Pecs Workshop (1968-1980)

Preface; contextualization of the problem, the conceptual positions of the dissertation

I may hardly choose a more emblematic photo than Károly Halász’s Private Broadcast[1] to characterize the topic of my dissertation. This work by Halász, that was made in 1970 and 1971, shows a candle in an empty television set frame. This work of Halász’s is not without precedence, it can be considered the cornerstone of his later work. Similar to the other workshop members he had already got past the geometric abstract, pop art and op art studies by that time, and simultaneously with the land art experiments started then, he discovered the study and use with artistic purpose of the immediate physical environment, and within, the television, the TV set. Subsequently he completed those works that present the television set as one of their major attribute and central element.
Nam June Paik’s installation from 1975 entitled Candle TV[2] uses the hauntingly identical elements as Halász’s work with similar content that was mentioned above. At first glance, in the photographs of the two installations we see the same: lighted candle in a TV set frame. Any difference between the two images would only be traced in the difference in brand of the television sets, or in the level of elaborateness of the images. At the same time the two works differ significantly if we consider Halász’s work from a geographically and culturally defined local point of view. This work of Halász’s can be interpreted in a specific Central-Eastern European context much rather with the concepts of arte povera, the assambladge and the bricolage than with Paik’s media art tools and the set of concepts of the contemporary American media culture and media criticism. The distance between the works of Paik and Halász - although the photos may correspond to each other almost entirely – does not exist only through the comparison of the oeuvre of the two artists. It is the difference in cultural, in this case in the medial experience along which the divergent visual models are created that distinguishes these two, seemingly identical artworks. By that time Paik was dealing in far greater depths with the potentialities provided by the video and television: he had been using the Sony Portapak first generation video camera since 1965, in 1969 they make their first own video-synthesizer with electrical engineer Shuya Abe, and the Candle TV is just one of Paik’s many video installations and video sculptures. In contrast, as Lorand Hegyi remarks, the television may be interpreted as a pseudo-phenomenon at Halász, as a kind of shortage-filling in art, a special Eastern European manifestation of the arte-povera (Hegyi 1990, 41). After all, the cultural political restrictedness, and the resulting technical "poverty" are quite obvious and are the outcome of the lack of high-tech and mass media tools. Halász can only involve this medium on a conceptual level into his creative set of tools, and he is able to construct his own medial system of codes only by a specific, reflective way. Simultaneously, Paik was an active creator of the American and Western European intellectual and scientific discourse on media. His 1967 work entitled McLuhan Caged[3]  that shows the American media theorist’s video footage distorted by magnet illustrates well the different levels of reflection on which the two artists’ media concept and medial competence diverge. In 1967 Paik – together with artists Allan Kaprow, Otto Pien, James Seawright, Thomas Tadlock and Aldo Tambellini – attempted to launch an autonomous video art channel at the request of WGBH-TV in Boston with the name The Medium is the Medium[4]. These works explored the possibilities of the genre of the video both from stylistic and substantive respects. Paik's art – similarly to McLuhan's theoretical orientation, who, by the way, was an enthusiastic devotee of the flux art - dealt with the problem of television, and its role in the world.
By contrast, in Hungary, it was Gábor Bódy among the first to employ video in artistic context in 1973, when he set up two closed-circuit installations to study the phenomenon known as feedback. This experiment among others can be seen in his work entitled Four Bagatelles (1975)[5].  Bódy considered the video and the interoperability among technical image recording media as a unique cinematographic enterprise that he perceived as an extension and liberation of the language – inherent in an open communication system – of photography, avant-garde film, television and video.  He emphasizes these media’s dual function as creative instrument and diffusion device, that is, he regards these media – and primarily the video – as the attraction of expressions barely obstructed by freedom of thought, games and circumstances (Bódy 1982).
Paik preceded these experiments with more than a decade and he exceeds by far the possibilities of both Gábor Bódy and all the other Hungarian artists who showed any affinity towards the video, including Halász, in both access to technical device and in institutional integrity. It was only in 1978 during his study trip in Amsterdam that Halász had the opportunity to directly try out, and use for artistic purposes the video technology[6]. Then were created ​​his first video-performances, the Transition - A Native American in Amsterdam[7] consisting of the seven independent sequences during which he repeats on one hand the earlier Private Broadcast and Pseudo video photo-performances, and, on the other hand the stamped images, his new painting procedure are introduced, that are to be elaborated during the eighties. These works of Halász are not followed by a systematic analyzing-creative work regarding the video; his use of technique is confined to a few later performances, for example the documentation of the performance entitled Going, going and staying[8] in the Miskolc Gallery in 1979. It is obvious, that behind the two photographs of Paik and Halász we can identify a totally different artistic canon, a fundamentally different socio-cultural context, medial competence and experience.
Yet how can this dissimilarity, that is, the difference between the two "TV with candles" pictures, and more broadly the discrepancy between the Western and the –Central-Eastern European neo-avantgarde trends made tangible? Along which different hermeneutical procedures, methods, and methodologies can the two grounds of art be divided? How does a "geographical environment", a "topographical entity", a "spatial experience" define the status and the identity of a work of art?


