la fête permanente
going on around him all the time in all parts of the world” (an idea
translated into English as the “eternal network”).12 So, too, the art his-
torian should not disregard the artists’ participation in this fête perma-
nente, with all the social relations this inevitably entails. If we are to
better understand historical dialogues and the global traffic of artistic
ideas, we need to take a translocal and transregional approach, embrac-
ing the many forms of the “social” and the agencies with which this
sociality is inflected. Above all, we must continue to challenge the per-
petuation of Cold War attitudes in our discipline today.
Cold War assumptions that should surely have been relegated to
the academic graveyard keep failing to die. Little more than a decade
ago, the author of a volume designed to address the question “Is Art
History Global?” put forward that “as a discipline and as a unit within
universities, art history is very much a North American and western
European phenomenon.” The claim was backed up with reference to

the contents of an inadequate database of universities with art his-
tory departments, which, the author reported, included just six such
departments in total for Eastern and Southeastern Europe (two each
in Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria).13 More recently, an otherwise ex-
cellent work of comparative art history proposed that “participatory
art under State Socialism in the 1960s and 1970s provides an important
counter-model to contemporaneous examples from Europe and North
America”—as though Eastern Europe was not Europe.14 It is troubling
that such slips should continue to occur, for our times give us unprec-
edented access to information. Marina Gržinić was quite right, then, to
point out that Walter Mignolo’s call for “delinking” remains as relevant
as ever in relation to the Cold War matrix.15 After all, it is 30 years since
Mikhail Gorbachev declared: “We are Europeans.”
Among the projects and publications that stimulated my think-
ing about the methodological approach I wanted to take in Network-
ing the Bloc was the important exhibition “Fluxus East” (Künstlerhaus
Bethanien, Berlin, 2005) which brought together all manner of experi-
mental 1960s and ’70s artists from both east and west under the rubric
of Fluxus, irrespective of whether the activities described were con-
ceived of by the artists themselves as having been affiliated with the
global movement (founded in New York), in ways that amounted to a
potential retrospective “colonization by Fluxus” of a very diverse scene
whose complex politics far exceeds, in my view, the relatively limited
terms of the Fluxus idea. My own sense has been that Fluxus played
only a marginal role in the development of Eastern European art of the
’60s and ’70s. It is important to stress that a group such as OHO, for
instance, developed independently of Fluxus, and that George Maciu
nas’s socialist ambitions for the movement would have been anathema
to the majority of experimental artists living within the framework of
“actually existing socialism.”
“Subversive Practices: Art under Conditions of Political Repression
60s–80s / South America / Europe” (Stuttgart, 2009) was another point
of departure in terms of its geographical breadth and thematic coher-
ence—deploying the idea of subversion as a node capable of migrating
beyond any concrete political framework to become a global “attitude”

of sorts. While the majority of the exhibition was again devoted to
particular nations, with sections curated by local experts, one section
notably succeeded in going beyond the limits of such a framework:
Cristina Freire’s Brazilian section, called “Alternative Networks,” bril-
liantly demonstrated the international links established by Walter Za-
nini at MAC in São Paulo with the help of a wall diagram and works and
documents from the MAC-USP collection, many of these by artists from
Eastern Europe.16
The horizontal, comparative approach to writing the art history
of Eastern Europe taken by Piotr Piotrowski in his In the Shadow of
Yalta (2009) is one to which I am also committed. While Piotrowski’s
overarching aim was to offer an art historical account of artistic devel-
opment in the region (which was pioneering because no such unified
account had previously been attempted) based on local movements
and styles and their interpretation by selected artists and groups,
my own aim has been to account for the development of experimental
art, in particular, and for the international dialogues that were central
to its dynamism.
Three of the books I found most inspiring while writing were archi-
val projects—forms of self-historicization on the part of artists them-
selves.17 The first was the edited volume KwieKulik (Vienna: JRP Ringier,
2012), which I especially admire for its layout, precision, and sumptu-
ous celebration of the color photographic documents of the artist duo’s
activities. The second, the volume Artpool: The Experimental Art Archive
of East-Central Europe (Budapest: Artpool, 2013), presenting an extraor-
dinarily rich chronology of activities and documents, designed by its
founders in a typically low-key format that also prioritizes images over
text. The third, a huge volume devoted to the Polish conceptual artist
Jarosław Kozłowski’s Akumulatory 2 archive in Poznań, was published
on the occasion of an exhibition at the National Gallery of Contempo-
rary Art in Warsaw: Beyond Corrupted Eye (Warsaw: Zachęta, 2015). Net-
working the Bloc has sought to deliver some sense of the level of detail
and care taken in the storytelling of these three archival projects, as
well as to draw out and account for some of the roundabout transac-
tions between their authors over the course of the long 1970s. In a sense

my findings have been simple: that there were a good many connec-
tions among artists from different countries in the three worlds in this
period and that an individual framework, a national framework, and a
regional framework are all equally inadequate for understanding how
artistic developments occurred or what they meant. Experimental art
in Eastern Europe has always been and remains inseparable from the
collective production of a global art history.

Notes
Unless otherwise specified, all translations from sources in other languages are my own.
Introduction: A Useless Game
1. Karinthy bemoaned the “hysteria and fear and terror that grips Europe today” and said
he was convinced that these were a result of the fact that “the world doesn’t value scrib-
bling nearly as much as it used to.” Frigyes Karinthy, “Chain-Links,” trans. Adam Makkai,
originally published as “Láncszemek” in Karinthy, Minden másképpen van [Everything is
different] (Budapest: Atheneum, 1929), 85.
2. Géza Perneczky, The Magazine Network: The Trends of Alternative Art in the Light of Their
Periodicals 1968–1988 (Cologne: Soft Geometry, 1993), 53. Notes
3. Ibid., 13.
4. Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), 242.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
Notes
7. Václav Havel, “Six Asides about Culture,” in Jan Vladislav, ed., Václav Havel: Living in
Truth: Twenty-two Essays Published on the Occasion of the Award of the Erasmus Prize to
Václav Havel (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 127.
8. Ibid.
9. Lawrence Alloway, “Network: The Art World Described as a System” (1972), in Donald
Kuspit, ed., Network: Art and the Complex Present (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research
Press, 1984), 4–5.
10. Ibid., 4.
11. Ibid., 6.
12. Ibid., 3.
13. László Beke, “Conceptual Tendencies in Eastern European Art,” in Global Conceptual-
ism. Points of Origin 1950s–1980s, exh. cat. (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), 42.
14. György Konrád, Antipolitics: An Essay, trans. Richard E. Allen (San Diego: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 74.
15. Ibid., 123–126.
16. Ibid., 128.
17. Konrád is referring to the Polish movement here, from a Hungarian perspective, and
is writing after its collapse and the detention of Adam Michnik.
18. Konrád, Antipolitics, 132–133.
19. Ibid., 36.
20. Václav Havel, “Stories and Totalitarianism” (April 1987), in Havel, Open Letters:
Selected Prose 1965–1990, ed. Paul Wilson (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), 344.
21. Ibid., 328.
22. Over the course of the project I have mulled over the fact that a number of the indi-
viduals referred to in this book were later revealed to have acted as police informants in
the period under discussion. Generally speaking, there were three types of police infor-
mants: professional agents, those who denounced others for personal gain, and those
who simply agreed to inform on whom they met abroad as the condition of receiving a
passport. (Many of the latter did not so report.) I have decided that attempting to explore
which of the accused fell into which of these categories falls beyond the scope of my
narrative. I cannot claim to have gathered sufficient evidence around which to recon-
struct the circumstances of their actions or to assess the implications of these for their
colleagues with the level of nuance that would be required to attempt such a task.
For these reasons, too, I do not refer to materials held in secret police files or repeat here
the accusations against others conveyed to me over the years by some participants in the
network outlined here.
23. Jaroslav Andĕl, “The Present Czechoslovak Situation,” in Works and Words, exh. cat.
(Amsterdam: de Appel, 1979), 69.
24. Lucy Lippard, “Escape Attempts,” in Lippard, ed., Six Years: The Dematerialization
of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (1973; rpt., Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997), vii.
25. Ibid., xvii.
26. Petr Štembera, “Events, Happenings, Land-Art, etc. in Czechoslovakia,” in Lippard,
Six Years, 169–170; first published as “Events, Happenings and Land-Art in Czechoslova-
kia: A Short Information,” in Revista de Arte, Universidad de Puerto Rico, no. 7 (December
1970). OHO also featured in the 1970 “Information” exhibition at MoMA.
27. Lippard, Six Years, 155.
28. Author’s interview with Marco Pogačnik, Šempas, 2016. (David Nez was American.)
29. Ibid.
30. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005), 46.
31. Ibid., 75.
32. Ibid., 49.
33. Ibid., 217.
34. Karinthy, “Chain-Links,” 85.
Part I: Mobilization
1. Henry Meyric Hughes, “Pierre Restany, l’AICA et l’aventure est-européenne,” in Richard
Leeman, ed., Le demi-siècle de Pierre Restany (Paris: INHA, 2009), 397.
416 Notes to Introduction and Part I

Chapter 1: Una Cosa Nostra
1. AICA was founded in 1948 and affiliated with UNESCO as of 1951.
2. The congress was held 6–13 September 1960.
3. Though several AICA congresses had been organized around a theme in the past,
topics for debate had focused primarily on aesthetic questions pertaining to art criticism
itself; the organization’s international agenda had not previously been thematized.
4. A quota of not more than 15 percent abstraction was absurdly applied to all future
public exhibitions in Poland, and he was sacked from his post at the Instytut Sztuki PAN.
Starzyński would seek to defend his position at the 1960 congress by arguing that “only
those artists who associate themselves with the historical reality of their own people,
while at the same time participating in the mainstream movement of their era, will have
a lasting presence in the history of art.” “Programme of the 7th International Congress
of Art Critics,” Bulletin No. 3, cited in Mathilde Arnoux, “Contemporary Polish Art Seen
through the Lens of French Critics Invited to the AICA Congress in Warsaw and Cracow
in 1960,” in Annika Öhrner, ed., Art in Transfer in the Era of Pop: Curatorial Practices and
Transnational Strategies, Södertörn Studies in Art History and Aesthetics 3 (Stockholm:
Södertörn Academic Studies 67, 2017), 45. See Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, “Paris
from Behind the Iron Curtain,” in Sarah Wilson, ed., Paris: Capital of the Arts 1900–1968,
exh. cat. (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2002), 258; and Susan Reid, “The Exhibition
the Art of Socialist Countries, Moscow 1958–9, and the Contemporary Style of Painting,” in
Susan E. Reid and David Crowley, Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture
in Post-War Eastern Europe (Oxford: Berg, 2000).
5. Arnoux, “Contemporary Polish Art,” 52.
6. Sophie Cras, “Le Nouveau Réalisme: Du réalisme socialiste au réalisme capitaliste,”
Own-Reality 6 (2014), http://www.perspectivia.net/content/publikationen/ownreality/6
/cras-fr, cited in Arnoux, “Contemporary Polish Art,” 41.
7. Typescript “La Pologne et la tentation de l’Occident,” November 1960, cited in Arnoux,
“Contemporary Polish Art,” 50.
8. Henry Meyric Hughes, “Pierre Restany, l’AICA et l’aventure est-européenne,” in Rich-
ard Leeman, ed., Le demi-siècle de Pierre Restany (Paris: INHA, 2009), 387.
9. Meyric Hughes referring to the report to the French section filed by Restany on his
return. Ibid., 389.
10. Ibid., 396–397.
11. Restany, “Actes du VIIe Congrès international des critiques d’art, 1960,” 29, Archives de
la critique d’art (ACA), ACA PREST. XJ01/1, cited in Meyric Hughes, “Pierre Restany,” 390.
12. See Klara Kemp-Welch, Antipolitics in Central European Art: Reticence as Dissidence
under Post-Totalitarian Rule 1956–1989 (London: IB Tauris, 2014), 13–56.
13. “La Pologne et la tentation de l’Occident,” cited in Arnoux, “Contemporary Polish
Art,” 50.
14. The congress was very well attended, with delegates from Egypt, Yugoslavia, Mexico,
and the United States, among others. Meyric Hughes noted that Milan Knížák was
among the five delegates from Czechoslovakia. Meyric Hughes, “Pierre Restany,” 389.
Notes to Chapter 1 417

15. Pierre Restany, “Prague, Sisyphe sans Kafka serait Prométhée,” Domus 450 (1967),
50–55, cited in Lada Hubatová-Vacková, “Pierre Restany et Prague entre 1960 et 1970,” in
Leeman, Le demi-siècle de Pierre Restany, 262.
16. Typed transcript of interview with Pierre Restany recorded and translated into Czech,
archives of Jiří Balcar, cited in Hubatová-Vacková, “Pierre Restany et Prague,” 252.
17. He went on to win the critics’ prize at the Paris Biennial in 1965 for his assemblages.
18. Typed transcript of interview with Pierre Restany recorded and translated into Czech,
archives of Jiří Balcar, cited in Hubatová-Vacková, “Pierre Restany et Prague,” 257–258.
19. Ibid.
20. Pierre Restany, “Tchécoslovaquie: notes de voyage,” Cimaise 79 (January-February
1961), cited in Hubatová-Vacková, “Pierre Restany et Prague,” 268.
21. Meyric Hughes, “Pierre Restany,” 394.
22. Ibid., 396–397.
23. Henry Périer, interview with Alex Mlynárčik, in Henry Périer, Pierre Restany. Le
prophète de l’art (Paris: Éditions Cercle d’Art, 2013), 225.
24. Ibid.
25. Mlynárčik was to have a series of exhibitions with the gallery.
26. Mlynárčik, letter to Pierre Restany, not dated but mentions Christmas, probably 1964
or 1965, ACA PLEST XSEST66/22.
27. My thanks to Andrea Euringer-Bátorová for clarifying this. Alex Mlynárčik, interview
with Andrea Euringer-Bátorová, 2004, in Euringer-Bátorová, Akčné umenie na slovensku v
60. Rokoch 20. Soročia. Akcie Alexa Mlynárčika (Bratislava: Slovart, 2011), 209. Euringer-
Bátorová’s pioneering monographic study on Mlynárčik was first published as Aktions
kunst in der Slowakei in den 1960er Jahren. Aktionen von Alex Mlynárčik (Berlin: LIT
Verlag, 2009).
28. Meanwhile he had had a parallel career in fencing and had been four times national
champion of Czechoslovakia by 1965.
29. Mlynárčik, letter to Pierre Restany dated 22 November 1965, Bratislava, ACA PLEST
XSEST 69/5.
30. Alex Mlynárčik, “Cinq aspects de Pierre Restany,” in Leeman, Le demi-siècle de Pierre
Restany, 284–285.
31. Ibid., 285.
32. “Manifest ‘Happsoc,’” trans. Eric Dluhosch, in Laura Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl,
eds., Primary Documents. A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 87.
33. Meyric Hughes, “Pierre Restany,” 393.
34. Alex Mlynárčik, interview with Andrea Euringer-Bátorová, 2004, in Euringer-Bátorová,
Akčné umenie, 214.
35. George Maciunas was doing the same from the other side of the Atlantic. Paradoxi-
cally, Knížák was being claimed both for the European and for the New York narratives of
the 1960s.
418 Notes to Chapter 1

37. Konečný also published a number of articles on the activities of the group, as did
Věra Jirousová who reviewed exhibitions from Moscow and Leningrad. See Vít Havránek,
“Transient and Dispersed: Kinetic Art in Czechoslovakia, 1957–1970,” in Vit Havránek, ed.,
Akce, slovo, pohyb, prostor. Word, Action, Movement, Space, exh. cat. (Prague: City Art Gal-
lery, 1999), 378.
38. Ibid., 381. The third of the exhibitions, at the Czechoslovak-Soviet Friendship League
Exhibition Hall on Charles Square, was closed after just three days, and an exhibition of
Czechoslovak kinetic artist Milan Dobeš installed instead. Czech kinetic art was becom-
ing a significant tendency, and a Group of Kinetic Artists was even admitted by the Union
of Fine Artists in 1968.
39. Lev Nusberg, Manifesto of Russian Kineticists (1966), trans. in Igor Golomshtok and
Alexander Glezer, Soviet Art in Exile (New York: Random House, 1977), 164, cited in David
Crowley, “Staging for the End of History: Avant-Garde Visions at the Beginning and the
End of Communism in Eastern Europe,” Faktografia.com (14 April 2015). The manifesto
appeared in Výtvarná práce, no. 22 (1967), 9–12.
40. Havránek, “Transient and Dispersed,” 378.
41. Jiří Padrta, letter to Pierre Restany, Prague, 3 August 1969, ACA PLEST. XSEST 11/22.
42. Jiří Padrta, letter to Pierre Restany, Prague, 28 August 1969, ACA PLEST. XSEST 11/26–27.
43. Jiří Padrta, letter to Pierre Restany, Prague, 17 May 1966, ACA PLEST. XSEST 11/2.
Officially an illustrator of children’s books in Czechoslovakia, Kolář’s unofficial work was
widely exhibited in international circles in the 1960s. He participated in the Paris Bien-
nial of 1965, after which fellow poet Henri Chopin presented an exhibition of 68 of Kolář’s
collage works at La Galerie Riquelme (11 January–2 February 1966). He participated in
Documenta 4 in Kassel in 1968 and at the São Paulo Biennial in 1969, which he attended
in person and where he was awarded a prize, and in the Czech Pavilion at Expo 70 in
Osaka in 1970. One of his later exhibitions was reviewed by Georges Boudaille: “Kolář: Le
délire du collage,” Les lettres françaises, no. 1386 (19–25 May 1971), 26.
44. 25 September–2 October 1966. It was again well attended and included, for the first
time in each case, representatives from East Germany and Romania, and a Soviet
“observer.” Meyric Hughes, “Pierre Restany,” 382.
45. Ibid., 393.
46. Périer, Pierre Restany, 228.
47. Ibid.
48. Zuzana Bartošová, “Pierre Restany et la Slovaquie. L’oeuvre d’Alex Mlynárčik,” in
Leeman, Le demi-siècle de Pierre Restany, 271.
49. The Václav Špála gallery was opened in 1959, as a noncommercial exhibition hall, but
Chalupecký was appointed after a “reorganization of the Czechoslovak Artists Associa-
tion” in 1964. See http://vvp.avu.cz/en/activity/jine/spalovka/historie.
50. Author’s interview with Helena Kontova, Milan, 20 December 2016.

51. As Jaroslav Šťastný pointed out, if the 1960s were thought of as a “golden age” of sorts
in Czechoslovakia, this was at least in part because of the respective miseries of the 1950s
and 1970s. Jaroslav Šťastný, “You Don’t Need Government, You Need Intelligence …! John
Cage in Czechoslovakia (1964–1992),” in Katalin Székely, ed., The Freedom of Sound: John
Cage behind the Iron Curtain, exh. cat. (Budapest: Ludwig Museum, 2013), 61.
52. See CD ROM project 281m2, AVU Research Centre, Prague, 2003.
53. Chalupecký had been in direct contact with Duchamp through Arturo Schwarz and
received a typescript of his famous 1961 Philadelphia College of Art Lecture “Where Are
We Heading?” See Jindřich Chalupecký, Údal umělce, Duchampovské meditace (Prague:
Tosrt, 1998 (samizdat, 1982)).
54. Jindřich Chalupecký, “Art, Insanity, and Crime,” trans. William E. Harkins (June
1967), http://agora8.org. See also Andrea Euringer-Bátorová, “Ausstellungen als (un)poli-
tische Medien. II. Permanente Manifestationen und Danuvius 68. Zur alternativen Kunst
in der Slowakei in den 1960er Jahren,” in Verena Krieger and Elisabeth Fritz, eds., When
Exhibitions Become Politics (Cologne: Böchlau, 2016).
55. Chalupecký, “Art, Insanity, and Crime.”
56. Guy Debord and René Viénet, letter dated 27 April 1968, Debord File, Correspon-
dence, Chalupecký Archives, Archive of the Museum of Literature, Prague.
57. Jiří Kotalik, letter to Restany, 28 February 1968, Bratislava, ACA PLEST. XSEST 05/18–19.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid.
61. Erik Dietman and Mlynárčik, typescript of 22 August 1968, signed 24 August 1968 by
Karol Lacko, Zita Kostrová, Jana Želibská, Juraj Mojiš, Iva Mojžišová, Igor Holák, Bobeś
Bachartý, Stano Filko, and Ľuba Belohradská, ACA PLEST. XSEST 05/33.
62. Lubor Kara, letter to Pierre Restany, 28 February 1968, Bratislava, ACA PLEST. XSEST
05/15–17.
63. Kieran Williams, “Civil Resistance in Czechoslovakia: From Soviet Invasion to ‘Velvet
Revolution,’ 1968–89,” in Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash, eds., Civil Resistance
and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-violent Action from Gandhi to the Present (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009), 110–112.
64. Dietman and Alex Mlynárčik, typescript of 22 August 1968, ACA PLEST. XSEST 05/33.
65. For a detailed account, see Batorova, “Ausstellungen als (un)politische Medien. II.”
66. Mlynárčik, letter to Pierre Restany, 29 October 1968, ACA PLEST. XSEST 05/40–41.
67. Pierre Restany, “Bratislava: Une leçon de réalité (Une leçon de relativité),” Domus, no.
472 (March 1969), 49–50, cited in Bartošová, “Pierre Restany et la Slovaquie,” 275. Restany
was in correspondence with Jankovič (who had participated in a group show of young
Slovak visual artists in Florence, Rome, Milan, and Macerate), as well as with Filko, with
whom he conducted quite an extensive correspondence, among other things relating to
an exhibition at the Cazenave gallery for March 1968 under the title “Le Milieu Universel.”
68. For a detailed account of Mlynárčik’s activities see especially Euringer-Bátorová,
Akčné umenie, 106–200.
69. Mlynárčik, letter to Pierre Restany, 31 July 1970, Bratislava, ACA PLEST XSEST65/2.

