This essay appears in a new riso-printed catalog produced on occasion of Endre Tót : Gladness and Rain.

“I am glad that I could have this sentence printed.” A simple phrase and the inaugural Gladness act of Endre Tót, it speaks of the gratification of making something, however fundamental, a private joy, the realization of a single idea. The act of printing, however, also implies an exhibitionary impulse— the urge to share and show the thing that is made. The printed word takes that which is personal and internal and manifests it in a form that can be distributed and read by others, and with this added gravity, both personal and political, Tót’s phrase seems so unremarkable as to be a joke; and a dangerous one at that, considering the illegality of printing almost anything without state approval in Hungary at the time.

It is a kind of “Hello, World” or “____ was here” text, the most basic thing one can conceive of to print. It is precisely the nothingness of Tót’s statements that is revelatory, or to quote Tót himself, “Semmi sem semmi,” nothing ain’t nothing. It was this nothing-that-wasn’t-nothing that would allow Tót to become one of the most prolific and far-reaching artists of the 1970s Eastern Bloc countries, a nothing that would evade state repression, but would have a refreshing legibility to those willing to join in the artist’s gladnesses. In contrast to global conceptual art’s engagement with institutional critique and desire to circumvent the usual exhibitionary and market contexts, Tot’s subtle and humorous works are remarkable for their combination of pathos and their insightful opposition to the cultural climate of his time and place.

Born in Sümeg, Hungary in 1937, Endre Tót (born Tóth Endre) came of age in a Hungary where the tumultuous political situation led to a strict regime of censorship by the Soviet Union. As an Eastern Bloc state, Hungary had been under Soviet control since the end of World War II, though always on the periphery of its influence, feeling more affinity with Austria and Central Europe to the west than the USSR and Soviet states to the east. The Soviet presence in the country escalated following the Hungarian Revolution of October, 1956, an event which successfully negotiated the expulsion of the foreign troops. The uprising began as a student protest in Budapest, but quickly turned into a popular movement, with impromptu workers’ councils seizing control from the Soviet-backed Hungarian Working People’s Party, disbanding the State Security Police, and pledging to reinstitute free elections. The revolution took as its symbol the Hungarian flag with its Communist Rákosi coat of arms cut out of the center, leaving a circular hole in the red, white, and green horizontal tricolor. Despite its appeals to Western democracies, international support for the newly installed government failed to materialize, as the Soviet Politburo sent a large force to brutally crush the uprising in November of the same year. This grim episode left many Hungarians skeptical of professed Western support for democracy and Hungary increasingly isolated as a country, with the USSR consolidating national control over the next five years, restricting movement, gatherings, and speech.

In the early 1960s, the repressive measures ostensibly loosened, as the government allowed some degree of freedom of activity as long as it was not laudatory of the uprising of 1956 or critical of the prevailing institutions. The post-1956 government of János Kádár enacted cultural policies that permitted artistic freedom in exchange for “honest intention,” and released several prominent figures from prison to promote a spirit of compromise. ¹ As part of this easing, all artistic production in the country was classified under the rubric of the “3Ts”: támogatni, tűrni, tiltani; promote, tolerate, or ban. An artist’s ability to exhibit, teach, travel, or sell work (in state organized purchase and commission events) could be severely curtailed if their work fell too often into the banned or tolerated categories. This was particularly complex for artists who had to balance their status in state universities and arts organizations, from which they drew their livelihoods, against their need for creative freedom. Some exhibition spaces and artist organizations received state backing, but still allowed avant-garde artists to show their work, in order to keep tabs on their activities. In this “Second Public Sphere,” gray areas flourished, especially private exhibitions, readings, concerts and study groups, as they were afforded more freedom away from the public eye. ²