Central European neo-avantgarde: the problem of spatiality


"Spatiality" provided new types of viewpoints for cultural studies in the analysis from a social perspective of identity constructs (nationalism, tourism), of the "loci" (changing spatial and temporal experiences) and of the processes of globalization (neo-colonialism, Americanization) (Arias-Barney 2009; Döring-Thielmann 2009). In the eighties, the evolving spatial turn in the social and cultural science discourse did not only help make more tangible the rearrangement of the structuredness of the geographical environment but it also placed the restructuring of the various social subsystems in a different context. The ideas that were developed along concepts such as the ‘global village’ metaphor (McLuhan 2001) in the sixties and seventies, or the space of flows concept formed in the eighties and the nineties of the global society (Castells, 2005) delimited new spatial and temporal experiences and knowledge types. This new topography in fact defines the space of social communication where the various, mainly mediated interactions construct a new type of mediated experience and knowledge.
In some art history works in the last two decades there were put forward those suggestions that emphasize the divergent characteristics of the Central-Eastern European avant-garde and neo-avantgarde when compared to the American and Western European art movements: the different conceptual and socio-cultural contexts of the interpretation of the art works. Piotr Pitrowski’s work In the Shadow of Yalta can be seen as the most comprehensive study of the art history works that deal with the (Eastern) Central European characteristic features (Piotrowski 2009a). Piotrowski tries to explain the formation of the Central Europeanism with unique identity strategies. Among these he displays the political and social searches of solutions for new self-images instead of the socialist past, the current affairs strategies of the adherence to the European Union, as well as the nostalgic, multi-ethnic and multi-cultural image of the Habsburg Empire. Piotrowski takes into account as a specific Central European study the intentions and events that constructed the region, and he aspires to discover their historical motives; during the contextualization of the avant-garde endeavours he is confronted with the multi-pole character of the avant-garde that was thought of as universal (Piotrowski 2009a, 23–24).
I attempt to display the activity of the workshop and the created works of art in this spatial-locality sphere of concepts; this idea is flexible enough to allow me to place my subject of study in this – from the point of view of social sciences – relatively undefined setting, and to be able to do the examination along various methods. The concept of locality is difficult to be interpreted without the consequences of the post-modern affecting the different spheres of society and culture. The local narratives and the tradition turning reflexive, as appearing in opposition to the requirement of universality of modernity created situations by the sixties in which the everyday and self-reflective practices related to the place and the components of local identity had become more valuable. One of the emphatic statements of the dissertation is that the neo-avantgard took a prominent role in the loss of illusion of modernity and in turning against its program. Moreover, I argue that the neo-avantgarde – and here I think primarily of the so-called second-generation tendencies in Pécs – may more likely be classified as belonging to the post-modern trends, and also, post-modern elements can be found in the activities of the Pécs Workshop. This phenomenon – as a transition to be seized at the boundary of the stylistic periods that fall in the foreground of this study – can be identified in the shifting or newly emerging art forms and art types. The crisis of art after World War II was not only indicated by the formal and ideological style inclusions and the politically and ideologically crystallized art trends in the totalitarian societies; the returning "neo-trends" (expressionism, constructivism) after the war show how fine arts are compelled to reach back and reinterpret pre-war principles and practices. Neo-constructivism played an emphatic role in this conceptual and methodological self-revision and self-building process; the "renaissance" of the constructivist endeavours of the twenties and thirties unravelled in the sixties, and many local art discourses were built around this form of expression within the geographical-cultural-political entity of Central-Eastern Europe.
The importance of these neo-constructivist efforts in this respect in relation to the Pécs Workshop may not be overstated. The artistic attitude of the members was not defined on the long-run only by the structural analysis approach and the constructivist guiding principles of visualization and image creation. It was exactly this language of representation through which the members of the workshop could legitimately express themselves, and join the then current domestic and international neo-avantgarde art communication. In relation to this can we account for the venues, people, art colonies, exhibitions and other events that drew the scope of activities and the frame of reference of the activity of the Pécs Workshop.