70. Ján Budaj, interview with Mlynárčik, 6 June 1981, trans. Jana Krajnakova for Ján
Budaj, “3SD: Conversation in an Unrated Pub,” in Claire Bishop and Marta Dziewańska,
eds., 1968–1989: Political Upheaval and Artistic Change (Warsaw: MSN, 2009), 223.
71. This was further elaborated in the artist’s “Memorandum in the Name of the Totality
of Life and Art.” See Andrea Euringer-Bátorová, “Celebration, Festival and Holiday
in Former Czechoslovakia in the 1960s and 1970s as Artforms for Alternative and Non-
official Art,” Centropa 12 (January 2012).
72. Alex Mlynárčik, letter to Pierre Restany, 15 February 1973, Bratislava, ACA PLEST
XSEST 05/26.
73. The Hungarian artist Imre Bak was also a guest at the wedding. Artpool Chronology
of Mail Art: http://www.artpool.hu/MailArt/kronologia/70s.html
74. Jindřich Chalupecký, Na hranicích uměni (1987), 118–119, trans. Tomáš Pospiszyl,
cited in Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells (London: Verso, 2012), 326.
75. He wrote that he was planning Eva’s Wedding and that he wanted this to coincide with
the baptism of his child, asking Restany to be the godfather. Mlynárčik, “Cinq aspects de
Pierre Restany,” 285.
76. Alex Mlynárčik, letter to Pierre Restany, undated (probably 1967–1968), ACA PLEST
XSEST 69/64.
77. Pierre Restany, Ailleurs. Alex Mlynárčik (Paris: Galerie Lara Vincy; Bratislava: Slovak
National Gallery, 1995), 148, cited in Bartošová, “Pierre Restany et la Slovaquie,” 278.
78. Alex Mlynárčik, letter to Pierre Restany, 10 October 1972, Bratislava, ACA PLEST
XSEST65/29.
79. Ibid.
80. Alex Mlynárčik, letter to Pierre Restany, 24 October 1972, Bratislava, ACA PLEST
XSEST 69/30.
81. Alex Mlynárčik, letter to Pierre Restany, not dated, ACA PLEST XSEST 69/36.
82. Alex Mlynárčik, letter to Pierre Restany, not dated (probably 1973), ACA PLEST
XSEST 66/21.
XSEST66/23.
XSEST66/22.
85. Beke added: “better to link with Germany, the Zero Group … Uecker’s sister became
the wife of Yves Klein.” Author’s interview with László Beke, Budapest, 4 April 2014.
86. Ibid.
87. Given the notable silence of Picasso and other leading French intellectuals on the
events of 1956 in Budapest, this set him apart from the older generation associated with
Les lettres françaises. Thanks to Sarah Wilson for her comments on this.
88. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism,
Freedom and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
89. Cage had already appeared in Eastern Europe at the Zagreb Music Festival in 1963.

Chapter 2: Keeping Together
1. Jaroslav Šťastný, “You Don’t Need Government, You Need Intelligence …! John Cage in
Czechoslovakia (1964–1992),” in Katalin Székely, ed., The Freedom of Sound: John Cage
behind the Iron Curtain, exh. cat. (Budapest: Ludwig Museum, 2013), 64.
2. See Petr Kotík, “Not Wanting to Say Anything about John Cage,” in Székely, The Freedom
of Sound, 73–74.
3. Šťastný, “You Don’t Need Government, You Need Intelligence,” 66.
4. Ibid., 63–64.
5. If few American objects remained in Prague, some Czechoslovak objects made the
return trip: Cage notably spent his otherwise useless Czech currency on buying star
maps that would later be used for the scores of Etudes Australes and Etudes Boreales.
Šťastný, “You Don’t Need Government, You Need Intelligence,” 66.
6. Milan Knížák, “Aktual in Czechoslovakia,” Art and Artists, no. 79 (October 1972), 41.
7. Milan Knížák, email interview with Ranbir Jhutty, March 2010 (unpublished).
8. Ibid.
9. Knížák, “Aktual in Czechoslovakia,” 40.
10. Ibid., 41.
11. Milan Knížák, email interview with Ranbir Jhutty, March 2010.
12. Aktion as a Lifestyle, Auswahl der Aktivitäten 1953–85 (Hamburg: Hamburger Kunst-
halle, 1986).
13. Milan Knížák, “Manifesto of Aktual Art, 1963–4,” photocopy of typescript, Gilbert
and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Milan
Knížák’s performance files, folder no. 5 (item 5 of 26), available at http://post.at.moma
.org/content_items/557-milan-knizak-s-performance-files/media_collection_items/5724.
15. Ibid., 42.
16. Milan Knížák, “The Actual Walk: Demonstration for All the Sense,” typescript, Gil-
bert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Milan
Knížák’s performance files, folder no. 11 (items 2, 3 of 41), available at http://post.at
.moma.org/content_items/557-milan-Knížák-s-performance-files/media_collection
_items/5763.
18. Milan Knížák, email interview with Ranbir Jhutty, March 2010.
19. Allan Kaprow, letter to Jindřich Chalupecký, 26 January 1965, cited in Jindřich Chalu-
pecký, Na hranicích umĕní (Prague: Prostor, 1990) 91.
20. Allan Kaprow, Assemblages, Environments and Happenings (New York: Abrams, 1966).
21. Petra Stegmann, Fluxus East: Fluxus-Netzwerke in Mittelosteuropa, exh. cat. (Berlin:
Künstlerhaus Bethanien, 2007), 26.
22. Jindřich Chalupecký, letter to Willem de Ridder, 5 April 1965, Silverman Collection,
Museum of Modern Art; cited in Pavlína Morganová, Czech Action Art: Happenings, Actions,
Events, Land Art, Body Art and Performance Art behind the Iron Curtain (Prague: Karolinum
Press, Charles University, 2014), 55, and Stegmann, Fluxus East, 25.

23. Ibid.
24. Milan Knížák, email interview with Ranbir Jhutty, 2010.
25. See Stegmann, Fluxus East, 8.
26. Ibid., 21. The focus in this volume is on experimental work in the visual arts. For a
comprehensive study of the alternative music scene in Eastern Europe, see David Crow-
ley and Daniel Muzyczuk, eds., Notes from the Underground: Alternative Music in Eastern
Europe, 1968–1994, exh. cat. (Lódź: Muzeum Sztuki, 2017).
27. Apparently “there were no problems at the border; the materials were simply declared
as games and accepted as such by the customs officials.” Stegmann, Fluxus East, 21. The
Eastern European yearbox never come to fruition (ibid., 22). See Morganová, Czech Action
Art, 54.
28. Maciunas, undated letter in Archive Sohm, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.
29. Though he worked as a designer on a collaborative publication with Henry Flynt
entitled “Communists Must Give Revolutionary Leadership in Culture.” In the event,
Maciunas’s efforts were rechanneled away from the USSR and into the development of a
Fluxhousing cooperative in Soho New York as of 1966. See Stegmann, Fluxus East, 17–18.
30. The artist, who was present, is said to have torn off his shirt and shown the First
Party Secretary the scars of war which had earned him military decorations as a volun-
teer in the Red Army during World War II. As a result he lost his official status as an artist
and eventually emigrated to New York in 1976.
31. A series of pieces and screenings took place 5–7 April 1966, at the City Theater Studio
Reduta. That spring also saw a Fluxus Concert in Vilnius in Lithuania, coordinated by
Vytautas Landsbergis. See Stegman, Fluxus East, 209. These events have been discussed
extensively by Petra Stegmann. See Stegmann, “Fluxus in Prague: The Koncert Fluxu of
1966,” in Jerome Bazin, Pascal Dubourg Glatigny, and Piotr Piotrowksi, eds., Art beyond
Borders Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe (1945–1989) (New York: Central European
University Press, 2015), 241–254.
32. In the end Brecht could not go. Stegmann, “Fluxus in Prague,” 245.
33. See Morganová, Czech Action Art, 22–79.
34. George Maciunas, letter to Jindřich Chalupecký, 15 September 1966, PNP, Prague,
cited in Stegmann, “Fluxus in Prague,” 243.
35. Stegmann, “Fluxus in Prague,” 246.
36. Ben Vautier, letter to George Maciunas, n.d. (October/November 1966), Jean Brown
Papers, Getty Research Institute Library, cited in Stegmann, “Fluxus in Prague,” 245.
37. Stegmann, “Fluxus in Prague,” 246.
38. Ibid., 249.
39. The soldier’s name was Igor Demjen. Morganová reports that, in a conversation with
Robert Wittmann, that artist proposed that the episode must have been carefully pre-
pared by the secret police and that they may have put something in Oldenbourg’s drink.
He recalls that there had been a girl (probably an agent as well) trying to seduce Olden-
bourg and that she was working with Demjen to get his passport. Wittmann is convinced
that “Demjen wasn’t a normal soldier who wanted to escape to the West, but a secret
agent and this was the way to get secretly and legally to the West.” Pavlína Morganová,
email communication with the author, 10 September 2017.

40. Morganová, Czech Action Art, 22.
41. George Maciunas, letter to Milan Knížák, undated, cited in ibid., 67, footnote 77.
42. Milan Knížák, in Valerie Smith, “King of the Dwarfs: A Conversation with Milan
Knížák,” Arts Magazine (May 1991), 63.
43. Ibid.
44. Pierre Restany, “Prague, Sisyphe sans Kafka,” cited in Lada Hubatová-Vacková, “Pierre
Restany et Prague entre 1960 et 1970,” in Richard Leeman, ed., Le demi-siècle de Pierre
Restany (Paris: INHA, 2009), 262.
45. See Maja and Reuben Fowkes, eds., Revolution I Love You: 1968 in Art, Politics and Phi-
losophy (Manchester, UK: MIRIAD, Manchester Metropolitan University, 2008), 232.
46. Milan Knížák, interview cited in Patryk Wasiak, “Kontakty kulturalne pomiędzy
Polską a Węgrami, Czechosłowacją i NRD w latach 1970–1989 na przykładzie artystów
plastyków” (PhD thesis, Instytut Kultury i Komunikowania, Szkoła Wyższa Psychologii
Społecznej, Warsaw, 2009), 325.
47. Milan Knížák, interview by Stegmann, Prague, 14 September 2006, cited in Stegmann,
Fluxus East, 244.
48. Milan Knížák, email interview with Ranbir Jhutty, March 2010. See also Milan Knížák,
“A Community 1963–1971,” in Stegmann, Fluxus East, 78–94.
49. Chalupecký, Na hranicích umĕní (Prague: Prostor, 1990), 101. Aktual’s activities cer-
tainly did nothing to recommend Fluxus to Khrushchev. Knížák said he was arrested and
interrogated more than one hundred times.
50. Knížák, “Polemizuje s J. Chalupeckým,” Výtvarná práce, no. 13 (1966), cited in Pavlína
Morganová, “Czech Action Art in the 1960s Press,” in Vit Havránek, ed., Akce, slovo, pohyb,
prostor. Word, Action, Movement, Space, exh. cat. (Prague: City Art Gallery, 1999), 367–368.
A debate about the happenings ensued in a number of cultural journals of the time, cul-
minating in a survey of sorts that brought together Czechoslovak and Western happen-
ings in a special issue of Sešity pro literature a diskusi (no. 33, 1969).
51. Wolf Vostell, letter to Jindřich Chalupecký, 1 April 1967, Vostell folder, Chalupecký
files, Czech Literary Archive, Prague.
52. For a full account of the event, which was called Happening az ebed (in memoriam Batu
Khan) (The lunch—in memoriam Batu Kán), see chapter 2 of my Antipolitics in Central
European Art: Reticence as Dissidence under Post-Totalitarian Rule 1956–1989 (London: IB
Tauris, 2014).
53. It would be his involvement in happenings rather than the publication of Laura? that
led to Altorjay’s political persecution and emigration, by way of Romania, Yugoslavia,
Italy, and France, to Germany on a false German passport arranged for him by a friend.
Amy Brouillette, “Remapping Samizdat: Underground Publishing and the Hungarian
Avant-Garde 1966–1975” (MA dissertation supervised by Gábor Klaniczay, Central Euro-
pean University, Budapest, 2009), 52.
54. Ibid., 50.
55. Ibid.
56. Masotta’s text appeared a year before Lippard and Chandler published their account
of “the dematerialization of art.” Though Lippard had traveled to Argentina in 1967 and
was presumably aware of Masotta, he is not referenced in Lippard and Chandler’s essay.

57. Brouillette, “Remapping Samizdat,” 52.
58. Kemp-Welch, Antipolitics in Central European Art, 104–114.
59. Dick Higgins, “Intermedia,” Something Else Press Newsletter, no. 1 (February 1966), 3.
See also Dick Higgins, “Statement on Intermedia,” 1966, in dé-coll/age 6 (Frankfurt:
Typos Verlag; New York: Something Else Press, July 1967).
60. Milan Knížák, “Travel Book” (extracts), trans. Paul Wilson, in Claire Bishop and
Marta Dziewańska, eds, 1968–1989: Political Upheaval and Artistic Change (Warsaw: MSN,
2009), 214.
61. Friedman was teaching Intermedia at the Experimental College of San Francisco
State College over the course of 1967–1968.
62. Marian Mazzone, “‘Keeping Together’ Prague and San Francisco: Networking in
1960s Art,” Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research 7, no. 3 (2009), 285.
63. Milan Knížák, letter to Ken Friedman, Ken Friedman collection, box 2, Folder 6,
Mondeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego, cited in
Mazzone, “‘Keeping Together,’” 286.
64. Mazzone, “‘Keeping Together,’” 288.
65. Tomás Pospiszyl, “Milan Knížák and Ken Friedman: Keeping Together Manifestations
in a Divided World,” post. Notes on Modern & Contemporary Art Around the Globe, 2015,
available at http://post.at.moma.org/content_items/683-milan-knizak-and-ken-friedman
-keeping-together-manifestations-in-a-divided-world.
66. Thanks to former Courtauld student Anna Smirnova, whose MA essay on living “a
little otherwise” focused my attention on this aspect of Knížák’s practice in early 2017.
67. This notwithstanding, Knížák did later go on to gather his documentation together
systematically for the so-called Performance Files, now cataloged and available online as
part of the Silverman Collection at MoMA.
68. Milan Knížák, letter to Ken Friedman, Box 7, Folder 82, Mandeville Special Collections
Library, University of California, San Diego, cited in Mazzone, “‘Keeping Together,’” 287.
69. Ken Friedman, “The Wealth and Poverty of Networks,” in Annmarie Chandler and
Norie Neumark, eds., At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 244–245.
70. Morganová, Czech Action Art, 80.
71. Morganová discusses several of his American activities in detail, exploring the 17
December 1968 Lying Ceremony at Douglass College, New Brunswick, New Jersey, in
which “everyone lies blindfolded on the floor. For a long time” and the Difficult Ceremony
of 18 January 1969 at Dick Higgins’s house in New York for which the script ran “Spend 24
hours together in a deserted place. Don’t eat, don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t sleep, don’t
speak and don’t communicate in any other way (e.g. by writing or pointing). After 24
hours, leave silently.” Morganová, Czech Action Art, 72–74.
72. 1968: 16 May, Night in Marin County and San Francisco; 17 December, Lying Ceremony
at Douglass College, New Brunswick, New Jersey. 1969: 18 January, Difficult Ceremony on
Greene Street, New York City; 9 February, Lecture: To Love to Bend the Gases at the Univer-
sity of Kentucky, Lexington; 2–3 April, Tonight’s Ceremony at Beneville Camp, San Ber-
nardino, California. See Stegmann, Fluxus East, 253–255.
73. Knížák, “Travel Book,” 215.

74. Ibid., 213.
75. Ibid., 214.
76. Ibid., 217.
77. Ibid.
78. Gábor Attalai, cited in Dávid Fehér, “Transfer Ideas,” in Fehér, Attalai Gábor—Conceptual
Works, Konceptuális művek 1969–85 (Budapest: Vintage Galeria, 2013), 12.
79. Harald Szeeman, letter to Jindřich Chalupecký, Chalupecký archives, Archives of the
Museum of Literature, Prague.
80. For an important discussion of the significance of this event as a turning point see
Philip Ursprung, “More Than the Art World Can Tolerate: Otto Muehl’s Manopsychotic
Ballet,” Tate Etc., no. 15 (Spring 2009), http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles
/more-art-world-can-tolerate. He reads Documenta 5 as a rappel à l’ordre which “stood for
the triumph of the museum over the artist,” where dissenting artists who cast doubt on
the art world’s power structures were cast out, and Joseph Beuys triumphantly entered
in to bolster “the myth of the political roots of contemporary art.”
81. Milan Knížák, cited in Smith, “King of the Dwarfs,” 64.
82. Knížák participated in a number of group shows internationally in these years: at the
Gallery Art Intermedia, Cologne, West Germany (1970), at the Museum am Ostwall,
Dortmund, West Germany (1972), and at Gallery ‘A’, Amsterdam (1976 and 1980). In 1979,
he published an LP in Italy called Broken Music and received a DAAD fellowship to West
Berlin.
83. Jiří Ševčík and Jana Ševčíková, “Thinking about Identity on the Threshold of Europe,”
in Lóránd Hegyi, ed., Aspects / Positions: 50 Years of Art in Central Europe 1949–1989, exh.
cat. (Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, 2000), 239.
84. Ibid.
85. Wolfgang Feelisch, ed., Zeremonien (Remscheid: Vice-Versand, 1971). Milan Knížák,
letter to Wolfgang Feelisch, 19 February 1973, in “Action on Behalf of Milan Knížák,”
mimeographed circular produced by Beau Geste Press. David Mayor papers, Tate Hyman
Kreitman Research Centre, London.
86. Undated letter to Wolfgang Feelisch in “Action on Behalf of Milan Knížák,” mimeo-
graphed circular produced by Beau Geste Press. David Mayor papers, Tate Hyman Kreit-
man Research Centre, London.
87. David Mayor papers, Tate Hyman Kreitman Research Centre, London.
88. “Statement by the Collector Dr. H Sohm,” in “Action on Behalf of Milan Knížák,”
mimeographed circular produced by Beau Geste Press. David Mayor papers, Tate Hyman
Kreitman Research Centre, London.
89. Knížák would go on to collaborate with the Beau Geste Press on the production of an
Aktual edition of Schmuck in 1974.
90. David Mayor papers, Tate Hyman Kreitman Research Centre, London.
91. Zanna Gilbert, “Something Unnameable in Common: Translocal Collaboration at
the Beau Geste Press,” in Klara Kemp-Welch and Christina Freire, eds., Artmargins, spe-
cial issue on Networking and Collaboration in Eastern Europe and Latin America, nos.
1–2 (2012), 45–73.

