Media and the Cold War in the 1980s by Henrik G. Bastiansen & Martin Klimke & Rolf Werenskjold

Author:Henrik G. Bastiansen & Martin Klimke & Rolf Werenskjold
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319983820
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

(Extra-)Official Reactions and International Impact

If, as I previously mentioned, the communist authorities remained silent about the Hungary Can Be Yours exhibition, this indifference was, obviously, publicly staged. Extra-officially, Galántai’s movements were constantly monitored by the secret police, as some reports conserved in the State Security Archive attest. 17

A curious exception to the authorities’ apparent disregard was noted in the Radio Free Europe report. While the banning of Hungary Can Be Yours had been officially sanctioned, a well-known arts-and-culture reporter from Hungarian Television (Magyar Televízió), György Baló, visited the exhibition accompanied with his crew, who carefully recorded all the exhibited pieces. 18 Considering that the broadcast of such images in a public TV program—Baló’s cultural television-magazine Stúdió 84—was highly improbable, what was this filming made for, then? While there is no available clue to its final use, the recording could have been destined to party officials concerned about the event’s impact or, perhaps, it was simply kept in official records as proof of Galántai’s subversive activities, likely to be used at any moment for blackmailing him or justifying any kind of mistreatment (Debeusscher 2011). In either case, the TV crew’s awkward presence at the Young Artists Club confirms the close connection and collaboration between the government apparatus and the media, and the latter’s involvement in control procedures over the life of Hungarian citizens.

We have to wait until November 1986 to find another brief reference to the banning of Hungary Can Be Yours in a Helsinki Watch report about the violations of the Helsinki Agreements in Hungary. 19 Here again, the description of the event in the section “Freedom to publish” is a bit distorted, identifying, for example, the exhibition’s organizer as Tamás Molnár, a member of the Inconnu Group. This error highlights the fact that information concerning nonofficial culture in communist states hardly circulated, and when it did, it frequently happened to be twisted by the successive stages of transmission and interpretation it had gone through.

Besides the scarcity of primary sources and the difficulty foreign journalists had when trying to access them directly, another explanation for the exhibition’s lack of press coverage is György Galántai’s personal decision not to react openly against the official banning. This reluctance was influenced by his previous experience of being watched and attacked for his artistic and cultural activity in the early 1970s, causing him serious difficulties in his professional and personal life. 20

If Galántai sought to avoid repercussions on his personal life by maintaining a low profile while the communists were in power, such a decision can in no way be considered cowardly or passive; it rather reflects the thoughtful choice to keep producing and showing nonconventional art under adverse conditions, despite its prohibition or its limited access to a restricted audience. As this essay will further expose, Galántai has been committed since 1989 to building new contextual and interpretational frames for a large number of artistic productions and events from the communist period, including Hungary Can Be Yours.

Before addressing this aftermath, however, I will discuss the case of The Fighting City, an exhibition organized by the Inconnu Group.

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