 

The land art works of the Pécs Workshop: geometrical forms in rural and urban environment

We may meet with at least the same degree of divergence while comparing the land art activities of Central Europe versus Western Europe and America, as expressive we would find the differences in relation to the interpretations of Károly Halász and Nam June Paik's use of media in the introductory example (‘candle-TV’ installations).
Neither in the case of Pécs Workshop can we speak of land art in the same sense as it appeared in the Western European and primarily in the American art. These distinctions do not only derive from the difference in scale, dimensions, and the occasional grandiosity of the American works; although, it should be also added that the feasibility of some project and plans was limited precisely by the different socio-political situation. The attainable project works within the American circumstances – such as Michael Heizer’s work from 1969 entitled Double Negative[9], for the execution of which more than two hundred thousand tons of sandstone were moved for artistic purposes – seem hardly feasible in the Hungary of the sixties and seventies. Due to this limitation the significant part of Hungarian, and Central and Eastern European land art project works emerged "only" on the level of visual designs and concepts.
It is necessary to deal with the urban environment also for the reason that we see a number of works at the Pécs Workshop that can be interpreted as "urban land art". The efforts occurring on the Western European scene consider the city[10] not merely as a specific setting formation but also as the scenery of the organization of society, where reorganization is only possible through visualization. We can talk about visual constructs which much rather belong with those intellectual trends – dealing with urban space and the urban organization – to be connected to the names of Kevin Lynch, Guy Debord, or Simon Sadler[11] among others, and so it happens that they belong to a lesser degree to the visual representation program of either László Moholy-Nagy, or from our perspective more emphatic Ferenc Lantos.
We can understand the other important difference between the Western European/ American vs. Central European/Pécs land art aspirations if try to examine the reference range of the works beyond questions of semiotics also from the perspectives of social and moral philosophy. Intervention in nature is a modernist view rooted in the Cartesian anthropocentric perception of the world which is materialized in the rule of man over nature. The interventions of gigantic character – for example Michael Heizer’s work Double Negative – as landscape wounds and metamorphoses turned into art, are more likely to be considered at the first glace the definitive formulations of a modernist authoritarian position rather than a critique of this modernist approach. But this radicalism may as well be interpreted as an exclamation mark kind of a gesture, which can be considered an early, less sophisticated articulation of ecological sensibility. The ecological way of thinking – not only in the social sciences – may be clearly considered a post-modern tendency. Moreover, it means such a critique on modernity which is characterized by reflexivity instead of breaking with tradition and situational truths instead of absolute truth validity. Due to the emptying of the social utopias and the loss of universal validity of the great narratives[12] the awakening and appearance of those social movements occurs among which ecology may be considered one of the defining intellectual trend of the sixties. The normative ideological and ethical system emerging in this intellectual environment formulates specific ideals for action and society. Ecology as a philosophical trend basically articulates new conditions in the man/society and culture/civilization vs. nature relationship (Ferry 1994, Schumacher 1991; Lovelock 2010). However, these philosophical currents reached Hungary and the post-Soviet region with considerable delay only in the eighties, when the ecological thinking, as an intellectual trend, became conceptually and methodologically tangible and reflected upon. (Szabo 1989).
With reference to the above mentioned the Pécs Workshop stood much closer to the ecological attitude that may be expressed in contemplation rather than intervention and not "merely" the respect towards nature – as opposed to the land art projects operating with the radicalism of intervention, causing landscape wounds. This means at the same time a fundamentally different attitude in cognition too, since cognition in modernity shifted from being the way to understand reality into being the tool for domination over nature. This new way of thinking brings with itself also the integrating vision and a kind of holistic approach besides/instead of the analytic backtracking of the phenomena.