92. Ibid.
93. Alex Mlynárčik, letter to Pierre Restany, not dated, ACA PLEST XSEST 69/31, 2/2.
94. This is an argument I develop in more detail in Antipolitics in Central European Art.
Chapter 3: Communication at a Distance
1. The French term is the best for our purposes, insofar as it does not distinguish
between letters and parcels in the way that the terms “mail” or “shipment” tend to, nor
does it suggest the sort of conceptual coherence or urgency that the term “dispatch”
implies—hence my decision in this chapter to use the French rather than a translation.
Poinsot’s dissertation is Jean-Marc Poinsot, “Une forme particulière d’intervention artis-
tique: les envois” (MA dissertation, University of Paris X Nanterre, June 1972). Poinsot
discussed the organization of his exhibition and offered close readings of the work of
Ray Johnson, Richard C, Ken Friedman, Eric Andersen, Ben Vautier, Christian Boltanski,
Jean Le Gac, Jan Dibbets, On Kawara, and Klaus Staeck.
2. Of this group, André Cadere was born in Warsaw in 1934 but had Romanian national-
ity and moved to Paris in 1967. The Romanian émigré with his trademark painted
nomadic wooden poles would soon become a staple of the Parisian gallery scene. Sarkis
Zabunyan (Sarkis), Christian Boltanski, and Annette Messager were the others con-
nected with the group. Jean Le Gac was not in the group but Poinsot knew him through
Boltanski. This scene is described in Jean-Marc Poinsot, Une scène parisienne 1968–1972
(Rennes: Centre d’histoire de l’art contemporain, 1991).
3. Author’s interview with Jean-Marc Poinsot, Rennes, 21 March 2017.
4. Ibid.
5. Poinsot, letter to Ben [Vautier], 16 March 1971.
6. Poinsot and his friend Alfred Pacquement had participated in a program established
by Szeemann in 1969 touring cultural institutions in Germany. Poinsot recollects: “In
1969, I found myself by chance in Bern, the day of the opening of ‘When Attitudes
Become Form.’ It was quite a strong experience.” When he returned, he wrote a text
about it, which he photocopied and distributed at the university. Szeemann visited Nan-
terre shortly afterward on Poinsot’s invitation, subsequently inviting him to Germany
and hiring him to put together artists’ documentation for Documenta V. Author’s inter-
view with Jean-Marc Poinsot, Rennes, 21 March 2017.
7. “And then some days there were surprises. One day, Ben arrived, and as I was not there,
he wrote in pen on my door, and we had a lot of trouble getting it off, my wife and I.”
Author’s interview with Jean-Marc Poinsot, Rennes, 21 March 2017.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Poinsot, letter to Ben [Vautier], Paris, 16 March 1971, Fonds Jean Marc Poinsot, ACA,
Rennes.
11. Georges Boudaille, “Les artistes hongrois d’aujourd’hui au musée Galliera,” Les lettres
françaises, no. 1327 (25–31 March 1970), 22; “Situation de l’art en Yougoslavie à la Trien-
nale de Belgrade,” Les lettres françaises, no 1343 (15–21 July 1970), 21–23; “L’avant garde
en Hongrie et en Roumanie,” Les lettres françaises, no. 1367 (6–12 January 1971), 21–23;
“L’avant garde en Roumanie,” Les lettres françaises, no. 1368 (13–19 January 1971), 26.
Notes to Chapters 2 and 3 427

12. People were asked to send in their materials by 1 September 1971.
14. “Exposition,” in Jean-Marc Poinsot, ed., Mail art. Communication à Distance. Concept
(Paris: CEDIC, 1971), unpaginated.
15. Jean Clair, “Hommage à Fouquet-la-Varenne,” in Poinsot, Mail art.
16. Ibid.
17. Konkoly pages in Poinsot, Mail art.
18. Letter signed Roselyne Chenu to Konkoly, dated 22 February 1971, reproduced in
Poinsot, Mail art.
19. Konkoly would later go on to organize an exhibition of work by Tót and by Albin
Marffy at the Cité des Arts, where he had a studio, in October 1972, whose aim it was to
challenge viewers to “decide whether the two exhibited artists were me or not … as it was
my exhibition. I took them for a fool.” He provided a clue in the form of a sign reading
“Art is illusory.” Katalin Székely, “Radikális jövőkép,” in Konkoly Gyula, exh. cat. (Budapest:
St.art Galéria, 2008), 57.
20. Gerz had played a key part in expanding Poinsot’s international network, for example
inviting him on a trip to Cologne, where they met mail artist Klaus Staeck and others.
21. Štembera, letter to Jean Marc Poinsot, Prague, 5 June 1971, Fonds Jean Marc Poinsot,
ACA, Rennes.
22. Groh pages in Poinsot, Mail Art.
23. The piece finds an interesting parallel in an unanswered questionnaire sent to Marcel
Duchamp by Endre Tót as part of his TÓTal Questions by TÓT, mailed to a series of promi-
nent art world contacts in 1974. The mailing list included both artists he knew already
and other people whom he wanted to know; the questionnaire consisted of five key “zero
questions,” about life, death, love, nothing, and zeros, but with all the words except
“what,” “you,” “life,” “death,” “love,” “is,” and “nothing” largely obscured by zeros. He
received replies from Marina Abramović, Anonymous c/o Marilyn Monroe, George
Brecht, Jacques Charlier, Hervé Fischer, Ken Friedman, Dick Higgins, Pierre Restany,
Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi, and Wolf Vostell, but not from Duchamp. Restany
responded saying he had “the fear of nothingness,” Higgins gave long-winded answers,
Brecht circled “please print clearly,” and Abramović simply stuck on five Yugoslav stamps
with Tito’s profile.
24. A limited edition of the five-photograph action was later produced by New Reform
Gallery in Antwerp (24 April 1974).
25. Petr Štembera, letter to Kozłowski, cited in Marika Zamojska, “Czechosłowacka
awangarda w polskim życiu artystycznym lat 70,” Fort Sztuki, no. 4 (2/2006), available at
http://www.fortsztuki.art.pl/fortsztuki4.pdf.
26. Štembera’s strategy for disseminating his work in this way led to many early exhibi-
tion opportunities. His work would be included in Prospect ’71 at the Düsseldorf Kunst-
halle in 1971; he went on to have an early solo exhibition at the New Reform Gallery
in Aalst in the Netherlands in 1972, and another at Jarosław Kozłowski’s Akumulatory 2
in Poznań (15–20 January 1973).

27. Konkoly was a radical painter who had already spent some six months in Paris in
1964, living in an attic room some 300 meters from the newly opened Sonnabend Gallery,
at a time when he had fallen (by his own account “like a newborn”) into a new mode of
painting after seeing a version of Rauschenberg’s winning 1964 Venice exhibition, which
subsequently toured to Germany. His friend László Lakner had seen the Rauschenberg
installation in Venice firsthand. The pair were among the most promising painters of
their generation and contributed to its radical transformation in the Hungarian context,
gradually pushing its boundaries ever further. Author’s Skype interview with Gyula
Konkoly, 8 May 2017.
28. Endre Tót, cited in Székely, “Radikális jövőkép,” 49 (unpublished translation by
Gergely Kovács).
29. Konkoly recalls that although Erdély was not officially selected for participation, he
came to Paris anyway to see the exhibition and found his own maverick way of becoming
involved. Author’s Skype interview with Gyula Konkoly, 8 May 2017.
30. This strategy would later become widespread within the framework of mail art, par-
ticularly with the development of the rubber stamp phenomenon.
31. The Chilean exile Guillermo Deisler and German Klaus Staeck were among those on
the same circuit who most consistently adopted the postcard format.
32. The series to which he refers included Typewriting, the activity that was to be included
in Lippard’s book the following year. Postcard from Petr Štembera to Jean Marc Poinsot,
undated, Fonds Jean Marc Poinsot, ACA, Rennes.
33. Jiří Valoch, “Incomplete Remarks Regarding Czechoslovakia Mail Art,” in Kornelia
Röder, ed., Mail Art: Ost Europa in Internationalen Netzwerk (Schwerin: Staatliches
Museum, 1996), 64.
35. In the original, “une mobilisation générale.” Jean-Marc Poinsot, “Circulaire,” Fonds
Biennale de Paris, ACA, Rennes.
37. As Szekely noted, through his friend Gábor Altorjay (who had emigrated to Germany
in the late 1960s, after state persecution following his 1966 Happening az ebéd, and who
worked as an assistant to Wolf Vostell), Konkoly had been employed to help in two
Vostell shows in Paris in early 1971, where he must have met the technician in question.
Székely, “Radikális jövőkép,” 49 (unpublished translation by Gergely Kovács).
38. Poinsot, “Circulaire,” Fonds Biennale de Paris, ACA, Rennes.
39. Alex Mlynárčik, Anno Domini, 1971 project card, Fonds Jean Marc Poinsot, ACA, Rennes.
40. Poinsot correspondence with Klaus Groh, Fonds Jean Marc Poinsot, ACA, Rennes.
42. It later traveled to the CCC in Anvers in Belgium on the invitation of Flor Bex, and a
related conference was held in Rome with Achille Bonito Oliva.
43. Ješa Denegri, “Sekcija ‘poštanskih pošiljki’ sa VII Bijenala mladih u Parizu,” in
Studentski kulturni centar kao umjetnička scena (Belgrade: Studentski kulturni centar,
2003), 27–29.

45. Ivana Bago, “Postal Packages by Želimir Koščević,” on website Parallel Chronologies:
An Archive of East European Exhibitions, http://tranzit.org/exhibitionarchive/postal
-packages/.
46. Koščević, statement published in Novine Galerije SC [Student Center Gallery newspa-
per], March 1972, 135; trans. from the Croatian by Ivana Bago and cited in ibid.
47. Bago, “Postal Packages by Želimir Koščević.”
48. Želimir Koščević, ed., Galerija Studentskog Centra. Publication made on the occasion of
the 10th anniversary of the gallery of the student centre in Zagreb (Zagreb: GSC, 1973), 204.
49. Koščević also curated an exhibition of the Polish avant-garde in 1975, distributing
the work from the show internationally through Novine.
50. He also said that he had heard from Klaus Groh that nobody was receiving compli-
mentary copies of the book, saying this made things particularly difficult given that
in his case he would be unable to pay for a copy, as Czechoslovak currency was not
valid in the West (as noted before, Štembera did receive his copy in the end). Petr
Štembera, letter to Jean-Marc Poinsot, dated 4 February 1972, Fonds Jean Marc Poinsot,
ACA, Rennes.
51. Endre Tót, letter to Georges Boudaille, dated 3 January 1972, Fonds Biennale de Paris,
ACA, Rennes.
52. Ibid.
53. Petr Štembera, letter to Jean Marc Poinsot, 20 May 1972, Fonds Jean Marc Poinsot,
ACA, Rennes.
55. Poinsot recounts anecdotally that “Mail art remained in the window of [the cult book-
shop the Boulevard Saint-Germain] La Hune for a year” while his supervisor’s PhD thesis
only lasted a day. Author’s interview with Jean-Marc Poinsot, Rennes, 21 March 2017.
56. Others were doing the same at that time. Poinsot recalled: “I met Lawrence Weiner
there, the director of Avalanche; we had a long conversation and we distributed a few
issues of Avalanche in France afterwards.” Author’s interview with Jean-Marc Poinsot,
Rennes, 21 March 2017.
Chapter 4: NET: An Open Proposition
1. My previous publications on NET include Klara Kemp-Welch, “Autonomy, Solidarity

and the Antipolitics of NET,” in Bożena Czubak, ed., SIEC—Sztuka dialogu / NET—Art of
Dialogue (Warsaw: Fundacja Profil, 2013).
2. “‘NET,’ Jarosław Kozłowski in Conversation with Klara Kemp-Welch,” ArtMargins 1, no.
2–3 (2012).
3. Ibid.
4. Possibly a misspelling of the painter Zlatni Bojadijev.
5. “‘NET,’ Jarosław Kozłowski in Conversation.”
6. Jarosław Kozłowski, “Art between the Red and the Olden Frames,” in Liam Gillick
and Maria Lindt, eds., Curating with Light Luggage (Frankfurt am Main: Revolver Books,
2005), 44.
430 Notes to Chapters 3 and 4

8. Ibid.
9. One of the earliest events to strategically incorporate the post office into an experi-
mental project in Poland had been Tadeusz Kantor’s happening The Letter of 1967 in
Warsaw, discussed extensively in my Antipolitics in Central European Art.
11. Jiří Kocman, letter to Jarosław Kozłowski dated 17 June 1972.
13. Ibid.
14. Jarosław Kozłowski, “Exercises and Paradoxes: An Interview with Jarosław Kozłowski
by Bożena Czubak,” in Jarosław Kozłowski, Doznania Rzeczywistości i praktyki konceptu-
alne 1965–1980. Sensation of Reality and Conceptual Practices 1965–1980, exh. cat. (Toruń:
Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Znaki Czasu; Kraków: MOCAK, 2015), 103.
15. Lucy Lippard, “Escape Attempts,” in Lippard, ed., Six Years: The Dematerialization of the
Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (1973; rpt., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), vii.
16. Dick Higgins, “Statement on Intermedia,” 1966, in dé-coll/age 6 (Frankfurt: Typos
Verlag; New York: Something Else Press, July 1967).
17. Barry McCallion, email communication with the author, August 2017.
18. Jarosław Kozłowski and Andrzej Kostołowski, letter to Géza Perneczky, Poznań, 29
March 1972, reproduced in Géza Perneczky, “A KÖLN—BUDAPEST KONCEPT Bizalmas
levéltári anyag az 1971-1972-1973-as esztendők magyarországi és nemzetközi Koncept
Art mozgalmának a tudományos kutatásához,” unpublished manuscript, 2013, 141.
19. When the material was returned, Kozłowski also received the prints made from the
confiscated roll of film, so that the secret police themselves ended up playing a part in
the production of the documentation of the event they had interrupted. “‘NET,’ Jarosław
Kozłowski in Conversation.” See also Luiza Nader, “Heterotopy: The NET and Galeria
Akumulatory 2,” in Petra Stegmann, Fluxus East: Fluxus-Netzwerke in Mittelosteuropa, exh.
cat. (Berlin: Künstlerhaus Bethanien, 2007), 111–125.
21. J. Kozłowski and J. Kasprzycki, “Alternatywna Rzeczywistość, Akumulatory 2,” Arteon
(2000, no. 4), 49.
22. Kozłowski, “Exercises and Paradoxes,” 99.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. For an overview of the Press see Donna Conwell, “Beau Geste Press,” Getty Research
Journal, no. 2 (2010), 183–192.
26. Ibid., 183.
27. David Mayor, letter to Jarosław Kozłowski, 14 October 1972, Kozłowski archive.
29. Art & Project was the subject of a MoMA exhibition in 2009 entitled “In & Out of
Amsterdam: Art & Project Bulletin 1968–1989.”
30. Luiza Nader, Konceptualizm w PRL (Warsaw: Fundacja Galerii Foksal, 2009), 146–147.

31. Jarosław Kozłowski, “Program działalności Galerii Akumulatory 2 przy RO ZSP UAM
w Poznaniu w roku 1972/1973,” dated 10 October 1972, cited in Patryk Wasiak, “Kon-
takty kulturalne pomiędzy Polską a Węgrami, Czechosłowacją i NRD w latach 1970–1989
na przykładzie artystów plastyków” (PhD thesis, Instytut Kultury i Komunikowania,
Szkoła Wyższa Psychologii Społecznej, Warsaw, 2009), 253.
32. Wasiak, “Kontakty kulturalne,” 261.
33. Kozłowski compares this situation with that in the West and finds that it was favor-
able: “Everything was more transparent in the East. But the perversity of ownership, and
the standard concept of freedom that the West attached to the function of art, camou-
flaged very clever and insidious forms of pressure and control.” “‘NET,’ Jarosław
Kozłowski in Conversation.”
34. Kozłowski cited in Wasiak, “Kontakty kulturalne,” 253.
35. Štembera cited in ibid., 261.
36. An early example is Štembera’s participation in an exhibition with the laconic title
Encore une occasion d’être artiste organized by Želimir Koščević at the Students’ Cultural
Centre in Zagreb. See Novine Galerije SC (7–17 December 1973).
37. Marika Zamojska, “Czechosłowacka awangarda w polskim życiu artystycznym lat 70,”
Fort Sztuki, no. 4 (2/2006), available at http://www.fortsztuki.art.pl/fortsztuki4.pdf.
38. Štembera distributed invitations to his Akumulatory 2 opening internationally, send-
ing one to Jean-Marc Poinsot, among others.
39. Jiří Valoch, “Incomplete Remarks Regarding Czechoslovakian Mail Art,” in Kornelia
Museum, 1996), 61.
40. She also writes that as “weather is not subject to political decisions,” “it represents …
the abstract notion of freedom.” Arguably, of course, we now know that weather is sub-
ject to political decisions, insofar as political decisions are central to halting the advance
of climate change. Maja Fowkes, The Green Bloc: Neo-avant-garde Art and Ecology under
Socialism (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2015), 19. On a less environmen-
tally minded note, the project inevitably also calls to mind Holly Go Lightly’s defense in
Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (released as a film in 1961) upon her arrest for visiting a
notorious criminal involved in cocaine trafficking while he was in prison (who would
give her messages such as “Snow flurries expected this weekend over New Orleans” to
pass on to his “agent”): “all I used to do would be to meet him and give him the weather
report.” Štembera was doing the same, just passing on his weather reports, for his own
reasons.
41. He was also committed to helping disseminate Western literature in Czechoslovakia
in samizdat and translated key texts such as Fiore and McLuhan’s The Medium Is the Mas-
sage (1967) and, later, writings by performance artists such as Acconci (for Jazz Petit,
edited by Karel Srp), presumably with the help of his wife, who studied languages
(Štembera had studied social sciences).
42. Petr Štembera, “Events, Happenings and Land-Art in Czechoslovakia: A Short Infor-
mation,” Revista de Arte, Universidad de Puerto Rico, no. 7 (December 1970).
43. Ibid., reproduced in Tom Marioni, Vision, no. 2 (1976), 42.
44. Ibid.

Chapter 5: Aktuelle Kunst in Osteuropa
1. Klaus Groh, “Zu diesem Buch,” in Groh, Aktuelle Kunst in Osteuropa (Cologne: DuMont
Schauberg, 1972) unpaginated.
2. Kroutvor was employed at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague as of 1969 (special-
izing in posters), where Štembera would also work. A German-language text by Josef
Kroutvor entitled “Möglichkeien, experiment, ideen und kreationen” (Prague, 1971) was
included in Groh’s Aktuelle Kunst in Osteuropa.
3. See for instance Leszek Kołakowski’s “Hope and Hopelessness,” Survey (London) 17,
no. 3 (Summer 1971); Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless” (1978), trans. P. Wilson,
in Jan Vladislav, ed., Václav Havel: Living in Truth: Twenty-two Essays Published on the Occa-
sion of the Award of the Erasmus Prize to Václav Havel (London: Faber and Faber, 1989).
4. Kroutvor, “Möglichkeien, experiment, ideen und kreationen,” in Groh, Aktuelle Kunst
in Osteuropa.
5. Author’s interview with Géza Perneczky, Budapest, 14 May 2016.
6. The exchanges between Štembera and Groh developed into a warm friendship: with
exchanges of greetings to one another’s partners and children and observations on
developments in their respective family lives.
7. Author’s interview with Klaus Groh, Bremen, 14 January 2015.
8. Groh attended a Cage concert in Bremen in 1970 together with David Mayor. He
recalls: “I also knew Beuys personally. I met him several times. … With Klaus Staeck
[from the Akademie der Kunst in Berlin] he founded the Internationales Künstler Gre-
mium. I was a member of this Gremium.” Author’s interview with Klaus Groh, Bremen,
14 January 2015.
10. Dóra Maurer, “SUMUS,” in Maurer, ed., Maurer, Gáyor. Párhuzamos életművek / paral-
lele lebenswerke / parallel oeuvres, exh. cat. (Gyõr: Városi Művészeti Múzeum, n.d. [2001]),
134.
11. Anna-Maria Potocka in an interview cited in Patryk Wasiak, “Kontakty kulturalne
pomiędzy Polską a Węgrami, Czechosłowacją i NRD w latach 1970–1989 na przykładzie
artystów plastyków” (PhD thesis, Instytut Kultury i Komunikowania, Szkoła Wyższa Psy-
chologii Społecznej, Warsaw, 2009), 278.
12. Groh recalled the importance of the official letterhead in convincing Eastern bloc
bureaucrats that his invitations to artists were legitimate. Such invitations also had to
stipulate the dates of the proposed visit, and the host had to accept financial responsibil-
ity for visitors for the duration of their trip. Author’s interview with Klaus Groh, Bremen,
14 January 2015.
13. The second book in the series, Relativities, was authored by Klaus Groh. Later authors
would include Andrzej Kostołowski, David Mayor, Bogdanka Poznanović, Endre Tót, and
Jiří Valoch.
14. Klaus Groh in conversation with author and students at Forschungstelle Osteuropa
Archives, Bremen, 15 January 2015. He also had a great many contacts among publishers
and gallerists, and helped put people in touch with one another. Among others, he put
Perneczky in touch with the Zentrum fur Aktuelle Kunst in Aachen and with the New
Reform Gallery in Aalst. Groh, letter to Perneczky, 25 September 1971.

15. Klaus Groh in conversation with author and students at Forschungstelle Osteuropa
Archives, Bremen, 15 January 2015.
16. The gallery had been founded and led by Jerzy Ludwiński from 1967 until his removal
from his post and the closure of the gallery in 1971. See Luiza Nader, Konceptualizm w
PRL [Conceptual art in the People’s Polish Republic] (Warsaw, 2009), 131–140; Groh,
Aktuelle Kunst in Osteuropa, 1.
17. The Polish participants were Andrzej Bereziański (b. 1939), Jan Chwałczyk (b. 1924),
Zbigniew Dłubak (b. 1921), Stanisław Dróżdż (b. 1939), Antoni Dzieduszycki (b. 1937),
Wanda Gołkowska, Zbigniew Gostomski (b. 1932), Zdzisław Jurkiewicz (b. 1931), Tomasz
Kawiak (b. 1943), Barbara Kozłowska, Jarosław Kozłowski (b. 1945), Andrzej Lachowicz
(b. 1939), Natalia Lach-Lachowicz, Maria Michałowska, Ludmiła Popiel / Jerzy Fedoro
wicz, Jerzy Rosołowicz (b. 1928), Krystyna Sokołowska (b. 1945), Tadeusz Walter (b. 1945),
Henryk Waniek (b. 1942), Anastasy Wiśniewski.
18. One of Attalai’s plans was to make a world map of women’s breasts. Among others,
he wrote to Carolee Schneemann to ask her to participate and she sent him some signed
nude photographs. Kristine Stiles, ed., Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of
Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 194–195,
319–320, cited in Dávid Fehér, “Transfer Ideas,” in Dávid Fehér, Attalai Gábor—Concep-
tual Works, Konceptuális művek 1969–85 (Budapest: Vintage Galeria, 2013), 17. Attalai had
had his first international solo show in 1966 at the Modern Nordisk Konst Gallery in
Göteborg, Sweden and had participated in Harald Szeemann’s exhibition “Plans and
Projects as Art / Pläne und Projekte als Kunst” at Kunsthalle Bern, traveling to Aktions
raum 1 in Munich, at the end of 1969.
19. Others from our network who were included were Fluxus artist Eric Andersen and
alternative magazine networkers Julien Blaine and Maurizio Nannucci.
20. Goran Trbuljak, roundtable discussion, SocialEast Forum Seminar on Networks and
Sociability in East European Art, Courtauld Institute of Art, 23 October 2010.
21. In the same critical spirit, he would collaborate with the famous Galerie des Loca-
taires run by the Croatian émigré Ida Biard, which consisted of a series of postes restantes
in Düsseldorf, Milan, Paris, and Zagreb. Biard had studied in Paris and returned there in
1972 after a spell in Zagreb. The ethos of the gallery was anticommercial, and Biard
sought to use it as a space for promoting young and experimental artists. An agreement
was struck whereby “participants in the Galerie des Locataires’ activity promised to ana-
lyze the relationship that exists between the exhibition site and their work, and to
explain the goals of their presentation within certain exhibition spaces. The Galerie des
Locataires, for its part, promises to remain an open field for communication.” As Mari-
jan Susovski explained: “the art of a given author … was distributed and served to the
public in such places where their socio-cultural origins would have the greatest effect
(shop fronts, apartments, banks, post offices, stations, streets, markets, cinemas, metros,
cafes).” It was not intended to “exhibit or present artists’ works” but to “communicate …
produce … and execute … them on behalf of the artist.” The gallery was effectively an
attempt to eliminate the “art system” and to facilitate direct contact between artist and
audience. See Béatrice Parent, “La Galerie des Locataires,” in La Galerie des Locataires,
1972 (Rome: Edizioni Carte Segrete, 1989); and Christine Macel, Joanna Mytkowska,
Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, eds., Les promesses du passé: Une histoire discontinue de l’art
dans l’ex-Europe de l’Est, exh. cat. (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2010), 185, 190–193.
22. Petr Štembera, roundtable discussion, SocialEast Forum Seminar on Networks and
Sociability, 2010.

