Performance Art in the Second Public Sphere by Katalin Cseh-Varga Adam Czirak

Author:Katalin Cseh-Varga,Adam Czirak
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

Notes

1This essay is a completely revised and rewritten version of a lecture presented at the SocialEast Forum on the Art and Visual Culture of Eastern Europe, Seminar No. 7: Art and Espionage, on February 27, 2009 at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. I am grateful to Tamás Szentjóby for his invaluable help and comments, and for providing documents and photographs for the lecture and this article. I would like to thank Gábor Altorjay for giving me insight into the files and dossiers in his archives, as well as for our discussion of his perspective of them. This essay, in its revised form, is part of the research project Performance Art in Eastern Europe 1950–1990: History and Theory at the University of Zurich. I am grateful to my colleagues for inspiring debates and discussions concerning the reframing of performance history in Eastern Europe. I would like to thank Tamás Szőnyei for his deep and precise insights and for his invaluable help in the jungle of the Historical Archive of the State Security in Budapest, as well as for providing me with one of the last issues of his seminal publication on the role of agents around Hungarian rock music. I would like to extend my gratitude to Edit Sasvári, who gave me hints and ideas on how these facts could gain proper interpretation and on how many traps one can fall into during the course of this research.

2The original Hungarian quote is as follows: “a zavaros világ logikájának való alávetettség, vagyis a résztvevők lemondanak arról az illuzórikus jogukról, hogy a véletlen felett befolyást gyakoroljanak, és beismerik tökéletes kiszolgáltatottságuk tényét egészen a fizikai megsemmisülésig.” This quote, which the reporting officer attributed to Allen Ginsberg, is imprecise and even in its Hungarian version is grammatically and semantically incorrect and unclear. The original of the Ginsberg quote could not be identified, but the translation appears in the anonymized 1968 document, Summary Report and Operation Plan (Schwitters dossier), Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security (Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára, ÁBTL), (V-156455, p. 103). The dossier “Schwitters” is not available for research, but excerpts from it are accessible online through the Center for Culture and Communication’s website at www.c3.hu/collection/tilos/docs.html (Accessed June 29, 2017). All translations in this text – if not indicated otherwise – are by the author.

3Concerning the supposedly serious threat coming from the happening scene, see also Kürti 2015, n.p.

4A Magyar Népköztársaság belügyminiszterének 0022. számú parancsa (dossier), ÁBTL, reproduced in Szőnyei 2005, p. 111. About the consequences of the order 0022, see also Sasvári 2003, pp. 11–13 and Szőnyei 2005, pp. 89–115.

5In the course of multifaceted evaluations of the effectiveness of the order 0022/1970 on cultural politics in a third evaluation in 1986, the cultural protagonists of different wings of the opposition attested that their aim was to try to develop their lines and to unite in order to “become a political factor, a power which has a defining role in society. Until today they have not decided for good whether they would like to realise this integration into society or to opt for ‘staying outside.

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