The neo-avantgarde use of media


Another set of issues to be addressed is the use of media in photography and photo-based works of art - and slightly expanding the question – of the neo-avantgarde; this can be unfolded from the media-oriented aspect of the avant-garde expansion. The Hungarian neo-avantgarde expansion designates two overlapping areas: a critique of the system sometimes to be considered radical, sometimes more acceptable (here it is worth thinking about the relevant works of Miklós Erdély, Gyula Pauer, Endre Tót, Sándor Pinczehelyi and Tamás Szentjóby among others). In this context we may speak about a type of work of art that is responsive to the socio-cultural situation and is aiming for the eradication of the boundary between the aesthetic sphere and reality, and, in another respect, there is a medium-oriented expansion to be mentioned.
In the avant-garde tradition the field of concepts of the media-oriented expansion appears as a feature of the neo-avantgarde alongside the social expansion. This means a kind of extended concept of image and medium, where the artist on the one hand involves a variety of tools in the broadest sense for one’s imaging repertoire; on the other hand (and this is the dematerializing process) the mediatization occurs also on conceptual level: that is, the artistic idea, design, or the concept itself appears as an autonomous form of art. And, although the so-called dematerialized conceptual art works are less typical of the activity of the Pécs Workshop, conceptualism, in this sense, is the substance of neo-avantgarde artefacts. As László Beke draws the attention as early as in 1972, the use of the photo was promoted by the spreading of trends such as action art, happening, the project art, land art and conceptual art. Besides the photo’s documenting and reality depicting purpose, thus were called to life new types of functions – magical, metaphorical, and reproductive ones (Beke 1972a, 8–9). Lóránd Hegyi defines this bipolar expansion on one hand as an anti-artistic phenomenon, and on the other hand, "as a creation of the synthesis of the arts". "Anti-art attempts to create a new cultural situation by the criticism and destruction of the existing cultural values." (Hegyi 1986, 122)
The Pécs Workshop makes palpable a very specific class of phenomenon both in terms of art technology and media use. On one side, it renders easily perceptible the theory which was displayed by Walter Benjamin in the 1930s in the concept of the apparatus. This covers not only the given use of technology and the conveyed nature of the artwork but we are also to include the institutional formations and the institutionalized relations connected/connecting to the technical means. And in the same way this assumption is to incorporate some modes – defined by the technology and the apparatus – of the ‘representation’, the imagery-visual expressible character and the creation of reality (Benjamin 1969, 315-327).  In Vilém Flusser's view, the main characteristic of the technical image is that it is produced by apparatuses and he perceives these apparatuses as the constructions of (scientific) texts. (Flusser 1990, 13). The activity and history of the Pécs Workshop may be positioned in the hermeneutic space between these two interpretations. On the other hand, it gives the iconic impression of a unique area of phenomena of photo-based imaging, that is, of a special part of domestic neo-avantgarde photo use, which was formed in this case in a very specific geographically and culturally defined medium in the seventies in Pécs.
This is well illustrated by the workshop members’ photo performances becoming a tendency in the early seventies – for example Halász’s works Private Broadcast, 1973-74 and Pseudo video 1975[13]. These works show the artist in a empty TV frame: he is either squeezing himself into the empty TV frame in different positions, or he is sitting on top of the device with a bouquet of flowers, naked or in underwear. Halász called these works photo actions, but they are in fact photo performances. Here the artist does not create for the audience directly observing the action, but he shows his actions to us through the camera and the photograph. This series of Halász’s is remarkable because it demonstrates the change how photography became the primary medium of the conceptual and performative works in the sixties and seventies; it is also remarkable because through these works the presentation of new problem fields was made possible such as the body and the new forms of self-presentation, the montage, the cinematic perspective, various instances of media consciousness as new kinds of aesthetic-cognitive fields of concepts. Halász uses photography as a medium for such identity constructions that give an account of both his individual disposition and his medial competence and the possible functions of the photo.