23. Rudolf Sikora, “Short History of Networking in the 1970s and 1980s,” three-page
typescript produced for SocialEast Seminar on Networks and Sociability in Eastern Euro-
pean Art, 2010. Other contacts from this period that he mentions include Art Agency;
Bernd Löbach—Informations Centrale für Ereignisse; New Reform Galerie, Aalst;
Omaha Flow Systems (Ken Friedman), Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska; CAyC
(Centro de Arte y Comunicación), Buenos Aires—Jorge Glusberg; Jürgen Schweine-
braden (Berlin); Julien Blaine—magazine Robho; and Marga van Mechelen and Albert
van der Weide in Amsterdam.
24. Maurer, “SUMUS,” 134.
25. Klaus Groh, email correspondence with the author, 15 September 2017.
26. Ibid.
Chapter 6: Émigré Encounters in Cologne
Periodicals 1968–1988 (Cologne: Editions Soft Geometry, 1993), 55.
2. Author’s interview with Géza Perneczky, Budapest, 14 May 2016, trans. Julia Secklehner.
3. Tomáš Strauss was also there at that time. Perneczky recollects: “He came at around
the same time as I did, from Bratislava. He was bought out by DuMont. DuMont bought
out Jewish people who were in the art world from Czechoslovakia. He was an art histo-
rian. They called it humanitarian action. The Germans did that on a grand scale, for
example in Romania. They gave the governments money so that German-speakers or
Jews could leave in a rescue act. DuMont did the same, but much smaller, and Strauss
was lucky, because his German was good and he immediately became vice-director of
one of the biggest museums in the Ruhrgebiet. A great start. … Eventually he got a job as
a librarian in the East European Cultural Centre in Cologne.” Author’s interview with
Géza Perneczky, Budapest, 14 May 2016.
5. Jiří Valoch, letter to Géza Perneczky, Brno, 19 March 1972, in Géza Perneczky, “A
KÖLN—BUDAPEST KONCEPT Bizalmas levéltári anyag az 1971-1972-1973-as esztendők
magyarországi és nemzetközi Koncept Art mozgalmának a tudományos kutatásához,”
unpublished manuscript, 2013, 138.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Helena Musilová, “Jiří Valoch and the ‘Position’ of Curator in Brno, Czechoslovakia in
1970s: The Official Curator and Unofficial Artistic Scene,” paper at the conference “Con-
tested Spheres: Artworlds under Socialism,” Kassák Múzeum, Budapest, 27–28 May 2016.
9. Jiří Valoch, letter to Géza Perneczky, Brno, 2 April 1972, in Perneczky, “A KÖLN—
BUDAPEST KONCEPT,” 142.
10. Jiří Valoch, letter to Géza Perneczky, Brno, 16 June 1972, in Perneczky, “A KÖLN—
11. Jiří H. Kocman, letter to Géza Perneczky, Brno, 25 March 1972, in Perneczky, “A
KÖLN—BUDAPEST KONCEPT,” 139.
12. Jiří H. Kocman, letter to Géza Perneczky, Brno, 10 April 1972, in Perneczky, “A KÖLN—

13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Jiří H. Kocman, letter to Géza Perneczky, 24 February 1973, in Perneczky, “A KÖLN—
17. David Mayor, letter to Géza Perneczky 23 March 1973, in Perneczky, “A KÖLN—
18. Jiří H. Kocman, letter to Géza Perneczky, Brno, 20 May 1972, in Perneczky, “A KÖLN—
19. Author’s interview with Géza Perneczky, Budapest, 14 May 2016. Groh and his wife
ran a gallery from their home in Oldenburg. They reminisce: “We had it 15 years, 170
exhibitions. A cellar gallery actually, at home, and in parallel, we had a home theater, a
room theater with a big piano and we still have it and we had many concerts and theater
and cabaret and readings. … The exhibitions were mostly not paintings but conceptual
art, Fluxus, dada. For 10 years we made exhibitions every six weeks and then we made a
little less because we had a lot of people coming to our theater. It was more famous than
the gallery. It was our intention to get more people to the gallery through the theater.”
Klaus Groh in conversation with author and students at Forschungstelle Osteuropa
Archives, Bremen, 15 January 2015.
20. Dóra Maurer, “SUMUS,” in Maurer, ed., Maurer, Gáyor. Párhuzamos életművek / parallele
lebenswerke / parallel oeuvres, exh. cat. (Győr: Városi Művészeti Múzeum, 2002), 131.
21. Ibid., 127. As Anna Wessely noted, this presented something of a conceptual problem
for the Hungarian authorities: “it is not only the Hungarian National Bank who treated
the husband as ‘a resident alien’ and the wife as a ‘resident’ (to whom different currency
regulations applied); the attitude of the bureaucrats employed by the various arts insti-
tutions in Hungary was pretty much the same. They completely neglected Gáyor’s exis-
tence and pretended that Dóra Maurer’s opportunities to travel and learn about
contemporary trends and exhibitions abroad depended on their favor.” Anna Wessely,
“Two Artists in One Household,” in Maurer, Maurer, Gáyor, 45.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 129.
25. Ibid., 137.
26. The “Fluxshoe” catalog would be published by the Beau Geste Press. See Ken Fried-
man and Mike Weaver, eds., Fluxshoe, exh. cat. (Devon: Beau Geste Press, 1972), and
Simon Anderson, “Fluxus, Fluxion, Flux-shoe: 1970s,” in Ken Friedman, ed., The Fluxus
Reader (West Sussex: Academy Editions, 1998).
27. Falmouth (23–31 October 1972), Exeter (13 November–2 December 1972), Croydon
(15–26 January 1973), Oxford (10–25 February 1973), Nottingham (6–19 June 1973),
Blackburn (6–21 July 1973), and Hastings (17–24 August 1973).
28. David Mayor, “Something about the FluxShoe” (for the Southern Arts Association Bul-
letin), December 1972, 1, 3, typescript from Tate Gallery Archive, David Mayor Collection
815.2.2.6.6.
29. Ibid., 4.

30. Ibid., 5–6.
31. When Budapest manufacturers refused to produce his rubber designs, Tót reportedly
succeeded in having his stamps made in Zurich. Author’s interview with Endre Tót,
Cologne, 6 January 2006.
32. Zanna Gilbert, “Something Unnameable in Common: Translocal at the Beau Geste
Press,” ArtMargins 1, no. 2–3 (June 2012).
33. Knížák later took advantage of the invitation to edit an issue of Schmuck to present to
an international audience the activities of the experimental group Aktual of which he
had been a leading figure since its founding in the 1960s. The fact that Knížák did not
opt for an overview of the contemporary Czechoslovak scene in 1974 may to some extent
be symptomatic of the political situation in normalized Czechoslovakia and its success-
ful interruption of solidarity among diverse artistic communities within the country.
34. Hungarian Schmuck (Collumpton, UK: Beau Geste Press, 1972).
36. Ibid., 144.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., 144–145.
39. Circular from Hans Werner Kalkmann and Jiří H. Kocman, 1972, reproduced in
Perneczky, “A KÖLN—BUDAPEST KONCEPT,” 141.
41. “Triptych: An Interview with Dóra Maurer and Tibor Gáyor by István Hajdu,” in
Maurer, Maurer, Gáyor, 20.
42. Ibid., 19. Perneczky concurs, saying: “Dieter Honisch did a lot for East European Art,
for Polish and Hungarian artists, in Essen, in the ’70s. He was born in Silesia—a German
Pole.” Author’s interview with Géza Perneczky, Budapest, 14 May 2016.Maurer describes
how 1980 marked a turning point in Hungarian cultural policy, which became more
open: “the state during those years slowly but surely abandoned the monitoring and
tight control of events of increasing artistic non-compliance,” and the co-founders of
SUMUS felt that “there was finally not a need for the ‘nurturing’ of certain tendencies
within the framework of our SUMUS-activity, and we could concentrate on the structural-
constructivist-concrete domain.” Maurer, “SUMUS,” 153.
Chapter 7: Hungarians at Galeria Foksal
1. Piotr Piotrowski, “Nationalizing Modernism: Exhibitions of Hungarian and Czechoslo-

vakian Avant-Garde in Warsaw,” in Jerome Bazin, Pascal Dubourg Glatigny, and Piotr
Piotrowksi, eds., Art beyond Borders: Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe 1945–1989
(Budapest: Central European University Press, 2016), 209–225.
2. Letter from János Brendel to the BWA ZPAP Poznan dated 19 September 1969. Artpool
János Brendel file.

3. Patryk Wasiak, “Kontakty kulturalne pomiędzy Polską a Węgrami, Czechosłowacją
i NRD w latach 1970–1989 na przykładzie artystów plastyków” (PhD thesis, Instytut
Kultury i Komunikowania, Szkoła Wyższa Psychologii Społecznej, Warsaw, 2009), 245.
4. Author’s interview with János Brendel, Poznań, July 2004, supplemented by informa-
tion from interview cited in Wasiak, “Kontakty kulturalne,” 244. A solo show of Csáji’s
works had been organized in Poznan on 11 March 1968 at Galeria OdNowa (1964–1969),
whose Salon Debiutow (Debut Salon) was programmed by the young Jarosław Kozłowski
as of 1967. As Patryk Wasiak points out, this was not the artist’s debut but his fourth
show, though it was his international debut.
5. Author’s interview with János Brendel, Poznań, July 2004.
6. Patryk Wasiak relates that eight of the works entered the permanent collection of the
Muzeum Pomorza Zachodniego in Szczecin in preparation for a planned official “Presen-
tation of Painting from the People’s Democracies.”
7. János Brendel, Wystawa grupy artystów węgierskich, exh. cat. (Poznań, 1970).
8. János Brendel, cited in Wasiak, “Kontakty kulturalne,” 247.
9. Jarosław Kozłowski, “‘NET,’ Jarosław Kozłowski in Conversation with Klara Kemp-
Welch,” ArtMargins 1, no. 2–3 (June 2012), 15.
10. Borowski citing the draft program for the gallery that he and Ptaszkowska and
Tchorek had drawn up in 1966 in “On One Side of the Same Water: Marek Bartelik with
Wiesław Borowski,” Brooklyn Rail (September 2011), available at http://www.brooklynrail
.org/2011/09/art/marek-baretlik-with-wieslaw-borowski.
11. Kantor had participated in Documenta in Kassel and the Venice Biennale among
others, and had recently returned from a seven-month tour of the United States and
other places. See chapter 1 of my Antipolitics in Central European Art.
12. Thomas Skowronek, “Crossing the Border: The Foksal Gallery from Warsaw in Lau–
sanne / Paris (1970) and Edinburgh (1972–1979),” in Bazin, Dubourg Glatigny, and
Piotrowksi, Art beyond Borders, 383. See also the review by Georges Boudaille, “Avant
garde des galeries pilotes à Lausanne,” Les lettres françaises, no. 1342 (8–14 July 1970),
22–23.
13. Borowski in “On One Side of the Same Water: Marek Bartelik with Wiesław Borowski.”
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ptaszkowska emigrated to Paris in 1970, and in 1983 collaborated with Hultén on a
major Polish/American artistic exchange program that resulted in a significant gift of
American work to the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź.
18. Skowronek, “Crossing the Border,” 383.
19. Ibid. See my essay “International Relations at the Foksal Gallery,” in Galeria Foksal
PSP 1966–2016 (Warsaw: Galeria Foksal, 2016).
20. Author’s interview with Wiesław Borowski, Warsaw, April 2004.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. See also Magdalena Radomska, Polityka kierunków neoawangardy węgierskiej (1966–
1980) (Kraków: Uniwersytas, 2013).

24. Bilingual exhibition introduction sheet with text in Polish followed by English, Gale-
ria Foksal, Warsaw, 1972.
25. Both are reproduced in Brendel’s monograph on Lakner: János Brendel, László Lakner.
Das Frühwerk 1959–1973 (Budapest: Új Művészet Kiadó, 2000), 110–113.
26. Ibid., 112.
27. Author’s email correspondence with László Beke, 2 July 2017.
28. Bendel, László Lakner, 112.
29. György Jovánovics, typescript describing the project for Hungarian Schmuck, 1973.
David Mayor Files in Heiman Kreitman Research Centre for the Tate Library and Archive.
815.3.4.3, 42.
31. Author’s email correspondence with Tamás Szentjóby, 31 June 2017.
32. Author’s email correspondence with Tamás Szentjóby, 5 July 2017.
33. Brendel, László Lakner, 112.
34. “Erdély Bequest” (uncataloged archive of Erdély not publicly available to date), cited
in Annamária Szőke, “Miklós Erdély: Moral Algebra—Solidarity Action (1972). A Case-
Study,” trans. Zsuzsanna Szegedy-Maszák, transcript of “Vivid [Radical] Memory” work-
shop, Stuttgart, 2007 available online at http://www.vividradicalmemory.org/htm/work
shop/stu_essays/szoke.pdf
35. Ibid.
37. If the show risked being all the more polemical in view of the coincidence that Rich-
ard Nixon would visit the city just a few days after its opening, so that security services
must have been on high alert, this presumably served only to demonstrate the lack of
overlap between political circles, the circle of regular attendees at the Foksal openings,
and the public at large.
38. Borowski in “On One Side of the Same Water: Marek Bartelik with Wiesław Borowski.”
39. Galeria Foksal was not the only beneficiary of Brendel’s extensive familiarity with
Hungarian art. Jarosław Kozłowski organized a screening of 10 minutes’ dreaming. Film at
Akumulatory 2 in 1973, again without the artists’ attendance in person. Brendel attended
the opening and delivered a lecture on “The Contemporary Hungarian Avant-Garde.”
The exhibition was even reviewed by one of the conservative critics of the day, who
reported that visitors were given instructions “to close their eyes when the room went
dark and to spend the minutes of the ‘dark’ film that would follow projecting their own
dreams.” Andrzej Osęka, “Po ciemku z zamknietymi oczami,” Kultura, no. 45 (1973),
cited in Wasiak, “Kontakty kulturalne,” 255. Imre Bak also had an exhibition at Akumu-
latory 2 that month.
40. Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe,
1945–1989, trans. Anna Brzyski (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), 295.
41. Andrzej Turowski, “O sztuce konceptualnej. Andrzej Turowski w rozmowie z Pawłem
Politem,” in Pawel Polit, ed., Refleksja konceptualna w sztuce polskiej. Doświadczenia dys-
kursu: 1965–1975. / Experiences of Discourse: 1965–1975 Conceptual Reflection in Polish Art
(Warsaw: CSW, 2000), 51–52.

42. He is referring to the exhibition “Douze ans d’art contemporain,” otherwise known
as “72 pour 72.”
43. Turowski, “O sztuce konceptualnej.”
Chapter 8: International Meetings at Balatonboglár
1. For political reasons Galántai had not initially been accepted to art school; he finished
at a technical school, working in construction, before finally being accepted by the Acad-
emy of Fine Arts in Budapest in 1963. György Galántai and Júlia Klaniczay, eds., Galántai
(Budapest: Artpool and Enciklopédia Kiadó, 1996), 298–299.
2. Galántai and Klaniczay, Galántai, 300.
3. Tamás Szentjóby in email to the author, 29 July 2017.
4. György Galántai, “Hogyan tudott a művészet az életben elkezdödni? Adalékok a boglári
történethez,” in Júlia Klaniczay and Edit Sasvári, eds., Törvéntelen avantgárd. Galántai
György balatonboglári kápolnamüterme 1970–1973 (Budapest: Artpool-Balassi, 2003);
unpublished translation by Krisztina Sarkady-Hart, “How Art Could Begin as Life: Sup-
plement to the Boglár Story.”
5. She writes that in the end it proved financially unviable to do. Emese Kürti, “Transre-
gional Discourses: The Bosch+Bosch Group in the Yugoslav and the Hungarian Avant-
Garde,” in Kürti, ed., Bosch+Bosch, exh. cat. (Budapest: acb ResearchLab, 2016), 21.
6. Galántai citing correspondence, 18 July 1972, Balatonboglár chronology, trans. Ágnes
Ivacs, available at http://www.artpool.hu/boglar/1972/chrono72.html
7. Author’s interview with Bálint Szombathy, Budapest, 20 June 2011.
8. Kürti, “Transregional Discourses,” 21.
9. My thanks to Charles Hebbert for this interpretation.
10. Új Symposion was available in Hungary and was an important source of information
for artists about developments abroad. It was also here that Szentjóby encountered the
experimental poet and performance artist Katalin Ladik, entering into a feverish corre-
spondence with her. They arranged to meet in person at a happening. Ladik arrived at
the station and was driven to a secret location on the banks of the Danube near Szenten-
dre where she found a human-form body in aluminum foil lying on the grass in the sun-
shine, which she unwrapped to find Szentjóby. For a more complete descriptions see my
Antipolitics in Central European Art: Reticence as Dissidence under Post-Totalitarian Rule
(London: IB Tauris, 2014), 114–115.
12. Assembling magazines followed the model of the American magazine Assembling
(1970–1987), a periodical which, according to historian of the mail art network Stephen
Perkins, “relied on contributors submitting a specific number of pages of original art
work, which the editor then ‘assembled’ to create an edition. Particularly well suited to
countries where access to print technology was restricted, such as Latin American and
the former Eastern bloc countries, these periodicals with their open and participatory
strategy had a mobilizing effect in literally ‘assembling’ the correspondence community.”
Stephen Perkins, “Utopian Networks and Correspondence Identities” (2007), in Estera
Milman, Alternative Traditions in the Contemporary Arts: Subjugated Knowledges and the
Balance of Power (Iowa City: University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1999), available at:
wayback.archive-it.org. Seven Hungarians sent work for issue 2 of Mixed Up Underground,
published in 30 copies (http://www.artpool.hu/MailArt/kronologia/70s.html).

13. Kürti, “Transregional Discourses,” 29–30.
14. Kürti, “Transregional Discourses,” 30. See Marko Ilić, “For a Self-Managing Art …”
(PhD thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, 2015).
15. Galántai’s diary in Klaniczay and Sasvári, Törvéntelen avantgárd, translated in Kürti,
“Transregional Discourses,” 23.
17. Author’s interview with László Beke, Budapest, 18 April 2014.
18. “Interview with László Beke,” in Klaniczay and Sasvári, Törvénytelen avantgárd, 141,
reproduced and translated in Dóra Hegyi, Sándor Hornyik, and Zsuzsa László, Parallel
Chronologies: How Art Becomes Public—“Other” Revolutionary Traditions, an exhibition in
newspaper format (Budapest: Tranzit.hu, 2011), 33.
19. Gyorgy Galántai’s diary 1972, cited in Klaniczay and Sasvári, Törvénytelen avantgárd,
142.
20. Kocman and Valoch had been in touch with Hungarian artists in June 1972, according
to Galántai and Klaniczay’s “Mail Art Chronology,” inviting Hungarian artists to
participate in various “art post” exhibitions: http://www.artpool.hu/MailArt/kronologia
/70s.html
21. Jiří Valoch, “Incomplete Remarks Regarding Czechoslovakia Mail Art,” in Kornelia
Museum, 1996), 65.
22. Pages was edited by David Briers between 1970 and 1972 and had found its way into
Hungarian circles. Géza Perneczky sent photographs of his work to Briers in early 1971
and entered into correspondence with him as a consequence. Another link to the United
Kingdom at the time was the publication New Hungarian Quarterly.
23. László Beke, interview, 1998, in Klaniczay and Sasvári, Törvénytelen avantgárd, 141.
24. Gyula Pauer, interview, 1998, in Klaniczay and Sasvári, Törvénytelen avantgárd, 142,
reproduced and translated in Hegyi, Hornyik, and László, Parallel Chronologies, 33.
25. One result of the meeting was that Hap and the Slovak artist Peter Bartoš became
close friends, and Bartoš visited Budapest some time later, staying with Hap.
26. It survived for five issues, circulated and produced over the course of a year before a
report on it was filed by an informant. The first issue, edited by Hap, included several
Czechoslovak contributions. Amy Brouillette, “Remapping Samizdat: Underground Pub-
lishing and the Hungarian Avant-Garde, 1966 to 1975” (M.A. dissertation, Central Euro-
pean University, Department of History, 2010), 65; available at www.etd.ceu.hu/2009
/brouillette_amy.pdf.
27. György Galántai, “Resistance as ‘Behaviour Art’: The Dissident Hungarian Avant-
Garde,” typescript from Artpool.
28. Dóra Maurer, “SUMUS,” in Maurer, ed., Maurer, Gáyor. Párhuzamos életművek / parallele
lebenswerke / parallel oeuvres, exh. cat. (Győr: Városi Művészeti Múzeum, 2002), 141.
29. Béla Hap, “Soft-Spoken Hungarian Underground Manifesto,” EXPRESSZIÓ, February
1973.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.