A challenger of the academic and artistic establishment from the beginning, Tót enrolled as a student at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts starting in 1958, but he immediately came into conflict with the orthodoxy of Socialist Realism. He soon transferred to the Mural Department of the Hungarian College of Arts and Crafts, where he studied from 1959–1965. Tót initially rose to prominence during this period as an abstract painter affiliated with the Art Informel movement, influenced by his mentor Dezső Korniss, an avant-garde artist well respected for his abstractions which drew on folk traditions to create a distinctly Hungarian form of modernism. Tót’s initial success as a painter brought him into contact with other artists who were interested in promoting an internationally relevant arts culture, as a parallel alternative to the prevailing state approved modes. One key manifestation of this was the Iparterv I and II exhibitions of 1968 and ‘69, curated by Péter Sinkovits, which described its program as gathering “… young artists [who] have attempted to orient themselves in the present state of the international art world and keep pace with the most progressive ambitions of the avant-garde.”³ Accompanied by illegally printed catalogs, and subject to repeated interference by state censors, the Iparterv shows boasted a checklist of Hungarian artists who would gain international recognition in the coming years. Around the same time, artist György Galántai inaugurated a series of under-the-radar exhibitions and performances at his Chapel Studio in Balatonboglár (1970–73), which became a meeting place for parallel artistic activity. The Chapel Studio served as a node for sharing information and ideas between East and West, often transmitted by mail, as well as an important source of documentation for the tolerated and banned artistic activity of those years. Much of this material would later become the archive of Budapest’s Artpool Art Research Center.

The beginning of the 1970s marked a profound shift for Tót. Declaring himself to be “Fed Up With Painting,” he denounced the medium for what he termed his “Zero Tendency,” publishing his artists’ book My Unpainted Canvases (1971) as a memorial to all the canvases he would no longer be painting. This conceptual turn ushered in a prolific phase in Tót’s career, as his work moved away from gestural abstraction and focused on books, documents and postcards, echoes of the bureaucratic society in which he lived. Through the humble medium of mail art, Tót realized his ambition of becoming an internationally-known artist, and his voluminous output reached international mail art and Fluxus networks through the post, one of the only avenues of contact with the outside world available to him. He dispatched frequent enigmatic “0” letters, meant to befuddle the censors’ ever watchful eyes, to a diverse cast of recipients, including Yoko Ono, Ray Johnson, Dick Higgins, Niels Lomholt, John Armleder and Ken Friedman (as well as Friedman’s dog Eleanor).

Tót’s distinctive graphic language and absurdist sense of humor attracted a cult following worldwide, and gradually, his work began to materialize outside of Hungary, first at the VII Biennale de Paris (1971), then David Mayor’s traveling Fluxshoe (1972–73) exhibition in England. In the United States, Tót’s mail art activity led to his inclusion in Young Hungarian Artists (1972) at Fluxus West director Ken Friedman’s de Benneville Pines, CA exhibition space. A 1975 solo exhibition at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem followed, for which he packed all works for the show in a single suitcase and traveled to Belgrade in order to mail them to the museum. Much of the exhibition-related activity in these years was facilitated by contact through mail art lists, including NET (1971), a hand-typed manifesto and list of contacts assembled by Polish artists Jarosław Kozłowski and Andrzej Kostołowski to promote East/West exchange, and the VII Biennale de Paris catalog, which included mailing addresses for many of the participants. Tót diligently worked these networks, which led to other important opportunities outside of Hungary, as in 1976 when friend and correspondent John Armleder invited him to Geneva for six months as artist-in residence at his Galerie Ecart. During his stay, Tót would realize his first public TOTalJoys street actions, a prohibitively dangerous activity under Hungary’s restrictions.

In 1978, Tót returned to the West via the DAAD Artist-in-Berlin residency. Upon traveling to Berlin, he was barred from returning to Hungary for five years, and subsequently decided to emigrate to Cologne. His newfound freedom allowed him to expand his street demonstrations, assembling large crowds with placards and banners emblazoned with zeros or phrases such as “WE ARE GLAD IF WE CAN DEMONSTRATE.” These absurdist gestures, balanced between sincerity and sarcasm, contrast Tót’s experience of repression with the often blasé attitude toward freedom of speech found in the West. Regarding the distinct responses to his work in Hungary versus Germany, Tót would say:

“When I lived in a dictatorial regime in the early 70s, the street actions were born in my mind. If someone had asked me why I didn’t realize these ideas I would have answered, I was afraid. Fear saved me from becoming a hero. Later there was no reason to be afraid, so I realized these actions in the streets to tell the people something, but they went away without a word. Their impassivity saved me from becoming a hero.”⁴

In other venues Tót’s work received an enthusiastic response, with several solo presentations around Europe and inclusion in Artists Space’s Young Fluxus (1982) exhibition, curated by Ken Friedman and Peter Frank, which brought him on a legendary journey to New York for the opening. The late 1980s signaled Tót’s return to painting, with a series of hard-edged abstractions entitled Layout Paintings and another called Absent Pictures, a nod to his earlier “Blackout” interventions into art history as well as his unpainted canvases. As with his previous work, these Absent paintings derive their power from a distinctive set of conceptual Zero Tendency strategies that he first developed in the 1970s, and would sustain him throughout his career—his Gladnesses (“I am glad if…”), Zeros, and Rain (repeatedly typed slashes).

The foundational strategy of Tót’s conceptual oeuvre is this statement “I am glad if…”, first found in a 1971 postcard reading, as noted above, “I am glad that I could have this sentence printed,” and then in his early series of photo and video performances, Joys. In Joys, the artist proclaims his gladness at enacting the mundane or absurd—“I am glad if I can take one step,” or “I am glad if I can stare at a wall.” In the context of 1970s Hungary, these Joys were subtly subversive—when Tót’s first Joys video performances were screened in the presence of a state censor, the film was confiscated and destroyed for its tongue-in-cheek gladness. In other instances, his unique blend of sincerity and mockery is more pronounced, as in his “I am glad if I can read Lenin,” a text which accompanies a photograph of Tót sitting in a chair, reading a book of Lenin’s writings so closely that it obscures his own face.

It is important to recognize the role of photography as not so much creating a photo-object, but as documenting an action which could not be performed in a public setting due to strict censorship laws. While Tót conceptualized and composed the photographs, he worked with a professional photographer, János Gulyás, to realize the technical camera work. In her essay on Tót’s Very Special Gladness series, art historian Orsolya Hegedüs pinpoints this as a distinct Eastern European genre of conceptual art, the “photo performance” as theorized by Miško Šuvaković. This use of photography has something in common with his peers in the West such as Ed Ruscha and Gilbert & George, putting an emphasis on documentation and the perceived neutrality of the camera-eye versus the aesthetic qualities of photographic artistry. ⁵

A second, less performance-centric sub-series of Gladnesses depicts Tót as doubled, such as I am glad if we can look at each other (1971). Art historian Klara Kemp-Welch suggests that these photographs represent the “…self having become subordinate to surface. Both selves are surface.” In the flattening that happens (both figuratively and literally in Tót’s works on paper) he assumes what Thomas Strauss, his collaborator of the late 70s, called his “laughing mask,” a logofied visage of permanent mirth regardless of circumstance. ⁶

Tót’s international ambitions are clear in his use of English for his earliest Joys, and in fact these works would see wide circulation through features in Flash Art and the Belgian art magazine +-0 by the mid 70s. Gladness frequently appears in combination with Tót’s other motifs, “I am glad if I can type zeros” or “I am glad if I can type rains,” providing a raison d'être for their obsessive repetitions.

The Zero in Tót’s work is both counterpart and foil to Gladness, a kind of happy nihilism that pervades Tót’s work of the 70s and seems heir to the disillusionment of 1956’s failed uprising. In a characteristic doubling of Tót, it is a cypher in both senses, the numerical and the cryptographic. It represents nothing, but also serves as a coded language; legible to the neo-Dadaist tendencies of the Fluxus and mail art communities, but opaque and nonsensical to the repressive bureaucracy, to which it is legible only as document, not as artwork. Tót’s zeros take on a variety of forms, often repetitiously typewritten on pages or postcards, other times stamped or printed, and still other times, occupying his demonstration banners and placards, strung into nothing sentences such as “0000 000 00. 00000-0000 000: 000000!”