This study undertook neither the complete critical adaptation nor the monographic processing of the activity of the workshop. During the presentation of the characteristic tendencies of the activity of the group it was intended to present instances of how different transitional types of works may be met in the specific verge of eras in the seventies. I also tried to show emphatic points that make visible the parallel quality of the activity of the group in the seventies with the domestic and international – including in the latter primarily the Central European – trends. From these activities and tendencies I set the focus of my investigations on the land art activity and media use of the workshop. In connection with both I wanted to emphasize the way the two areas may be presented in specific contexts of interpretation and along particular social and cultural practices, which all show the ‘uniqueness’ of the Pécs Workshop within the Eastern European entity.
I tried to point to the dissimilarity originating in individuality with the help of many areas of concepts well-known in the social sciences. The relation to nature that was made visible in the land art works was to be updatable and emphasised because of the lack of ecological discourse of the time. This typically post-modern phenomenon also reveals that the Pécs Workshop, as the representative of the second-generation neo-avantgarde in Hungary, may clearly be connected to post-modern trends. The western ecological endeavours appeared precisely in the first half of the seventies on the borderlines of social study thinking. Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975) in utopian literature, Arne Naess’ ecology-based moral philosophy and nature-centred society concept of deep ecology (1973), Ernst Schumacher’s ecology-based economics theory (1973) are only indicative milestones of that ecology-based social theoretical discourse that was developed in Hungary only in the eighties[14]. The activity of the Pécs Workshop becomes really exciting in this area due to the mode in which they express similar sets of problems – isolated from the contemporary ecological discourse – in their own way, with their own visual tools. It is a special feature of the situation that they perceived their own activities as a question of semiotics and not one of ecology.
A similar state of conceptual and material vacuum characterises the relationship of the workshop to the contemporary media and the media culture. The use of the different mediums may be primarily interpreted as a pseudo phenomenon; i.e. amid the limited technical conditions they deal with each new medium from principally cognitive-conceptual aspects. This is a typically Eastern European attitude, similar to the one that the "affordable", the photo becomes the number one medium for medial creative practice. Despite this restrictedness some opportunities arose such as in the case of Pécs Workshop the land art movies made with standard 8 films, Pinczehelyi’s video performance of 1975 in the art colony in Graz, or just in 1977 the Pécs Workshop movie recorded in the Pécs Regional Studio of the Hungarian National Television. 

Until the end of the seventies no serious possibilities occurred on the field of motion picture for the members of the workshop. It is interesting that the encounter with this form of expression essentially disrupted the unity of the group that was not unified anyway. And, although among the workshop members at Halász we encounter some sort of systematic program of the performances carried out before the public – albeit Szijártó also had performance-actions[15] – the performance as a form of expression was mainly limited to photo-performances in the workshop activities.