32. Ibid.
33. László Beke, “Conceptual Tendencies in Eastern European Art,” in Jane Ferver, Luis
Camnitzer, and Rachel Weiss, eds., Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 1950s–1980s,
exh. cat. (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), 42.
34. Gyula Pauer, interview, 1998, in Klaniczay and Sasvári, Törvéntelen avantgárd, 142,
reproduced and translated in Hegyi, Hornyik, and László, Parallel Chronologies, 33.
35. Magdalena Radomska, “Correcting the Czech(oslovakian) Error: The Cooperation
of Hungarian and Czechoslovakian Artists in the Face of the Warsaw Pact Invasion of
Czechoslovakia,” in Jérôme Bazin, Pascale Dubourg Glatigny, and Piotr Piotrowski, eds.,
Art beyond Borders: Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe 1945–1989 (Budapest: Central
European University Press, 2016), 376.
36. László Beke in email to author, 27 July 2017.
37. Both this piece and Tót’s had already been presented at the Chapel Studio as part of
the Direct Week festival organized by Pauer and Szentjóby on 6–9 July, within the frame-
work of which Legéndy persuaded 41 participants to complete a form. For a fuller
account of Direct Week, see my Antipolitics in Central European Art.
38. I am grateful to Gergely Kovács for his translation and suggestions concerning
this piece.
39. László Beke in email to author, 27 July 2017.
40. Galántai, “Hogyan tudott a művészet az életben elkezdödni?,” unpublished transla-
tion by Krisztina Sarkady-Hart.
41. László Beke, introduction (3 August 1973) to The Mirror, exh. cat. (Balatonboglár:
Chapel Studio, 1973.
42. László Beke, letter to Jarosław Kozłowski, dated 10 June 1972, Budapest, Jarosław
Kozłowski archive, Poznań.
43. László Beke, Budapest, 19 March 1972, Jarosław Kozłowski archive, Poznań. Another
of Beke’s responses to NET had been to send a proposal asking those on the list each to
fill out a questionnaire with their name and address and to add a message before for-
warding the letter to another member of the NET. If anyone decided they didn’t want to
add their name, they were asked to return the list to Beke in Budapest.
44. Other individuals who formed part of his international circle as well as Kozłowski’s
network, for one reason or another, and feature elsewhere in my narrative were Angelo
de Aquino, Ugo Carrega, Klaus Groh, Hans Werner Kalkmann, and Jean-Marc Poinsot.
László Beke, letter to Kozłowski, dated 10 June 1972, Budapest, Jarosław Kozłowski
archive, Poznań.
45. In addition to artworks, the Artpool web page documenting the exhibition includes a
cover of the cultural magazine Tükör (Mirror) showing a radiant naked boy of mirror
stage age delightedly seated on the knee of a handsome woman in a bikini, which had
apparently been issued the week of the show itself and may have been included as a
spontaneous afterthought, as Beke has no recollection of it.
46. László Beke, “On Imagination,” in Ahogy azt a Móriczka elképzeli (In your dreams! How
little Móricka imagines things), 1972, reproduced and translated in László Beke, Imagina-
tion / Idea. The Beginning of Hungarian Conceptual Art. The László Beke Collection (Buda-
pest: Tranzit.hu, 2014), 17.

47. “Prolog,” in Beke, Imagination / Idea, 3.
48. Ibid., 5.
49. Beke, “Conceptual Tendencies in Eastern European Art,” 43.
50. László Beke letter to Jarosław Kozłowski, undated, Jarosław Kozłowski archive,
Poznań.
51. Author’s interview with László Beke, Budapest, 18 April 2014.
52. They met in 1964, after an exhibition of her work.
53. Maurer, “SUMUS,” 128–130.
54. Maurer and Gáyor’s situation was never entirely comfortable, Wessely notes: they
“realised that they were ‘foreigners,’ not only for the authorities but also in the eyes of
many artists of their own generation. They were, as a rule, left out of consideration and
thus not invited to participate in the first group shows and actions of progressive Hun-
garian artists. But, they thought, ‘we also exist, we are here as well,’ and they called into
life the SUMUS group, consisting of the two of them and the artists they invited to coop-
erate in various events.” Anna Wessely, “Two Artists in One Household,” in Maurer,
Maurer, Gáyor, 46–48.
55. “Triptych: An Interview with Dóra Maurer and Tibor Gáyor by István Hajdu,” in
Maurer, Maurer, Gáyor, 19.
56. The exhibition was later shown again at the Pécs Studio.
58. Ibid.
59. There was no catalog of the exhibition.
60. My thanks to the artist for this explanation of the reference.
62. Piotr Piotrowski, “Nationalizing Modernism: Exhibitions of Hungarian and Czecho-
slovakian Avant-Garde in Warsaw,” in Bazin, Dubourg Glatigny, and Piotrowksi, Art
beyond Borders, 211.
63. All this is recorded in detail by Galántai in his Balatonboglár chronology on the
Artpool website: http://www.artpool.hu/boglar/1971/chrono71.html#0715
64. Galántai was presented with the choice of paying a large fine or serving a ten-day
prison sentence. Details are available in Galántai’s Balatonboglár chronology for 1 and
15 August 1973: http://www.artpool.hu/boglar/1973/chrono73.html
66. I am grateful to Kristof Nagy for providing helpful clarification regarding these matters.
67. Galántai’s Balatonboglár chronology for 26 July 1974: http://www.artpool.hu/boglar
/1974-/after.html

Chapter 9: Edinburgh Arts
1. Krzysztof Noworyta, “It All Began in Łódź …,” in Contact Rushes / Poprzez portret. Richard
Demarco’s Poland / Richard Demarco i Polska, exh. cat. (Łódź: Fabryka Sztuki, 2007), n.p.
2. Richard Demarco, ed., Art in the Open: Six Romanian Artists (Edinburgh: Richard
Demarco Gallery, 1990.
3. John Haldane, “A Life in Art,” in 70/2000: On the Road to Meikle Seggie. Demarco: Philos
ophy, exh. cat. (Kingston upon Thames: Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University,
2000), 9.
4. Cordelia Oliver, “New Fire in Auld Reekie,” The Guardian, 1 August 1973.
5. Richard Demarco, “Beginnings in the Traverse,” in Richard Demarco and John Martin,
eds., The Richard Demarco Gallery Edinburgh: Catalogue to the 1966–1976 10th Anniversary
Exhibition of Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings and Prints Acquired by Scottish Public and Pri-
vate Collections through the Gallery and a Ten Year Record of the Gallery’s Activities (Edin-
burgh: Richard Demarco Gallery, 1976), 7.
6. Richard Demarco, introduction to Demarco and Martin, The Richard Demarco Gallery
Edinburgh.
7. David Baxandall, BBC Arts Review program (20 October 1966), cited in Demarco and
Martin, The Richard Demarco Gallery Edinburgh, 9.
8. The show then traveled to the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford and the Kensington
and Chelsea Arts Council Gallery at Leighton House.
9. Richard Demarco, foreword to Sixteen Polish Artists, exh. cat. (Edinburgh: Richard
Demarco Gallery, 1967).
10. Demarco, introduction to Demarco and Martin, The Richard Demarco Gallery Edin-
burgh, 1.
11. Ibid.
12. Richard Demarco, “Atelier ’72,” exh. cat. (Edinburgh: Richard Demarco Gallery, 1972),
n.p.
13. Ibid.
14. April 1971 saw a one-man show at the Richard Demarco Gallery of theater director
and director of Galeria Studio Józef Szajna.
15. Wiesław Borowski, “Tadeusz Kantor,” in 10 Dialogues: Richard Demarco, Scotland and
the European Avant-Garde, exh. cat. (Edinburgh: Royal Scottish Academy, 2011), n.p.
16. In 1976 August, Kantor returned with Dead Class. The troupe returned in 1973 with
Lovelies and Dowdies.
17. Demarco, quoted in Oliver, “New Fire in Auld Reekie.”
18. Demarco and Stanisławski would collaborate on further occasions, among others on
the exhibition “Ten Polish Contemporary Artists from the Collection of Muzeum Sztuki,
Lodz,” in 1979, and the attendant catalog Ten Polish Contemporary Artists from the Collec-
tion of Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź (Edinburgh: Richard Demarco Gallery, 1979).
19. E.g., Cordelia Oliver in Ten Polish Contemporary Artists.
20. Piotr Piotrowski, “Nationalizing Modernism: Exhibitions of Hungarian and Czecho-
slovakian Avant-Garde in Warsaw,” in Jerome Bazin, Pascal Dubourg Glatigny, and Piotr
Piotrowksi, eds., Art beyond Borders: Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe 1945–1989
(Budapest: Central European University Press, 2016), 216.

21. Ibid.
22. Georg Jappe, “The Republic of Individuals,” in Strategy Get Arts, exh. cat. (1970; fac-
simile edition, Edinburgh: Richard Demarco Gallery Ltd, 2005).
23. Demarco, “Setting the Stage for the 1970 Edinburgh Festival Exhibition,” 2005 leaflet
reproduced in Strategy Get Arts (2005).
24. Demarco, Strategy Get Arts (Edinburgh: Richard Demarco Gallery, 1970), n.p.
25. Guy Brett, “Dusseldorf Baroque,” The Times (25 August 1970), cited in Demarco and
Martin, The Richard Demarco Gallery Edinburgh, 26.
26. Euan McArthur and Arthur Watson, “Introduction,” in 10 Dialogues, n.p.
27. Demarco, “Atelier ’72,” n.p.
28. Michael Shepherd, “Up with Imports!,” Sunday Telegraph (6 September 1970), repro-
duced in Demarco and Martin, The Richard Demarco Gallery Edinburgh, 26.
29. Demarco and Martin, The Richard Demarco Gallery Edinburgh, 19.
30. Cordelia Oliver, untitled commentary in Richard Demarco, ed., Romanian Art Today,
exh. cat. (Edinburgh: Richard Demarco Gallery, 1971), unpaginated.
31. Richard Demarco, “Such Is the Dance,” in Nine Catalytic Stations. Paul Neagu 1975–
1987, exh. cat. (Edinburgh: Scottish Sculpture Trust, 1988), n.p.
32. Cordelia Oliver, in Demarco, Romanian Art Today, n.p.
33. Paul Neagu, Palpable Art Manifesto (typescript, 1969).
34. Oliver, in Demarco, Romanian Art Today, n.p.
35. Richard Demarco, in Demarco, Romanian Art Today, n.p.
36. Piotrowski, “Nationalizing Modernism,” 217. He also comments on the essentializ-
ing tone of Cordelia Oliver’s text, arguing that it amounted to an attempt to construct a
homogeneous account of the heterogeneous art on display, whereas “Romanian origin
was the only common characteristic of all the artists who took part in the exhibition.”
37. Demarco, “Such Is the Dance,” n.p.
38. Paul Neagu, cited in Demarco, “Such Is the Dance,” n.p. Paul Neagu had also had a
one-man show at the gallery in March 1974. In February 1975 Neagu’s Generative Arts
Group appearance at the Saltire Society Gallery was filmed by the BBC. The recording
included an interesting discussion with the audience, a copy of which can be viewed at
the National Gallery of Scotland in their Demarco archives.
39. Jasna Tijardović in Eight Yugoslav Artists. Edinburgh Arts 1973 (Edinburgh: Richard
Demarco Gallery, 1973), n.p. The Students’ Cultural Centre in Belgrade opened in 1971.
40. Richard Demarco, “Report on His Visit to Yugoslavia 4th–13th December 1972,” type-
script available on Demarco Digital Archive.
41. Jon Blackwood, “Marina Abramovic, Richard Demarco and the Yugoslav Art World in
the 1970s,” in 10 Dialogues, n.p.
42. Marina Abramović, The Artist’s Body (Milan: Edizioni Charta, 1998), 56, cited in Black-
wood, “Marina Abramovic,” n.p.
43. Raša Todosijević, 1&1 (Belgrade: Students’ Cultural Centre, 1974).
44. The exhibition toured to Dublin, Lancashire, Belfast, the University of Sussex, and
the Third Eye Centre in Glasgow over the course of late 1975–summer 1976.

45. Jasna Tijardović, letter to Richard Demarco, Belgrade, 19 October 1973.
46. Ibid.
47. Raša Todosijević, “Who Makes a Profit of Art, and Who Gains from It Honestly?,” 21
April 1975, in Aspects 75: Contemporary Yugoslav Art (Edinburgh: Richard Demarco Gallery,
1975), n.p.
48. Ibid.
49. The collector Marinko Sudac appears to have resurrected a new form this tradition
with his Artist on Vacation series in Poreč, also in Istria.
50. Richard Demarco, “The Road to Meikle Seggie,” in 70/2000: On the Road to Meikle
Seggie, ix.
Chapter 10: An American Vision
1. Tom Marioni, letter to Wiesław Borowski, dated 23 April 1973, cited in Jerzy Kierkuc-
Bielinski, “Confinement and Illusions of Freedom: The Dialogue between Polish and
American Conceptual Art 1970–1981” (PhD thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, 2006), 120.
2. Tom Marioni, cited in ibid., 123.
3. The magazine ran for five issues (1975–1982), in collaboration with Crown Point Press
editor Kathan Brown.
4. Tom Marioni, “Interview with Stephen Perkins,” San Francisco, 5 July 2006, available
at: http://artistsperiodicals.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/vision.html
5. Marioni, Vision, no. 2 (1976), 7.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 8.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., 9.
12. Ibid., 10.
13. Ibid.
14. For more on these institutional structures in Yugoslavia see Marko Ilić, “For a Self-
Managing Art: Students’ Cultural Centres in Yugoslavia” (PhD thesis, Courtauld Insti-
tute of Art, 2015).
16. Tamás St Turba, FIKA (Fiatal Művészek Klubja) / BOGEY (The Young Artists’ Club), an
Interview with Tamás St. Auby, trans. Katalin Orbán (Budapest: Ludwig Museum, 2006), 18,
20.
18. He had met Knížák in Berlin before traveling to Prague. Tom Marioni, interview with
Stephen Perkins, San Francisco, 5 July 2006.

19. Petr Štembera in Karel Srp, Karel Miler, Petr Štembera, Jan Mlčoch: 1970–1980 (Prague:
Sorosovo centrum současného umění, 1997), 33.
20. Gabor Attalai, cited by Tom Marioni, “Hungary,” Vision, no. 2 (1976), 11.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid. 15.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., 16.
27. Wiesław Borowski, “Pseudoawangarda,” Kultura, no. 12 (614) (23 March 1975), 11.
28. Piotr Piotrowski, Dekada. o syndromie lat siedemdziesiątych, kulturze artystycznej, kry-
tyce, sztuce—wybiórczo i subiektywnie (Poznań: Obserwator, 1991), 88.
Chapter 11: Alternative Spaces and Experimental Poets
1. This list was just the tip of the iceberg. Galeria Remont later published a booklet on
the “Activities of the ‘Independent Galleries,’” based on an archive of materials gathered
by Jan Wojciechowski, subtitling it “a selection of important exhibitions, actions, pub-
lishers and publications of significance for the new artistic movement in Poland in the
years 1971–1974.” Jan Wojciechowski, Dzialalność “Galerii niezaleznych” (Warsaw: Galeria
Remont, March 1975).
2. The last of these had been established by Małgorzata Potocka and Józef Robakowski
(one of the authors of the list) in their own home with the aim of facilitating “the
exchange of ideas, archive—current, by people active in all artistic media—e.g. book
illustration, self-publication, sketching, posters, projects, drawing, documentation, film,
photography, video—etc.” Among those with whom the gallery collaborated were Goto-
vac, Beuys, Higgins, Bereś, Themerson, Krivet, Andrzej Partum, Valoch, Kolař, Kwiat-
kowski, Chartny, Waśko, Rehfeldt, and Warpechowski. See Bożena Czubak, ed., Art of
Exchange: Józef Robakowski’s Collection [Latent Capital 4], exh. cat. (Warsaw: Fundacja
Profile and Muzeum Pałac w Wilanowie, 2013).
3. Sylwia Serafinowicz and Dorota Monkiewicz, “The Open Wrocław,” in Dorota Monkie-
wicz, ed., The Wild West: A History of Wrocław’s Avant-Garde, exh. cat (Warsaw: Zachęta
National Gallery of Art; Wrocław: Contemporary Museum, 2015), 142. Chwałczyk went
on to become one of the pioneers of mail art in the region with his Counterpoint project
of July 1972. He wrote to international artists with the following four questions: “Does
art protect our psyche from the literalness of the everyday? / What is the role of intuition
and the intellect in artistic creation? / Do people’s fascinations have to be compartmen-
talised? / Is the artist-recipient mutual feedback the last one possible, the simplest one?”
Besides the many respondents from Poland and the West, participants included Attalai,
Beke, Rehfeldt, Maurer, Miler, and Štembera.
4. Ewa Partum, “Na wszystkim szminki ślad. Z Ewa Partum rozmawia Dorota Jarecka,”
Gazeta Wyborcza, Wyskokie Obcasy supplement (12 August 2006), 8–9; cited in Patryk
Wasiak, “Kontakty kulturalne pomiędzy Polską a Węgrami, Czechosłowacją i NRD w
latach 1970–1989 na przykładzie artystów plastyków” (PhD thesis, Instytut Kultury i
Komunikowania, Szkoła Wyższa Psychologii Społecznej, Warsaw, 2009), 306.

5. Angelika Stepken, “Monograph,” in Angelika Stepken, ed., Eva Partum 1965–2001, exh.
cat. (Karlsruhe: Badischer Kunstverein, 2001), 18.
6. Andrzej Partum, “Bureau de la Poésie,” in Andrzej Partum, Manifestes d’art / the art
manifestoes 1971–1977 (Lublin: Arcus Gallery, 1977), 15.
7. Ibid.
8. Walter Zanini, letter dated 7 October 1975, MAC 800/75, MAC archive. Partum had
already been in touch with Zanini in 1974, when he was invited to participate in the exhi-
bition “Prospective 74” at MAC. The inclusion was doubtless a result of the network
forged between the Polish and Latin American scenes thanks to Jorge Glusberg’s visit to
Poland in 1973, after which he organized the survey exhibition “Poland 73” on his return.
Zanini and Glusberg were in regular contact, and Zanini must have had his Polish con-
tact list from his Argentine colleague.
9. Glusberg became the president of the Argentine section in 1978.
10. Zofia Kulik, letter to Gerard Kwiatkowski (returned to them by Pawel Petasz after
Kwiatkowski had emigrated to Germany), dated 27 May 1973, PDDiU Archives.
11. The situation came to a head in 1975 with the publication by Borowski, of the Foksal
Gallery, of an aggressive attack on what he called the “Pseudo-Avant-Garde” which
named names and accused countless emerging artists of being shallow imitators of
Western trends. Wiesław Borowski, “Pseudoawangarda,” Kultura, no. 12 (1975).
Periodicals 1968–1988 (Cologne: Editions Soft Geometry, 1993), 37.
13. Jorge Glusberg, letter to Zofia Kulik, 2 May 1973, KwieKulik archives, CAyC file.
14. Jiři H. Kocman letter to Géza Perneczky, 24 February 1973, in Géza Perneczky, “A
KÖLN—BUDAPEST KONCEPT Bizalmas levéltári anyag az 1971-1972-1973-as esztendők
magyarországi és nemzetközi Koncept Art mozgalmának a tudományos kutatásához,”
unpublished manuscript, 2013, 220.
15. László Beke, letter in English to Jorge Glusberg dated 16 April 1974, included in Hun-
gría 74, exh. cat. (Buenos Aires: CAyC, 1974), n.p.
16. At that time, he was also working for the Society for Popularizing Science, an official
role which gave him a certain flexibility. The exhibition had evolved out of two previous
iterations: “Szövegek. Texts,” organized by Dóra Maurer and Gábor Tóth, first at Galán-
tai’s Chapel Studio, Balatonboglár (19–25 August 1973), then at Pécsi Műhely, Pécs (9–28
December 1973).
17. Author’s interview with Júlia Klaniczay, Budapest, 26 May 2016.
18. Tamás St Turba, FIKA (Fiatal Művészek Klubja) / BOGEY (The Young Artists’ Club), an
Interview with Tamás St. Auby, trans. Katalin Orbán (Budapest: Ludwig Museum, 2006),
20.
19. Ibid.
21. Tamás St Turba, FIKA, 20.
22. Dóra Maurer, “SUMUS,” in Dóra Maurer, ed., Maurer, Gáyor. Párhuzamos életművek / par-
allele lebenswerke / parallel oeuvres, exh. cat. (Győr: Városi Művészeti Múzeum, 2002), 143.

23. Tamás Szentjóby recalls that at the time the FMK went by the name FIKA (which
translates as “bogey”) and that it was “the only ‘arts’ place, so to speak, where I went
from 1963 on to socialize and date girls … there was dancing at the weekend with live
bands.” Tamás St Turba, FIKA, 12, 16.
24. Jarosław Kozłowski, interview cited in Wasiak, “Kontakty kulturalne,” 263.
25. Ibid., 257.
26. Schweinebraden hosted a number of shows by artists from the Soviet bloc were held
over the years, but his gallery was closed down in 1980. See Peter Angus Mitchell, “Social-
ism’s Empty Promise: Housing Vacancy and Squatting in the German Democratic
Republic,” in Juliane Fürst and Josie McLellan, eds., Dropping out of Socialism: The Cre-
ation of Alternative Spheres in the Soviet Bloc (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), 286.
27. 27 September to 23 October 1975. The same year, Klaus Groh organized a major IAC
INFO exhibition of mail art in Poland, borrowing one of Rehfeldt’s slogans, “Art in Con-
tact. It’s Life in Art,” for his title. The exhibition traveled to Olsztyn, Białystok, and Kosza-
lin. Wasiak, “Kontakty kulturalne,” 266.
28. My thanks to Basia Piwowarska at Galeria Studio for noticing this and for digging out
the photographs from the archives.
29. Typescript, Rehfeldt Folder, Galeria Studio.
30. Galeria Teatr Studio, Zbiory sztuki wspólczesnej i dokumentacja (Warsaw, 1976), 100,
cited in Wasiak, “Kontakty kulturalne,” 296.
31. Robert Rehfeldt, “Art in Contact. It’s Life in Art!,” typescript, undated. PDDiU archives.
32. Ibid.
33. Anne Thurmann-Jajes, “Robert Rehfeldt and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt: Their GDR-Based
International Network,” setup 4, no. 1 (2013), available at http://www.setup4.de/ausgabe
-1/themen-und-beitraege/anne-thurmann-jajesrobert-rehfeldt-and-ruth-wolf-rehfeldt/
34. Jarosław Kozłowski, letter to Valoch dated 27 October 1972, Jarosław Kozłowski
archive. Cited in Wasiak, “Kontakty kulturalne,” 255.
35. Jarosław Kozłowski, interview cited in Wasiak, “Kontakty kulturalne,” 256.
36. Among the many other artists who showed at Akumulatory 2 were Endre Tót, who
devoted four days to typing zeros several hours a day from 3 November 1975, and French
poet Henri Chopin, who published the important international Revue Ou (1964–1974)
and who exhibited at the gallery in 1977. In the same year, Kozłowski invited George
Maciunas to Akumulatory. He wrote back that he could not afford to come but that they
could do the whole show / event themselves: “flux policy is that there are no professional
flux performers and anyone can do it.” Kozłowski sent Maciunas documentation after
the event saying: “Generally speaking, it was for us a great, splendid and truly important
experience.” Letters displayed as part of the exhibition “Fluxus East” at Künstlerhaus
Bethanien.
37. Grzegorz Dziamski, interview cited in Wasiak, “Kontakty kulturalne,” 301.
38. Józef Robakowski in Robakowski, ed., Żywa Galeria. Łódzki progresywny ruch artys
tyczny 1969–1992 (Łódź, 2000), 231; cited in Wasiak, “Kontakty kulturalne,” 310.
39. Andrzej Mroczek, interview cited in Wasiak, “Kontakty kulturalne,” 266.

