Catalogue

Capa Center published a catalogue on the occasion of the the exhibition Endre Tót: Very Special Gladnesses in cooperation with acb Gallery. The catalogue includes an essay by Orsolya Hegedüs, art historian, about the artist’s series as well as the reproductions of the pieces from the series itself.

The catalogue is available for purchase at the Capa Center’s shop for 3,000 HUF.

The actionism employed in Joys was Tót’s truly radical break with painting and traditional art associated with the medium of painting, and ultimately with modernism. In the light of the cultural and existential circumstances in Hungary at the time, Tót reached action as a genre following different antecedents and in a different way than the international representatives of Fluxus. His banal actions carried out in front of an audience (I am glad if I can gaze at the wall for an hour a day, Blackburn 1973) or alone, documented in photographs/films, his gesture of declaring joy itself a form of art, the transformation of his artist-personality into a brand as a result of the infinite repetition of his own laughing portrait: these are all gestures intended to erase the boundary between life and art, to abolish the elitism of art. The Hungarian avant-garde had already embarked on the same endeavour by realizing the first Hungarian happening in 1966 – The Lunch (in memoriam Batu Khan) – but while the devices used by that happening were close to the Kaprowian conception of art in terms of involving the audience, rituality, spontaneity and effect, Tót’s actionism is conceptually inspired and in terms of end result, his actions are rarely devoid of creating objects. According to Géza Perneczky, what Tót’s Joy and Zero pieces represent is in fact “the space between the four poles of concept art, mail art, street actions and conceptual painting, the realm that might be labelled post-fluxus art.”

(Quote from Orsolya Hegedüs’s essay)