In my dissertation I attempt to understand along what ‘timely’ concept of art may the works of art created in the Pécs Workshop be interpreted, and along which divergent and/or similar concepts can these be connected to either western or domestic neo-avantgarde aspirations. Can an art concept, artistic practice and identity exist on the periphery if it is immanent and moves on an internal path of development, and if so, what features of it can be identified in the activity of the Pécs Workshop. Throughout the study I only tried to display emphases that were considered to be characteristic, and I strove less to give a thorough, inventory-like analysis of the activity of the workshop.

Pécs, 2013





[1] See the work in: Pinczehelyi 2004, 97; resp. Pinczehelyi 2011, 92.
[2] See the work in: Paik: Candle TV. 1975. Installation. Sohm Archive.
[3] See the work in: Paik: McLuhan Caged. 1967. Electronic Art II.
[4]The Medium is the Medium. WGBH, 1969 (27’50). Director: Fred Barzyk. Electronic Arts Intermix; http://www.eai.org/title.htm?id=1443 (2012.07.12)
[5] See the work in: Gábor Bódy: Négy bagatell, 1975. (27’40). Balázs Béla Studio.
Bódy made a presentation of the problems that are introduced here also on a semiotics conference in Tihany in 1974 with the title Végtelen tükörcső (Infinite mirror-tube), which he published later entitled Végtelen kép és tükröződés (Infinite image and reflection) (Bódy 1978, 295-299).
[6] Although they could try out the “action in front of the camera’ genre in 1977 in the Pécs Regional Studio of the Hungarian Television, it was this meeting that brought the direct use of video technology for Halász. See the work in: Pécsi Műhely film, 1977. Pinczehelyi 2004 CD.
[7] . See the work in: Karoly Halasz: An Indian in Holland. 1978 (33’23min), De Appel collection, Netherlands Media Art Institute, Amsterdam.
[8] See the work in: Pinczehelyi 2011, 157-159.
[9] See the work in: Michael Heizer: Double Negative. 1969–70, Overton, Nevada.
 [10] The use of the term public art for these works that were realized in urban medium I think to be misleading for historical reasons, so I chose Tamás Aknai’s “urban land art” term in my dissertation. (Aknai 1995, 25). On the definition of the concept of public art Franciska Zólyom’ study Nyilvánosság. A köztéri szobrászattól a társadalmi felelősségvállalásig (Publicity. From public sculpture to social responsibility) gives - among others – an excellent overview. (Zólyom 2010).
[11] Lynch - among others - examines the kinds of elements of spatial organization along which the city becomes “readable”, to be interpreted by various groups in society. What elements and modules make the main units of this "text". Lynch considered these to be a sort of reflections, while he tries to define the conceptual conditions of the city – especially the US metropolis – on visual basis: paths, edges, districts, nods and landmarks make up the emphatic elements of the city's imaginative repertoire. Lynch’s specific mapping studies, which were conducted in Los Angeles and Boston opened the way in the direction of the mental mapping, among others in the field of behaviorism, and – among other things – gave answers to issues like the types of mental mapping-images, space and symbol uses that are present in the visual consciousness of the users of space (Lynch 1960). On Guy Debord and the reception of the Situationist International see Merrifield 2005.
[12] On the post-modern dispute see also Bujalos 1993.
[13] See the work in: Pinczehelyi 2011, 130-143
[14] The first studies related to the problems of ecology in Hungary are to be connected to the name of Pál  Juhász-Nagy, whereas the interpretations of the international ecological movements belong to Máté Szabó from the mid-eighties. See also: Juhász-Nagy 1984; Szabó 1985, resp. Callenbach 1992; Drengson – Naess 2005; Schumacher 1991.
[15]See the work in: Átváltozások. 1980. Kálmán Szijártó’s performance in the Fészek Klub in Budapest. Photo-documentation (Pinczehelyi 2004, 287).