40. Robakowski and Valoch organized an exhibition of the materials at the Galeria Domu
środowisk twórczych in Łódź in March 1978.
41. Galeria Sztuki Najnowszej was founded by Lech Mrożek, Piotr Olszański and
Romuald Kutera. The gallery held an exhibition of Hungarian art entitled “Most Recent
Hungarian Art” in April 1976. Piotr Olszański and his friends later had exhibitions at the
FMK in Budapest, and in Pecs at IH Galeria in April 1977.
Chapter 12: The Students’ Club Circuit
1. This was an interesting nod of sorts perhaps to Joseph Beuys’s I Like America and
America Likes Me of 1974, in which he was collected by ambulance from the airport in
New York and transported to the Rene Bloch gallery wrapped in a protective layer of felt.
2. Tom Marioni, Vision, no. 2 (1976), 12.
3. László Beke, personal communication with Gergely Kovács, 9 August 2017.
4. He had first performed the piece in Prague, 28 December 1974.
5. Tamás St Turba, FIKA (Fiatal Művészek Klubja) / BOGEY (The Young Artists’ Club), an Inter-
view with Tamás St. Auby, trans. Katalin Orbán (Budapest: Ludwig Museum, 2006), 30.
6. Štembera in Karel Srp, Karel Miler, Petr Štembera, Jan Mlčoch: 1970–1980 (Prague:
7. Petr Štembera and Helena Kontova in conversation, Prague, 8 September 1976, in
Flash Art, no. 78–79 (November-December 1977), 21.
8. Ibid.
9. Petr Štembera in Helena Kontova and Jaroslav Anděl, “CSSR Fotografija,” Spot—Review
of Photography, no. 11 (1987), 8, cited in Maja Fowkes, The Green Bloc: Neo-avant-garde Art
and Ecology under Socialism (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2015), 199.
10. Srp, Karel Miler, Petr Štembera, Jan Mlčoch: 1970–1980, 14.
11. Patryk Wasiak, “Kontakty kulturalne pomiędzy Polską a Węgrami, Czechosłowacją i
NRD w latach 1970–1989 na przykładzie artystów plastyków” (PhD thesis, Instytut Kultury
i Komunikowania, Szkoła Wyższa Psychologii Społecznej, Warsaw, 2009), 328.
12. Jan Mlčoch in Srp, Karel Miler, Petr Štembera, Jan Mlčoch, 53.
13. Anna-Maria Potocka, interview cited in Wasiak, “Kontakty kulturalne,” 279.
14. Other exhibitions of artists from socialist countries included one by Gábor Attalai
(8–20 April 1974) and Goran Trbuljak’s exhibition “Diptych Wall—Canvas,” which opened
28 October 1974.
15. Jan Mlčoch in Srp, Karel Miler, Petr Štembera, Jan Mlčoch, 56. Štembera’s performance
Nine Days may have been a homage to Dennis Oppenheim, who had had an exhibition
with this title at CAyC in 1971. Miler’s was titled Saturated Flour.
16. When the annual AICA congress was held in Warsaw in 1975 (for the first time since
1960), KwieKulik hosted visitors keen to see their slide presentations.
17. Kovanda’s first trip to Poland had been in 1975, with friends. Although the purpose of
the trip had not been art-related, he made a number of artistic contacts by chance on
this occasion, and recalls, in particular, meeting the experimental artist Paweł Freisler
while visiting Galeria Repassage.

18. Petr Štembera, letter to KwieKulik (he addresses it “Dear Contextualists”), 15 Novem-
ber 1976, Prague, PDDiU archive. The letter is written by hand on the back of a sheet
from a CAyC publication.
19. Tomasz Sikorski, “22.XI–10.XII 1976. Galeria ‘Mospan’,” Linia 2 (1977), 11.
20. Ibid. The Mospan club gallery was run by Tomasz Sikorski, at that time a second-year
student at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, at the instigation of the artist Paweł Freisler,
between 16 January 1976 and 11 December 1978, when it was closed on the pretext of
refurbishment.
21. Amended translation, Przemysław Kwiek in Zofia Kulik, Przemysław Kwiek, and Maryla
Sitkowska, “KwieKulik—Art and Theory Illustrated by Life Events, That Is ART OUT OF
NERVES,” available online at http://www.kulikzofia.pl/english/ok2/ok2_wywiad1_eng.
22. Transcripts of papers delivered at the meeting of the Artistic Council of the Polish
Association of Visual Art, “Rada Artystyczna ZPAP Łódź 24–25 June 1975,” in Biuletyn Rady
Artystycznej Związku Polskich Artystów Plastyków, no. 3 (120) (1975), PDDiU archive.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid. A number of interesting interventions were recorded in the documentation of
the meeting. Ryszard Stanisławski, the aging director of the famous international avant-
garde Art Museum in Łódź, proposed international collaboration as a solution.
Stanisławski suggested making closer links with the Department of Documentation at
Beaubourg in Paris, taking the opportunity to voice in public his grievance at having
been prevented, bureaucratically, from publishing his exhibition catalog Polish Construc-
tivism in sufficient numbers to meet international demand. Jerzy Ludwiński, the impor-
tant Wrocław conceptual artist and theorist, also took advantage of the opportunity to
voice his immense frustration with bureaucratic obstacles. Having spent years gathering
thousands of documents relating to Polish contemporary art and working to prepare
them for publication, he never received the permission to publish them. Instead, the
municipal authorities closed down his gallery space. For an excellent account of
Ludwiński’s activities in Wrocław, see Luiza Nader, Konceptualizm w PRL (Warsaw: Fun-
dacja Galerii Foksal; WUW, 2009).
25. Zofia Kulik, “KwieKulik. Sztuka i teoria ilustrowana przypadkami życiowymi, czyli
sztuka z nerwów. Wywiad z Zofią Kulik i Przemysławem Kwiekiem. Rozmawiała Maryla
Sitkowska,” available at http://www.kulikzofia.pl/polski/ok2/ok2_wywiad1.html
26. The space on Krakowskie przedmieście had once been run by artist Paweł Freisler,
first as “Galeria” and then as “Muzeum 0.” It was taken over and renamed Repassage by
Elżbieta and Emil Cieślar and Włodzimierz Borowski in January 1973, after Freisler orga-
nized elections for a new manager. Štembera performed there on 9 May 1977.
27. Štembera, letter to KwieKulik, 20 June 1977. The piece he was referring to was called
Journey, and its description ran: “I made grooves in the tilted wooden board. Then I
climbed up onto its top end and poured out acid in its upper groove in such a way that it
would slowly work its way down but stop for a while at each groove it came across. Bare-
foot, with my legs tied together, I shifted away from it until I reached the end of the
board where a small glass plate had been positioned. The action was completed when I
was able to untie the string around my feet, which stopped the acid taking effect.” Having
slid down the acid-soaked ramp, Štembera landed on a sheet of glass which he trampled
underfoot. Štembera in Srp, Karel Miler, Petr Štembera, Jan Mlčoch, 39.
28. Fowkes, The Green Bloc, 237–238.

29. Chris Burden, Polar Crossings: 3 Europeans, n.p., cited in Fowkes, The Green Bloc, 237.
30. Author’s interview with Helena Kontova, Milan, 20 December 2016. Abramović and
Ulay already had contacts with artists in Prague: Ulay was in touch with Knižák by way of
the countercultural grouping around the Provos, and Abramović knew Štembera
through performance art networks. Abramović’s contacts with East-Central European
artists at the time were extensive. Documentation of her Rhythm 10, 2, 5, 4, and 0 was
included in an exhibition of the “Yugoslav Avant-Garde” at Galeria Współczesna in
Warsaw in 1975. She also showed Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful at Galeria
Sztuki Najnowszej in Wrocław in June 1976.
31. Grzegorz Dziamski, interview cited in Wasiak, “Kontakty kulturalne,” 302–303.
32. Petr Rezek, “Nowa Sztuka Poszukuje Nowych Wartosci,” trans. Andrzej Jagodziński
(typescript), PDDiU archive.
33. In 1976, Štembera had performed in the Small Fortress at the former concentration
camp at Terezín where the Nazi occupying forces held political prisoners prior to trans-
ferring most of them to extermination camps. Explicitly engaging with this traumatic
past, he had recreated a situation in the interrogation room where those interned had
been forced to sit for hours on end without moving, providing visitors with a whip and
instructions to use it. See Srp, Karel Miler, Petr Štembera, Jan Mlčoch, 35.
34. Other Czechoslovak visitors to the gallery would include Valoch, who took part in the
November 1979 exhibition “Places and Moments,” as well as Kovanda and Sikora. Olek
recalled that one evening they all went out to see One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest at the
cinema as it was still banned in Czechoslovakia. Wasiak, “Kontakty kulturalne,” 319.
35. Štembera in Srp, Karel Miler, Petr Štembera, Jan Mlčoch, 46.
36. Piotr Piotrowski, “Sztuka męskiego ciała: tożsamość narodowa i polityka tożsamości,”
Format, no. 31–32, 56/1999, 16, cited in Wasiak, “Kontakty kulturalne,” 320.
37. Jaroslav Anděl, letter to Zofia Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek, dated 11 November 1979,
PDDiU archive, Dziekanka folder.
Chapter 13: International Artists’ Meetings
1. For more on these see Sylwia Serafinowicz, “More than Documentation: Photography
from the People’s Republic of Poland between 1965–1972” (PhD thesis, Courtauld Insti-
tute of Art, 2014).
2. Certain pleners set out to have international programs: Osetnica 72, 73, and 74. Among
those participating were Eric Andersen and Ben Patterson, Miklós Erdély, and Goran
Trbuljak.
3. Bereś’s practice is addressed in detail in chapter 6 of my Antipolitics in Central European
Art.
4. The three also showed a version of it at the FMK in Budapest in 1977. Filko was a regu-
lar visitor to Poland and had a girlfriend studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.
Among his Polish exhibitions was another at Galeria gn in Gdańsk, where Filko had a
show entitled “Transcendence” in March 1979.
5. Andrzej Kostołowski, “Plener pytań. Kilka uwag na temat plenerów w ogóle,” in Plener
pytań, exh. cat. (Warsaw: Młodzieżowa Agencja Wydawnicza, 1980), 15.

6. All quotations in this paragraph are from Roland Miller, “The Polish Link,” Circa 7
(December 1981).
7. Roland Miller, “Live Art Works,” typescript, August 1981, Shirley Cameron and Roland
Miller archive.
8. Author’s interview with Jerzy Bereś, Kraków, 16 May 2007.
9. The Third Eye Centre, which opened in 1975, hosted a number of important Eastern
European exhibitions and events over the course of the 1970s and 1980s. As I discuss in
the conclusion, it also coordinated a major international symposium for Eastern Euro-
pean museum professionals in 1989, under the heading Points East, addressing the
implications of the fall of the Berlin wall for the European artistic community as a whole.
10. Warpechowski also collaborated with Miller on a number of other projects, such as
performing with him at Art and Research Exchange, Belfast, in November 1981. A second
tour was also planned for 1982, under the title “Live Art Works,” with an expanded list of
international artists, including from Eastern Europe the Hungarian performance artist
Judit Kele, Petr Štembera, Zofia Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek, in addition to Jerzy Bereś
and Zbigniew Warpechowski.
11. Shirley Cameron and Roland Miller, eds., “The Anglo-Polski Tour,” exhibition cata-
logue typescript, 1978.
12. Andrzej Kostołowski, “Birth of the Star—Art and Society,” typescript, Shirley Cam-
eron and Roland Miller archive.
13. KwieKulik, “Pomnik bez paszportu—opis,” typescript, PDDiU archive, Pomnik bez
paszportu folder 134.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. KwieKulik, letter to “Elly,” dated 21 September 1978, PDDiU archive, Warsztat zachowań
folder 133.
17. KwieKulik, letter to the Passport Office of the Ministry of the Interior, 13 September
1978, PDDiU Warsztat zachowań folder 133.
18. KwieKulik, letter dated 21 September 1978, PDDiU Warszatat Zachowań folder 133.
19. Ibid.
20. KwieKulik, undated handwritten letter to Zdrojewski, September 1978, PDDiU
Warszatat zachowań folder 133.
21. KwieKulik, sketch dated 2 October 1978, PDDiU Warsztat zachowań folder 133.
22. Ibid.
23. KwieKulik, “Pomnik bez paszportu—opis.”
24. The following description of the performance is drawn from the PDDiU archive,
“Body Performance” folder 088.
25. Letter to Andrzej Mroczek, 10 August 1978, PDDiU archive, “Body Performance”
folder 088.
26. Documentation of this performance by Todosijević, consisting of 61 photographs,
would be shown in 1981 at the IX Krakow Meetings organized by Maria Pinińska-Bereś,
Zbigniew Warpechowski, and Andrzej Kostołowski. Miklós Erdély was also invited.

27. Świdiński’s manifesto text “Sztuka jako sztuka kontekstualna” (Art as Contextual Art)
was published in Art Text, no. 1 (1977). See also Helena Kontova, “Warsaw,” Flash Art, no.
82–83 (May-June 1978); Bożena Stokłosa, “Warszawa—I am—Warsztaty Remont,” Foto-
grafia, no. 3 (1978); Paweł Karkoszka, “Henryk Gajewski—artysta epoki technologicznej,”
Kultura, no. 14 (1978).
28. Henryk Gajewski, “I Am,” in Grzegorz Dziamski, Henryk Gajewski, and Jan Srt.
Wojciechowski, eds., Performance (Warsaw: Młodzieżowa Agencja Wydawnicza, 1984),
12–13.
29. Gajewski had already collaborated with Carrión on an Other Books project of
the summer of 1977, collecting around 250 alternative books from around the world at
the gallery, produced either by artists themselves or by foreign galleries or publishers.
The show opened on 9 May 1977. Carrión was proactive in writing to see whether artists
wanted to make use of his bookshop, for instance writing to Zofia Kulik and Przemysław
Kwiek on 19 April 1977 “Dear people, Jan Brand gave me your address. He said, you
might have some publications that I can sell at Other Books and So. It is so?” He said he
would be in Warsaw for the whole month of May for the Other Books show and hoped to
meet them.
30. Author’s interview with Peter Bartoš, Bratislava, 23 June 2010.
31. Ibid.
32. Peter Bartoš in conversation with Lucia Stach-Gregorova, Bratislava, September 2017.
My thanks to Lucia for recording the artists’ recollections of the event.
33. Peter Bartoš, “Rytuał wypuszczania golębi,” in Dziamski, Gajewski, and Wojciechowski,
Performance, 140.
34. Gajewski, “I Am,” 14–15.
35. Aggy Smeets, letter to KwieKulik (undated), PDDiU archive, Works and Words file.
She wrote again after she returned to the Netherlands, this time addressing her letter to
“Sofia and Stalin,” saying what great food Stalin (Przemysław) had made and that “my trip
was very interesting, confusing, horizontal” (Smeets, letter to KwieKulik, 3 April 1979,
PDDiU archive).
36. Letter to Jean Sellem (in English), 18 January 1980, PDDiU archive.
37. Gerrit Jan de Rook, ed., Oosteuropese Conceptuele Fotografie, exh. cat. (Eindhoven:
Technische Hogeschool, 1977).
38. Mlčoch in Karel Srp, Karel Miler, Petr Štembera, Jan Mlčoch: 1970–1980 (Prague:
39. Marga van Mechelen, “Works and Words (1979) in the Shadow of I AM (1978),” in
Christian Höller, ed., L’Internationale: Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986
(Zurich: JPR Ringier, 2012), 278.
40. Ibid., 280–281.
41. Ješa Denegri, “The Situation of the New Art in Yugoslavia,” in Works and Words. Inter-
national Art Manifestation Amsterdam, exh. cat. (Amsterdam: De Appel, 1980), 88.
42. Ibid., 88–89.
43. Goran Đorđević, letter to De Appel, 1979, reproduced in ibid, 89.

44. Frank Gribling, cited in Marga van Mechelen, ed., De Appel: Performances, Installations,
Video, Projects, 1975–1983 (Amsterdam: De Appel, 2006), 243.
45. Ibid., 246.
46. Van Mechelen, “Works and Words (1979),” 282.
47. Ibid., 285.
Chapter 14: Prague-Milan / Venice-Moscow / Moscow-Prague
1. Giancarlo Politi and Helena Kontova, “Chronology of Flash Art,” in Politi and Kontova,
eds., Flash Art: Two Decades of History XXI Years (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), n.p.
2. Germano Celant, “Notes for a Guerrilla War,” Flash Art 5 (November-December 1967).
3. Politi and Kontova, “Chronology of Flash Art.”
5. For more on these artists see Łukasz Ronduda, Polish Art of the 70s (Jelenia Góra: Polski
Western; Warsaw: CCA, 2009).
6. See David Crowley, “‘Consumer Art’ and Other Commodity Aesthetics in Eastern
Europe under Communist Rule,” Faktografia.com (3 June 2017).
7. For more on the debates surrounding this see Agata Jakubowska, “The Attractive
Beauty of Natalia LL’s ‘Consumer Art,’” available at file:///Users/klarakw/Desktop/1763
-6626-1-PB.pdf.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Flash Art 66–67 (July-August 1976), 18–22.
12. Flash Art 72–73 (March-April 1977), 20–23; Flash Art 74–75 (May-June 1977), 36–37.
14. Giancarlo Politi, letter to Jindřich Chalupecký, 20 April 1977, Chalupecký Archives.
15. Giancarlo Politi, letter to Jindřich Chalupecký, 15 May 1977, Chalupecký Archives.
16. Giancarlo Politi, letter to Jindřich Chalupecký, 20 April 1977, Chalupecký Archives.
18. Ibid.
19. Flash Art 78–79’s German-language section “Heute Kunst.” See also Christine Macel,
Joanna Mytkowska, and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Les promesses du passé: Une histoire
discontinue de l’art dans l’ex-Europe de l’Est (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2010), 185–189.
Ptaszkowska and Michel Claura had previously run the so-called Galerie 1–37 in Paris
from 1972 after Ptaszkowska left Poland to join Eustachy Kossakowski, the photogra-
pher, in Paris, where she met Buren and Claura. Among the artists they worked with over
the years were Trbuljak, Cadere, and Krasiński; each event organized within their mobile
framework was given a new number.
20. Géza Perneczky, The Magazine Network: The Trends of Alternative Art in the Light of
Their Periodicals 1968–1988 (Cologne: Editions Soft Geometry, 1993), 52.

21. Ibid.
22. Giancarlo Politi, “I Accuse You,” editorial, Flash Art special (May 1976).
25. Ibid.
26. Politi, “I Accuse You.”
27. See “Il dissenso culturale,” in Eventi del 1976–7, Annuario 1978 (Venice: La Biennale
di Venezia. Archivo storico delle arti contemporanee, 1978), 542–546; and Carlo Ripa di
Meana and Gabriella Mecucci, L’ordine di Mosca. Fermate la Biennale del Dissenso. Una
storia mai raccontata (Rome: Liberal Edizioni, 2007).
28. He subsequently published his memoirs of the event: Ripa di Meana and Mecucci,
L’ordine di Mosca.
29. Quoted from F. Colombo, “Italy: The Politics of Culture,” New York Review of Books 24,
no. 12 (1977), http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1977/jul/14/italy-the-politics-of
-culture/; cited in Maria-Kristiina Soomre, “Art, Politics and Exhibitions: (Re)writing the
History of (Re)presentations,” Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi 21, no. 3 (January 2012), 115.
30. “Il dissenso culturale,” 529; cited in Soomre, “Art, Politics and Exhibitions,” 115.
31. Thomas Petz, “Papier schrifften auf der Lagune,” Suddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 23
November 1977; cited in Edit Sasvári, “Eastern Europe under Western Eyes: The ‘Dissi-
dent Biennale,’ Venice, 1977,” in Beata Hock, ed., “Doing Culture under State-Socialism:
Actors, Events and Interconnections,” special issue of Comparativ. Zeitschrift für Globalge-
schichte und Vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung 4, no. 24 (2014), 17.
32. I am grateful to Katarína Lichvárová for contributing this observation by email, 24
September 2017.
33. Soomre notes that Crispolti had previously worked on Eastern European exhibitions
on several occasions, among them the Alternative Attuali 2 in L’Aquila in 1965. Soomre,
“Art, Politics and Exhibitions,” 116.
34. My thanks to Margarita Tupitsyn for clarifying this by email, 12 September 2017.
35. 1977 also marked a peak more widely in Western exhibitions of Soviet unofficial art,
including “Unofficial Art from the Soviet Union” (ICA, London, 19 January–27 February
1977); “New Art from the Soviet Union: The Known and Unknown” (The Arts Club, Wash-
ington, 2–20 October 1977); “Art et matière. Avec la participation des artistes russes con-
temporains” (Orangerie du Luxembourg, Paris). See Igor Golomstock and Alexander
Glezer, Unofficial Art from the Soviet Union (London: Secker & Warburg, 1977), and Drugoe
iskusstvo. Moskva 1956–1988 (Moscow: Galart, 2005).
36. Crispolti, “Una mostra … ,” 20; cited in Soomre, “Art, Politics and Exhibitions,” 118.
37. Sasvári, “Eastern Europe under Western Eyes,” 19.
38. Enrico Crispolti and Gabriella Moncada, eds., La nuova arte sovietica: Una prospettiva
non officiale (Venice: Biennale di Venezia and Marsilio Editore, 1977), 13–14; cited in
Soomre, “Art, Politics and Exhibitions,” 116.
39. Soomre, “Art, Politics and Exhibitions,” 117.
40. I am grateful to Katarína Lichvárová for this information.

41. Lichvárová, unpublished interview with Viktor Skersis. My thanks to Lichvárová for
sharing this with me.
43. Tiziana Villani, “The ‘Biennale of the Dissent’: A Page from the Italian Cold War,”
paper delivered at the conference “Art Histories, Cultural Studies and the Cold War,” Insti-
tute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London, 24 September 2010.
45. Ibid., 14–15.
46. The Italian had spent time in Czechoslovakia as a student. Carlo Ripa di Meana,
letter to Jindřich Chalupecký, 18 August 1977, Chalupecký Archives.
47. Ibid.
48. Cited in Jan May, “‘Biennale of Dissent’ (1977): Nonconformist Art from the USSR in
Venice,” in Jerome Bazin, Pascal Dubourg Glatigny, and Piotr Piotrowksi, eds., Art beyond
Borders: Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe 1945–1989 (Budapest: Central European
University Press, 2016), 364.
50. Géza Perneczky, “Biennále télen,” Beszélő no. 9 year 3, issue 8, available online at
http://beszelo.c3.hu/cikkek/biennale-telen.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. David Crowley, “Staging for the End of History: Avant-Garde Visions at the Beginning
and the End of Communist Rule in Eastern Europe,” in Patryk Babiracki and Austin Jer-
sild, eds., Socialist Internationalism in the Cold War: Exploring the Second World (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 116.
54. Thanks to Margarita Tupitsyn for this comment. See also chapter 3 of Margarita
Tupitsyn, Moscow Vanguard Art 1922–1992 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).
55. Alexander Glezer, letter dated 5 December 1977, ASAC, AV 268; cited in Soomre, “Art,
Politics and Exhibitions,” 119.
56. Soomre, “Art, Politics and Exhibitions,” 119.
57. Ibid. Soomre also curated the exhibition “Arhiivid tõlkes. Dissidentluse biennaal ’77 /
Archives in Translation. Biennial of Dissent ’77” at the Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn, in
2007.
58. Perneczky concurred, saying that “the official program was terrible. The Russians
tried to make propaganda for themselves.” Perneczky, “Biennále télen”; and author’s
interview with Géza Perneczky, Budapest, 24 May 2016.
59. Perneczky, “Biennále télen.”
60. Tamás St Turba, FIKA (Fiatal Művészek Klubja) / BOGEY (The Young Artists’ Club), an Inter-
view with Tamás St. Auby, trans. Katalin Orbán (Budapest: Ludwig Museum, 2006), 42.
61. István Hajdu, “Rétegződések—Körner Éva,” Balkon 6, no. 3–4 (1999), 11–17. My
thanks to Gergely Kovács for finding the material and providing this translation.

62. Éva Körner, “Az ablaknéző arhipov. Ilja Kabakov kiállítása budapesten,” Múlt és Jövő 4,
no. 3 (1992), 115. My thanks to Gergely Kovács for finding the material and providing this
translation.
64. Flash Art 76/77 (July-August 1977).
65. Yaacov Ro’I, “Jackson Vanik Amendment,” in The Yivo Encyclopedia of Jews in East-
ern Europe, available at http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Jackson-Vanik
_Amendment.
66. See Elizaveta Butakhova, “A-YA Magazine: Soviet Unofficial Art between Moscow,
Paris and New York, 1976–1986” (PhD thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, 2015).
67. He had previously published on the subject internationally in “Moscow Diary,” Studio
International 185 (February 1973), 81–96.
68. Jindřich Chalupecký, “Moscow 1977,” trans. Paul Wilson, Flash Art 80–81 (February-
April 1978), 16.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid.
71. Milena Slavická, “Moskva-Praha. Projekt Jindřicha Chalupeckého,” in Milena Slavická
and Marcela Pánková, eds., “Zakázané Umĕníi I,” special issue of Výtvarné Umění 3–4
(1995), 199–200. Unpublished translation by Julia Secklehner.
72. Chalupecký, “Moscow Diary,” cited in Lola Kantor-Kazovsky, “The Moscow Under-
ground Art Scene in an International Perspective,” in Bazin, Dubourg Glatigny, and
Piotrowksi, Art beyond Borders, 43.
73. Slavická, “Moskva-Praha.”
74. Ibid., 198.
75. Ibid.
76. Ibid., 199.
77. “Dialogue Pierre Restany / Jindřich Chalupecký,” undated typescript in Archives de la
Critique d’Art, Fonds Pierre Restany (PREST.XSEST 14/17, 14/18); reproduced in Macel,
Mytkowska, and Petrešin-Bachelez, Les promesses du passé, 196.
78. Boris Groys, “Art beyond the Art Market: A Conversation between Boris Groys
and Anton Vidokle,” Notes for an Art School, 2006; available online at https://s3.amazon
aws.com/arena-attachments/74847/ManifestArtBeyond.pdf
79. For a critique of this position, see also Sarah Wilson, “Moscow Romantic Exception-
alism: The Suspension of Disbelief,” e-flux journal 29 (November 2011).
80. Author’s interview with Milena Slavická, Prague, 13 December 2015, trans. Katarína
Lichvárová.
81. Ibid.
82. Slavická, “Moskva-Praha,” 200.
Lichvárová.
84. Ibid.

Lichvárová.
88. Ibid., 201. Jana Klusaková served as translator on this and other occasions.
Lichvárová.
90. Slavická, “Moskva-Praha,” 201–202.
91. Ibid., 203.
92. Ibid.
93. Ibid., 202.
94. Ibid.
95. Ibid., 201–202.
Lichvárová.
97. Thanks to Katárina Lichvárová and Margarita Tupitsyn for both pointing this out.
Conclusion: Networking the Bloc
1. Éva Forgács, “Between Local and Global: Double Bind and Double Challenge,” paper
given at the conference “East European Art Seen from a Global Perspective,” Galeria
Labirynt, Lublin, October 2014.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Iara Boubnova, “Post-What? Neo-How? For-Whom, Where and When?,” Moscow Art
Magazine, no. 22 (1998), 24.
5. Zdenka Badovinac, “Contemporaneity as Points of Connection,” e-flux journal 11
(December 2009), 5–7.
6. Ibid.
7. This book was in part inspired by the two volumes published to accompany a 2002
exhibition at LACMA, Central European Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation, 1910–
1930, ed. Timothy O. Benson (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), and Between Worlds: A Sourcebook of Central European
Avant-Gardes, 1910–1930, ed. Timothy O. Benson and Éva Forgács (Los Angeles: Los
Angeles County Museum of Art; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). Their transcosmo-
politan approach to mapping the historical avant-gardes and their presentation of the
centrality of Central European developments for any consideration of the history of
the avant-garde as a whole were exemplary in scope. The MoMA publication Primary
Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s, ed. Laura
Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002) provided a
wealth of previously unpublished documents in translation, helping to open up the field
further, though it paid little attention to possible interrelations between the authors and
ideas presented.
Notes to Chapter 14 and Conclusion 459

8. Jane Farver, “Global Conceptualism: Reflections,” available at http://post.at.moma
.org/content_items/580-global-conceptualism-reflections
9. Irwin, East Art Map (London: Afterall Books, 2006), 12.
10. Ibid.
11. László Beke, “Conceptual Tendencies in Eastern European Art,” in Luis Camnitzer et
al., Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, exh. cat. (New York: Queens
Museum of Art, 1999), 43.
12. Robert Filliou, Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts (Cologne: König, 1970), 204,
cited in Stephen Perkins, “Utopian Networks and Correspondence Identities” (2007), in
Estera Milman, Alternative Traditions in the Contemporary Arts: Subjugated Knowledges
and the Balance of Power (Iowa City: University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1999); available at
wayback.archive-it.org.
13. James Elkins, Is Art History Global? (London: Routledge, 2006), 8–9.
14. Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London:
Verso, 2012), 161.
15. Marina Gržinić, ed., “Biopolitics, Necropolitics and De-coloniality,” Pavilion 14 (2010).
16. See also Cristina Freire and Klara Kemp-Welch, eds., “Artists’ Networks in Eastern
Europe and Latin America,” special issue, ArtMargins 1, no. 2–3 (June-October 2012).
17. For an important discussion of the processes of artistic self-historicization in the
region, see the work of Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, “Innovative Forms of Archives, Part 1,”
e-flux journal 13 (2010).
460 Notes to Conclusion

Index
Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. Attalai, Gábor, 58, 130–131, 132, 133,
147–148, 209, 271–272, 273, 309,
Abakanowicz, Magdalena, 227, 228 370, 434n18
Abramović, Marina, 248, 250, 251, 253, Aue, Walter, 74, 140
254, 260, 265, 268, 325, 370, 452n30 Autonomy, 4, 198
Abstract art, 267–268, 388 Avalanche, 3, 373
Abstraction, 17, 19, 42, 417n4 Avant-garde, 22, 26–27, 31, 48–49, 57, 60,
Actor-network theory, 10 80, 116, 130, 133, 166, 168, 170, 184, 193,
AICA (International Association of Art 195–196, 198, 225, 236, 265, 277, 290,
Critics), 17–19, 25, 287, 291, 417n1 345, 366, 370, 375, 382, 385, 389, 390,
Aktual Art, 42, 43, 45, 55, 58, 115, 123, 377 399–400, 402, 408, 410–411 Index
Alloway, Lawrence, 3, 347
Alternative networks and movements, Bak, Imre, 81, 158, 200, 206
2, 4, 14, 20, 31, 34, 101, 120, 128, 141, 150, Balatonboglár Chapel Studio, 143,
205, 220, 279, 283, 285, 289–290, 297–298, 193, 195, 198, 200, 208, 216, 218, 220,
305, 311, 325, 358, 384, 408, 413 294, 442n37
Altorjay, Gábor, 52, 54, 58, 75, 424n53, Bartoš, Peter, 130, 150, 200, 330, 358,
429n38 359, 360 Index
Amsterdam, 58, 116, 147, 189, 325, 358, 361, Beau Geste Press, 60, 111, 115, 154, 161
363–364 Becher, Bernd and Hilla, 235–236, 253
Anděl, Jaroslav, 5, 330, 335, 363, 377 Beke, László, 4, 36–38, 93, 116, 120, 144,
Andersen, Eric, 44, 47, 49 161, 163, 164, 165, 168, 169, 182, 188,
Anonymity, 23, 59, 101 195–196, 198, 200–201, 203, 204,
Archives, 163, 182, 215, 321, 379–380, 410 205–206, 208–209, 210, 213, 215, 217,
Art & Project, 6, 116 291, 294–295, 297, 309, 317, 363, 382,
Art Diary, 317, 380–382 409, 411, 442n43
Art market, 100, 140, 344 Belgrade, 7, 88, 90, 94, 99, 248, 250,
Art object(s), 5, 66, 260, 267 252–253, 267–268, 325, 411, 445n39
Artpool, 200, 413 Bernea, Horia, 131, 244–245
Art world, 1, 3–4, 7, 14, 24, 34, 38, 51, Beuys, Joseph, 88, 157, 190, 223–224, 231,
59, 61, 64, 94–95, 100, 155, 158, 171, 233, 236–237, 238, 248, 250, 260, 351,
173, 178, 224, 246, 248, 253, 255, 263, 369, 433n8
265–268, 277, 280, 347, 364–366, Biard, Ida, 253, 434n21
379–380, 382, 392, 396 Biennale del Dissenso (Venice), 280, 383,
Assembling magazines, 440n12 385, 390
Biennale des Jeunes / Biennale de Paris, Chwałczyk, Jan, 130, 284, 447n3
14, 20, 64, 85, 87, 90 Claura, Michel, 288
Biermann, Wolf, 386, 387 Claus, Carlfriedrich, 99
Bitzan, Ion, 237, 240, 244–245 Cold War, 1, 4, 41, 176, 212, 265–266, 344,
Biuro Poezji (Warsaw), 283, 285, 287 365, 411–412
Biuro Wystaw Artystycznych (Poznań), 173 Collaboration, 7, 13, 36, 52, 55, 71, 80, 86,
Bogucki, Janosz, 289 106, 131, 177, 184, 190, 198, 234, 244, 253,
Borowski, Wiesław, 99, 175–177, 182, 188, 298, 354, 375, 396, 410–411
190, 209, 225, 231, 232, 263–264, 277 Collective, 13, 48, 54, 59, 63, 81, 84, 115,
Bosch+Bosch, 195, 197, 198 125, 158, 198, 205–206, 248, 250, 273,
Boudaille, Georges, 64, 94 300, 332, 386, 392, 409–410, 414
Bratislava, 21, 23, 25, 27–28, 30, 34, Cologne, 58, 74–75, 143, 147, 155, 158
36–37, 58, 148, 332, 398, 403 Commitment, 20, 23, 26, 34, 52, 55, 58,
Brendel, János, 173–174, 177–178, 182, 209 198, 200, 220, 223, 234, 236, 260, 285,
Briers, David, 131 335, 351, 354, 369, 382
British Arts Council, 158, 343 Communication, 3, 19, 55, 63, 65, 71, 75, 81,
Brno, 19, 25, 81, 99, 104, 106, 130, 140, 148, 95, 104–105, 110, 120, 125, 200–201, 203,
168, 403–404 208, 268, 285, 294–295, 317, 367, 388
Brown, Jean, 150 Community, 7, 10, 50, 106, 147, 160,
Bucharest, 224, 237, 239 190, 208, 255, 267, 285, 290, 300, 325,
Budaj, Jan, 330 343–344, 352, 358
Budapest, 67, 80, 131, 147, 157, 163, 166, Conceptualism, 6, 80, 135, 176, 402,
168, 173, 178, 184, 195, 198, 205, 215, 216, 409–410
220, 271, 291, 294–295, 309, 360, 413 Connectivity, 2, 3, 75, 101, 410
Bulatov, Erik, 401–402, 406 Cricot, 2, 224, 231, 232, 248
Burden, Chris, 322, 324, 375 Crispolti, Enrico, 384, 388
Buren, Daniel, 287, 288 Critics, 3, 13, 17, 25–26, 80, 163, 176, 271,
Burnham, Jack, 233 325, 330, 361, 380–381, 398, 401, 403, 411
Csáji, Attila, 173, 195, 438n4
Cadere, Andre, 63, 81, 84, 86, 427n2 Csernik, Attila, 198
Cage, John, 38, 41, 51, 57, 128, 236, 291, Cyprich, Róbert, 31, 34, 330, 332, 333
421n89 Czechoslovakia, 2, 6, 13, 19, 22, 26, 30, 37,
Cameron, Shirley, 253, 337, 339, 340, 343, 41–44, 50, 57, 59–60, 99, 104, 118–120,
345, 356 125, 144, 168, 198, 200, 201, 206, 237,
Carrega, Ugo, 216, 381 253, 265, 267, 271–272, 289–291, 296, 307,
Carrión, Ulises, 147, 317, 358, 454n29 326, 329, 360, 363, 370, 375, 382, 389,
CAyC (Centro de Arte y Comunicación, 397, 403
Buenos Aires), 279, 287–292
Celant, Germano, 6, 369 Dada, 195, 237
Censorship, 28, 111, 118, 185, 188, 352. See Damnjan, Radomir, 267–268, 269, 370
also Self-censorship Danuvius, 28, 30
Chalupecký, Jindrich, 14, 23–24, 26–27, De Appel, 361, 363–364, 366–367
34, 44, 47, 49, 51–52, 58–59, 272, 280, Debord, Guy, 28, 29
291, 375, 375, 377, 387, 396–404, 419n49, Deisler, Guillermo, 429n32
420n53 Demarco, Richard, 144, 220, 223–225, 231,
Chartny, Dalibor, 99, 104, 209, 375 232, 233–234, 236–237, 239, 244–248,
Chess, 160, 182, 184, 340 250, 253, 255, 260
Christo (Christo Javacheff), 30, 131, 148 De Maria, Walter, 7
Chuikov, Ivan, 400–402 Dematerialization, 5–6, 93, 106, 126, 389
Democracy, 4, 188, 203
462 Index
Denegri, Ješa, 267, 363, 365 Film, 47, 81, 97, 111, 135, 158, 193, 205, 234,
Détournement, 75, 126 248, 250, 268, 298, 307, 319, 330, 360,
Dialogue, 13, 17, 20, 80, 99, 106, 116, 383–384, 389, 392, 397
223–224, 234, 236, 260, 325–326, 384, Flash Art, 94, 280, 317, 367, 369–375, 379–380,
408, 410–411, 413 382, 391–392, 396
Dias, Antonio, 148 Fluxshoe, 158, 160–161, 163
Dietman, Erik, 30–31 Fluxus, 14, 38, 44, 47–51, 57–58, 63, 94, 120,
Dimitrijević, Braco, 131, 253, 268, 370 158, 176, 190, 358, 396, 412
Dissidence, 4, 125, 366, 383–384, 386–387, France, 13, 25, 84, 90, 337, 370
389, 406 Freedom, 20, 28, 30–31, 60–61, 67, 100, 111,
Distribution, 3, 13, 15, 43, 64, 84, 86, 93, 133, 177, 189, 213, 272, 273, 276, 343, 366
95, 100, 104, 106, 126, 143, 155, 161, 284, Friedman, Ken, 54–55, 57, 60, 158, 294
322, 380 Friendship, 4, 14, 21–22, 28, 34, 37, 61, 64,
Documenta, 36, 58, 95, 140, 223, 225, 351, 106, 173, 205, 223–224, 272
388, 392
Documentation, 14, 21, 52, 55, 76, 81, 116, Galántai, György, 193–220, 221, 381–382
119, 126, 130, 133, 148, 158, 163, 200, 213, Galeria Akumulatory 2 (Poznań), 99, 116,
229, 255, 272, 284, 289, 302, 311, 317, 319, 118, 283, 295, 297, 305–306, 413
321, 340, 345, 349, 354, 370, 392 Galeria Dziekanka (Warsaw), 190, 283,
Domus, 25, 50 319, 330
Đorđević, Goran, 366 Galeria Foksal (Warsaw), 58, 99, 143,
Dragan, Nuša, 248, 370 173–177, 179, 185, 188–190, 209, 225, 231,
Dragan, Srečo, 99, 248, 370 263–264, 276–277, 289, 294, 373
Dubček, Alexander, 3, 27–28 Galeria Mospan (Warsaw), 283, 315, 451n20
Duchamp, Marcel, 17, 22, 26–27, 59, 150, Galeria Nad Fosą (Wrocław), 326
216, 379 Galeria Permafo (Wrocław), 283
Dům umění (Brno), 81, 148, 404 Galeria PI (Kraków), 128, 311
Dvizhenie, 24, 385, 388 Galeria pod Moną Lisą (Wrocław), 130
Dziamski, Grzegorz, 283, 306, 325, 361 Galeria Remont (Warsaw), 128, 312, 356
Galeria Repassage (Warsaw), 283, 322,
Edinburgh, 144, 220, 223–225, 231, 451n26
233–235, 237, 242, 244, 246–248, 250, Galeria Studio (Warsaw), 298, 302
253, 259–260, 263, 267 Galeria Sztuki Informacji Kreatywnej
Ehrenberg, Felipe, 115 (Wrocław), 284
Emigration, 21, 147, 203, 216, 389, 390, Galeria Sztuki LKD Labirynt (Lublin),
396–397 128, 283, 306, 355
Émigrés, 47, 63, 81, 84, 133, 143, 147, 158, Galeria Sztuki Najnowszej (Wrocław),
173, 380, 384, 389, 396, 411 307, 450n41
Envois, 14, 63–64, 69, 71, 80–81, 84, 88, Galerie des Locataires (Paris), 434n21
90, 93–94 Galerie EP (Berlin), 298
Erdély, Miklós, 52, 80, 177, 186, 188, 200, Galerie Lara Vincy (Paris), 21, 36–37
209, 215, 358, 361 Galerie Sonnabend (Paris), 63, 429n28
EXPRESSZIÓ, 203 Gáyor, Tibor, 131, 155, 156, 157–158, 161,
166, 168, 170, 215
Feelisch, Wolfgang, 59–60 Gerlovin, Valeri, 392
Fiatal Művészek Klubja (Budapest), 168, Gerlovinova, Rimma, 392
271, 294 German Democratic Republic (GDR),
Filko, Stano, 23, 26, 58, 123, 130, 133, 136, 140–141, 296, 300, 307, 380
200, 206, 291, 332, 340, 370, 403 Gerz, Jochen, 63, 71, 216
Filliou, Robert, 236, 294, 411 Glezer, Alexander, 388–389
Global village, 5, 171
Index 463
Glusberg, Jorge, 36, 279, 287, 288, Isolation, 2, 20, 51, 135, 157, 179, 223,
289–291, 357 272, 410
Gnezdo Group, 386 Iveković, Sanja, 253
Gotovac, Tomislav, 317, 320
Graphic art, 155, 170, 213, 298 Jovánovics, György, 177, 182, 184, 200
Groh, Klaus, 15, 74–75, 76, 77, 81, 86, 87,
93, 104, 122, 123, 125–126, 128–131, 133, Kabakov, Ilya, 389, 390, 391, 397,
135, 140–141, 147, 155, 156, 158, 168, 184, 400–402, 405, 406
216, 248, 250, 265, 298, 387–389 Kalkmann, Hans Werner, 110, 168
Gulyás, Gyula, 166, 168, 200, 213 Kantor, Tadeusz, 19, 54, 58, 176, 178, 224,
229, 231, 237, 248, 265, 276
Hajas, Tibor, 220, 355–356, 358, 360, 361 Kaprow, Allan, 14, 44, 51, 57, 60, 120, 123,
Halász, Károly, 93, 150 190, 191, 325, 326
Halász, Péter, 200, 206 Karinthy, Frigyes, 1, 10
Hap, Béla, 200, 205, 209 Khrushchev, Nikita, 1, 48
Happening, 14, 22, 44, 229, 250, 267, 332, Kinetic art, 24, 182, 385, 398
375, 385 Klaniczay, Júlia, 200, 294, 381–382
Harasztÿ, István, 291 Klaus, Carfriedrich, 296–297
Havel, Václav, 3, 5 Knižák, Milan, 14, 24, 41–47, 49–51,
Hegyi, Lóránd, 363 54–61, 115, 120, 123, 155, 266, 272, 291,
Hellion, Martha, 115 330, 375, 377, 392
Hencze, Tamás, 174 Knowles, Alison, 49, 317, 358
Higgins, Dick, 49, 54, 57, 95, 106, 110, Kocman, Jiří H., 81, 83, 104, 106, 108, 109,
284, 286 130, 148–150, 153, 155, 168, 200, 206, 209,
Honisch, Dieter, 170, 387–389, 437n32 211, 216, 286, 287, 291, 298, 306–307
Hultén, Pontus, 177 Kolář, Jiří, 20, 25, 48, 50, 296, 375, 377
Hungary, 36, 47, 66–67, 69, 81, 99, 131, 133, Kolíbal, Stanislav, 371, 375, 377, 402
143, 144, 147, 157, 158, 174, 178, 184, 193, Koller, Július, 330, 403
195, 200, 215, 216, 265, 290–291, 298, Komar and Melamid, 386
307, 360, 363, 370, 382, 389, 391 Konkoly, Gyula, 66–67, 68, 69–70, 80–81,
84–85, 131, 174, 175
IAC (International Artists’ Cooperation), Konrád, György, 4, 384
128–130, 449n27 Kontova, Helena, 310, 373, 375, 376, 377,
Ideology, 3, 100, 189, 330 378, 379, 381–382
Imagination, 1, 36, 168, 174, 213, 215, 389 Körner, Éva, 390–391
Important Business, 150, 152, 154, 166, 290 Koščević, Želimir, 90, 93–94
Independence, 4, 44, 185, 208, 236, 329, Kostołowski, Andrzej, 14, 97, 98, 100–101,
343, 407 104, 106, 130, 143, 283, 337, 340, 345,
Individualism, 205, 365 346, 347, 348, 363
Infante, Francisco, 392, 397 Kostrová, Zita, 23, 332
Informants, 416n22 Kotík, Jan, 20, 24, 41
Installation, 27, 85, 88, 119, 133, 182–184, Kovanda, Jiří, 314–315, 316, 317, 325, 327,
195, 227, 236–237, 298, 300, 330, 392, 402 330, 355, 377, 450n17
Institutionalization, 90, 100, 396 Koželj, Marinela, 252, 356
Intermedia, 54, 106, 182, 425n61 Kozłowski, Jarosław, 14, 76, 97, 98, 99–101,
International relations, 3, 80, 84, 106, 177 103, 104, 106, 110–111, 116, 118, 130,
Invasion, 2, 30, 198, 206, 237, 403 174, 209, 213, 283, 295, 296–297, 305–306,
Iparterv, 69, 174, 185 370, 410, 413
Iron Curtain, 1, 13, 19, 51, 95, 155, 176, 266, Kraków, 17, 19, 51, 128, 176, 224, 298,
322, 344–345, 386 311–312, 363
464 Index
Krasiński, Edward, 131, 133, 134, 233 Maurer, Dóra, 115, 128, 131, 140, 155, 156,
Kroutvor, Josef, 75, 125–126, 133, 291, 433n2 157–158, 160–161, 166, 168, 170, 203,
Kulik, Zofia, 288, 289–291, 302, 320, 322, 215–216, 217, 294–295
330, 335, 347, 349, 351, 354, 356, 363 Maximal Art Gallery (Poznań), 283,
Kwiek, Przemysław, 302, 316, 319, 320, 321, 306, 325
330, 335, 337, 347, 349, 354, 356 Mayor, David, 115–116, 154–155, 158,
KwieKulik, 289, 302, 314–315, 317, 319, 322, 160–161, 163, 166
347, 349, 350, 351–352, 353, 354, 355, 356, McCallion, Barry, 110, 113
363, 413 Merce Cunningham Dance Company,
38, 41
Lach-Lachowicz, Natalia (Natalia LL), Milan, 280, 367, 369, 373, 375, 377, 379,
233, 371, 373, 374 387, 392
Lachowicz, Andrzej, 130, 216 Miler, Karel, 253, 272, 309, 314, 316, 356,
Ladik, Katalin, 198, 199, 440n10 370, 373, 375, 377, 403
Lakner, László, 105, 131, 157–158, 174, 177, Military, 3, 4, 30, 51, 54, 220, 365
179, 180, 181, 182, 188, 196, 209, 373 Miller, Roland, 237, 253, 337, 339, 340,
Land art, 80, 119–120, 133, 148–149, 267 343–345, 356
Language, 6, 19, 71, 104, 135, 161, 173, 179, Mixed Up Underground, 198
188, 193, 196, 201, 208, 268, 291, 295, Mlčoch, Jan, 272, 309, 310, 312, 314, 316,
325, 329, 354, 387, 400, 403 330, 356, 364, 375, 377
Latour, Bruno, 10 Mlynárčik, Alex, 14, 21–28, 30–31, 32, 33,
Lebel, Jean-Jacques, 28 34, 36–37, 41, 58, 61, 81, 86, 123, 130,
Legéndy, Péter, 93, 200, 206, 208 291, 332
Lenin (V. I. Ulyanov), 85, 133, 182, 184, 268, Moscow, 3, 17, 24, 48, 75, 131, 182, 237, 271,
300, 302 280, 369, 389–392, 396–400, 402–403,
Lippard, Lucy, 5–7, 93, 106, 120, 126, 404, 406, 410
263, 377 Mroczek, Andrzej, 306, 355
Lódź, 174, 363 Music, 31, 41, 48, 110, 218, 285, 295, 298,
Love, 55, 67, 133, 150, 206, 255, 267, 286, 358, 423n26
345, 387 Muzeum Sztuki, Lódź, 225, 234, 307
Ludwiński, Jerzy, 337
Neagu, Paul, 131, 237, 239, 241, 242,
Mach, Jan, 42 244–245, 246, 247–248, 249
Mach, Vít, 42, 44 Neizvestny, Ernst, 48, 385, 398
Maciunas, George, 14, 47–51, 60, 158, 412 NET, 14, 97, 98, 99–101, 104, 106,
Mail art, 6, 55, 65, 71, 75, 94–95, 104, 128, 110–111, 116, 143, 205, 209, 283–285,
130, 148, 168, 213, 285, 297–298, 302, 295, 410
306, 381, 410 Networkers, 15, 36, 130, 220, 363, 399
Major, János, 157, 166, 213, 216 Networking, 1, 14, 24, 100, 140, 155, 168,
Malich, Karel, 291, 401–402, 404 184, 196, 277, 325, 381, 407–408, 410,
Manifestos, 17, 23–24, 42, 99, 125, 184, 412–413
204–205, 209, 215, 242, 253, Networks, 1–4, 7, 10, 13–15, 20, 21, 61, 64,
284–286, 340 75, 81, 110–111, 116, 123, 126, 128, 130,
Marioni, Tom, 144, 190, 260, 263–269, 131, 135, 147, 150, 155, 158, 168, 173, 176,
271–273, 274, 276–277, 309 195, 209, 225, 265, 279, 283, 286, 291,
Marx, Karl, 48, 170, 182, 213, 268, 343, 302, 305, 345, 347, 373, 380, 389, 399,
345, 397 411–412
Masotta, Oscar, 54, 424n56 Newspapers, 36, 86, 298, 326–327, 330
Matanović, Milenko, 7 Nez, David, 7
Matković, Slavko, 195, 198 Nonconformist art, 398
Index 465
Normalization, 3, 27, 59–60, 118, Poetry, 110, 148, 193, 195, 198, 216, 279, 284,
335, 400 285, 289, 295–297, 307, 410
Nouveau Réalisme, 14, 17, 22–23, 38 Pogačnik, Marko, 7, 131
Nusberg, Lev, 24, 31, 36, 75, 131, 385, Poinsot, Jean-Marc, 14, 63–66, 71, 75, 80–81,
387–389, 398 84–86, 88, 90, 93–95
Poland, 10, 13, 17, 19, 44, 50, 54, 97, 99,
Objects, 3, 11, 20, 23, 41–44, 104, 106, 116, 128, 130, 133, 140, 144, 168, 173–177, 179,
143, 149, 184, 239, 245, 247–248, 260, 184, 223–225, 234, 253, 265, 274, 276,
266–267, 312, 349, 352, 379 279, 283, 284, 287, 289, 290, 305, 307,
Occupation, 3, 30, 55 311–312, 325, 327, 329, 335, 337, 340, 343,
Official art, 189, 266–268 344, 351, 358, 360, 363, 370, 382
OHO, 7, 59, 131, 255, 370, 412 Politi, Giancarlo, 317, 369–370, 375, 376,
Oldenbourg, Serge, 49–50, 55 377, 378, 379, 380–383
Oldenburg (Germany), 75, 86, 128–131, 170 Popovič, Vladjimír, 200, 206
Ono, Yoko, 57, 160 Popović, Zoran, 248, 267–268
Opposition, 2, 59, 110, 149, 189, 205, 208, Pospíšilová, Gerta, 81, 200, 307, 317
329, 384, 407 Postcards, 52, 80–81, 84, 86, 94, 160, 163,
284, 286, 302, 352
Padrta, Jiří, 24–25, 28, 398 Potocka, Anna-Maria, 128, 311–312
Pages, 131, 201, 441n22 Poznań, 14, 97, 110, 116, 173–174, 273, 283,
Parallel culture, 3 295, 306, 325, 337, 363, 413
Paripović, Neša, 248 Poznanović, Bogdanka, 131, 196, 198
Paris, 14, 19–22, 25, 28, 31, 36–38, 52, 63–65, Prague, 14, 19–20, 23–26, 38, 41–42, 47–51,
67, 69, 75, 80, 84, 86, 88, 90, 94–95, 189, 54–55, 58–61, 94, 148, 272,280, 309–310,
231, 236, 268, 276, 290, 310, 380, 387, 314–315, 322, 325, 363, 369, 373, 375,
390, 396, 411 377, 397–398, 400–404, 406, 411
Partum, Andrzej, 284–286, 288, 289, 291, Prague Spring, 2, 13, 28, 399
306, 316, 337, 340 Prigov, Dmitri, 401
Partum, Ewa, 284, 291, 302 Ptaszkowska, Anka, 176, 288, 380
Passport, 49, 51, 111, 185, 195, 253, 351–352, Publications, 10, 44, 47–48, 130, 140, 148,
354, 363, 416n22 150, 163, 166, 176, 284, 290, 298, 314,
Patkowski, Józef, 48 343, 382, 398, 411–412
Pauer, Gyula, 173–174, 177, 182, 183, 184– Publishing, 3, 7, 48–49, 54, 111, 125, 198,
185, 196, 200, 203, 206, 208–209, 289 203, 213, 290, 369, 380
Perneczky, Géza, 2, 93, 104, 110, 126, 130–
131, 147–148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 154, 155, Rauschenberg, Robert, 38, 41
156, 166, 170, 209, 210, 212, 290–291, Realism, 17, 22, 48, 266, 268
380, 387, 388–389 Rehfeldt, Robert, 296, 298, 300, 301, 302,
Photographic documentation, 6–7, 10, 303, 304, 305, 307
24, 31, 44, 75, 80, 85, 88, 90, 93, 97, 101, Responsibility, 90, 118, 163, 205
106, 116, 119, 126, 133, 135, 155, 166, Restany, Pierre, 14, 17, 19–25, 28, 30–31, 34,
169, 182, 185, 186, 200, 201–203, 36–38, 50, 60–61, 66, 71, 72–73, 80, 177,
205–206, 209, 210, 212, 213, 216, 218, 224, 291, 388–389, 398
224, 225, 231, 233, 260, 284, 295, 310, Rezek, Petr, 326, 373
312, 314, 317, 335, 340, 349, 351, 370, Ripa di Meana, Carlo, 382–384, 387–389
373, 375, 377, 380, 392, 404 Ritual, 57–58, 248, 309, 358
Pinczehelyi, Sándor, 93 Robakowski, Józef, 283, 306, 363
Pińinska-Bereś, Maria, 337, 341 Rockefeller, Nelson, 267
Piotrowski, Piotr, 2, 173, 189, 218, 234, 244, Rockefeller Scholarship, 157
277, 327, 413 Romania, 84, 133, 237, 244–245, 360, 412
Pivovarov, Victor, 397, 400–401, 405, 406
466 Index
Ságl, Jan, 24 Szentjóby, Tamás, 52, 58, 131, 166, 177, 185,
Ságlová, Zorka, 123, 291 187, 193, 196, 198, 200, 212, 214, 216,
Samizdat, 52, 59, 203 219, 271, 294, 309
Schmuck, 115, 154, 161, 164–165, 166 Szétfolyóirat, 203
Schwarz, Arturo, 26, 36 Szombathy, Bálint, 195–196, 198, 298
Schweinebraden, Jürgen, 297–298, 302 Sztuka, 306
Sculpture, 48, 76, 173–174, 184, 213, 223,
236–237, 268, 276, 284, 306, 354, 385 Thaw, 1, 24, 175
Sekal, Ján, 401, 403, 404 Themerson, Franciszka, 225
Self-censorship, 54, 163, 188 Third Eye Centre (Glasgow), 345
Self-historicization, 200, 413 Tijardović, Jasna, 248, 253
Šetlík, Jiří, 401–403 Tito (Josip Broz), 7, 133, 268, 409
Siegelaub, Seth, 66, 189 Todorović, Miroljub, 99, 216, 296, 307
Sikora, Rudolf, 140, 200, 330, 403 Todosijević, Raša, 248, 252, 255, 260,
Sikorski, Tomasz, 315, 317, 318, 358 267, 356
Šimotová, Adriena, 401–402 Tót, Endre, 66, 69–71, 73, 80–81, 82, 83, 94,
Skersis, Viktor, 386, 392 95, 99, 104, 131, 158, 161, 162, 163, 168,
Slavická, Milena, 280, 397–399, 174, 177–178, 182, 183, 188, 196, 198, 200,
401–404, 406 206, 209, 213, 216, 284, 291, 293, 307,
Smeets, Aggy, 361, 363, 454n35 371, 372, 375, 388
Socialist realism, 42, 67, 266, Tóth, Gábor, 93, 198, 216, 307
388–389, 396 Trbuljak, Goran, 131, 135, 139, 140, 253,
Sohm, Hans, 58, 60–61 317, 370
Solidarity, 4, 10, 37, 101, 110, 186, 205, 302, Tuč, Pavel, 315
329, 344, 352, 379 Tudor, David, 41
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 383 Türk, Péter, 200
Something Else Press, 49, 54, 95, 284 Turowski, Andrzej, 182, 189, 209
Sosnowski, Zdzisław, 209, 371 Typewriter, 3, 52, 80, 81, 126, 218, 298
Soviet Union. See Union of Soviet Tzara, Tristan, 182, 184
Socialist Republics
Spielmann, Peter, 387, 389 Uecker, Günther, 236
Stanisławski, Ryszard, 225, 234 Új Symposion, 196
Štembera, Petr, 6, 66, 71, 74, 75, 76, 79, Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen), 325
80–81, 82, 94–95, 104, 105, 107, 118, 119, Underground, 4, 59, 135, 147, 160, 195, 198,
120, 121, 123, 125–126, 127, 129, 130–133, 203–205, 209, 265, 373
135, 137, 140, 163, 200, 209, 210, 253, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
267, 272, 274, 291, 305, 309, 310–311, 314, (USSR), 24, 47–48, 67, 75, 131, 133, 160,
316, 317, 322, 325–326, 328, 329, 330, 184, 271, 273, 296, 360, 384, 386, 388–
332, 335, 355–356, 358, 360, 363, 370, 373, 389, 391–392, 396–397, 399, 409–410
375, 377, 403 United States, 7, 13, 47, 55, 59, 110, 143, 263,
Strauss, Tomáš, 358, 363 277, 366, 370, 396, 411
Students’ Cultural Centre (SKC, Unofficial art, 161, 204, 267, 392, 400
Belgrade), 88, 248, 250 Unofficial artists, 315, 330, 399, 407
Studio International, 24, 176 Urbân, János, 93, 131
Surrealism, 26, 237 Urkom, Gergelj, 248, 252
Susovski, Marijan, 363
Švecová, Soňa, 42 Václav Špála Gallery, 26
Szajna, Józef, 225, 226, 227, 298 Valoch, Jiří, 81, 93, 99, 104, 119–120,
Szalma, László, 195, 198 130–131, 135, 138, 140, 148, 168,
Szeemann, Harald, 58, 64, 140, 427n6 200, 206, 209, 216, 291, 296, 305–307,
311, 317, 370, 403
Index 467
Vautier, Ben, 49, 63, 88, 148, 163, 190,
191, 216
Venice, 38, 41, 69, 280, 383, 386–387,
389, 396
Venice Biennale, 36, 225, 381
Veselý, Aleš, 20
Viénet, René, 28, 29
Vienna, 41, 157, 166, 215–216
Violence, 30, 356
Vostell, Wolf, 24, 51–52, 54, 60, 63, 85
Výtvarná práce, 24, 25, 51, 398
Výtvarná uměníe, 25, 398
War, 30, 37, 110, 128, 184, 188, 369, 410

Warpechowski, Zbigniew, 229, 230,
337, 345
Warsaw, 41, 48, 51, 58, 128, 143, 168, 174,
176, 182, 185–186, 224–225, 272, 283–285,
289, 298, 311–312, 314–315, 322, 330, 335,
347, 352, 356, 363, 377, 413
Warsaw Pact, 30, 198, 201, 206, 237
Weichardt, Jürgen, 130, 170
Williams, Emmett, 47
Wodiczko, Krzysztof, 373
Wolf-Rehfeldt, Ruth, 296, 298, 299,
302, 303
Wrocław, 130, 168, 283–284, 298, 307, 326,
330, 363
Xerox, 93–94
Yankilevsky, Vladimir, 391, 397–398,

401, 404
Zanini, Walter, 413, 448n8

Zankó, Tomas, 81, 84
468 Index

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Introduction: A Useless Game | 1

1 Una Cosa Nostra­ | 17

Part II Points of Passage | 143

6 Émigré Encounters in Cologne | 147

Part III Convergences | 279

11 Alternative Spaces and Experimental Poets | 283

Conclusion: Networking the Bloc | 407

Slavická, Támas Szentjóby, Balint Szombathy, and Endre Tót.

2 Introduction: A Useless Game

Introduction: A Useless Game 3

4 Introduction: A Useless Game

Introduction: A Useless Game 5

6 Introduction: A Useless Game

Introduction: A Useless Game 7

8 Introduction: A Useless Game

Introduction: A Useless Game 9

10 Introduction: A Useless Game

Introduction: A Useless Game 11

A series of creative initiatives led by artists, art historians, and critics

The influential UNESCO-affiliated International Association of Art Crit-

Una Cosa Nostra 19

Una Cosa Nostra 21

Una Cosa Nostra 23

Una Cosa Nostra 25

Una Cosa Nostra 27

Una Cosa Nostra 29

Una Cosa Nostra 31

Una Cosa Nostra 33

Figures 1.6 and 1.7

Una Cosa Nostra 37

Among the artists representing Czechoslovakia in Venice in 1964 was

reification of life: “man is drowning in the enormous abundance of

Hungary, and the USSR in 1964 in a Renault 4 converted into a mobile

Knížák explained that at the time he had been “a completely for-

Instead, he moved to a village near Mariánské láznĕ and continued

Jean-Marc Poinsot first became interested in envois (items sent in the

time, undertaken for oneself but documented to be shared with oth-

A rare photograph of the installation suggests that next to a series

Figures 3.14 and 3.15

stay in Belgrade, Poinsot recalled how different the working conditions

In 1971, Jarosław Kozłowski and Andrzej Kostołowski conceived of a

NET: An Open Proposition 99

NET: An Open Proposition 101

NET: An Open Proposition 103

NET: An Open Proposition 105

NET: An Open Proposition 107

Figure 4.6 (facing page, top)

Figure 4.7 (facing page, bottom)

NET: An Open Proposition 111

NET: An Open Proposition 113

Figure 4.11 (below)

NET: An Open Proposition 115

NET: An Open Proposition 119

NET: An Open Proposition 123

the art of possibility is an art of projects and demonstrations, events,

Aktuelle Kunst in Osteuropa 127

He was … collecting all possible addresses … he held a meeting at my place …

Aktuelle Kunst in Osteuropa 129

Aktuelle Kunst in Osteuropa 131

1 Una Cosa Nostra | 17