This compulsive zero writing is reminiscent of the “zero stroke,” a disorder diagnosed in 1920s Weimar, Germany, as astronomical inflation compelled patients to write endless lines of zeros. Tót’s zeros seem induced by a similar strain of absurdity in politics—the zero symbolizing isolation, voicelessness and the extreme caution of expression under a repressive system.

Along with his own face, the zero would become his totem, the sign of his self-proclaimed Zero Tendency, by which he was recognized in the mail art community, as his ubiquitous Zeropost stamps would attest. Tót’s zero lives as a signifier alongside the great conceptual artist logos of the period, such as Joseph Beuys’ cross, Július Koller’s question mark, Ray Johnson’s bunny, or George Maciunas’ Fluxus Aztec. Its iconic nature inspired tributes as far away as San Francisco, where Carl E. Loeffler and Bill “Picasso” Gaglione recorded their own zero sound poem Homage to Endre Tót in 1977. Ken Friedman argues that Tót’s importance lies in giving “a discrete and particular voice to the emptiness of the void,” ⁷ a practice in the lineage of Arabic and Indic conceptions of the zero as a key to transcendence.  ⁸ At the very least the zero is the symbol of a universal language, understood across cultures where little else would be.

The third and most enigmatic of Tót’s strategies is rain, the repeated typing of the “/” character, often with a built-in duality (“my rain, your rain”), or a distinct character based on the image it overlays or the way the slash symbol is formatted (“inside rain,” ”isolated rain”). The Rain works’ carefully arranged typings are a time-consuming, rhythmic activity that, with their attendant clacking keys, is the sonic equivalent of a rain shower. In Tót’s world, anything can be subjected to rain, from Budapest’s Heroes’ Square (a frequent victim of Tót’s downpours, and a loaded site in Hungary’s national identity), to world tourist locations and even photographs of domestic interiors. They bear a certain resemblance to his zeros, which sometimes also appear as rain—they can be perceived as zeros collapsed or on their sides, or as even further negations of zero, agents of division.

The Rains often emphasize Tót’s feelings of isolation from the goings-on of the Western art world. It is hard to determine whether having rain visited upon you is a blessing or a curse—and most probably, it is neither—they are only typed because it makes him glad. Rain may simply be a way of treating and distinguishing differences of time and space, in Geneva it is raining in a certain way, in New York another way, and in Budapest, the sky may be totally clear. This conception of rain echoes Tót’s photographic doublings, works that convey the kind of doublespeak artists had to negotiate in order to secure a minimum of creative freedom. In duplicating himself, Tót has an imagined audience, whereas in his Rains, he imagines other climes where his audience may exist. One of Tót’s postcards expresses this most poignantly, “I write because you are there and I am here.”

Tót’s visual strategies create distinctly memorable works, but much of his output remains unclassifiable as typical art objects for display in an exhibition context. Within mail art circles it was acknowledged that these ephemeral gestures derive their primary value in the act of networking, communicating, and performing—likewise, his photo performances were placeholders for want of more public acts. A piece of mail art reaches its full potential only in the act of receipt and opening, and diminishes in power after that; a performed action that rapidly fades to only a memory of its kinetics. Further exhibition of these works is at a diminished capacity, they are primarily prosthetics for the act of communicating, of sending and receiving. However, over the intervening years they begin to accrue peculiar new power as objects that represent these historically significant experimental art strategies of the 60s and 70s and also as examples of the earliest peer to peer networks; networks that have become part of everyday life. The international resonance of Tót’s Zero Tendency is proof positive of this, his missives formulated to mean nothing to the casual observer, provoked a response that would daily flood his mailbox with international attention, largely from correspondents who had little direct experience with the repressive circumstances which necessitated his cyphers. With this in mind, Tót’s Gladnesses and Rains, perhaps have another potential reading—one of empathy, of bearing the weight of the circumstances of another who may be in the storm, while you are in the sun.

Footnotes
1. Cristina Cuevas-Wolf, “The 3Ts: The Modernist Puzzle in Cold War Hungary” Promote Tolerate Ban: Art and Culture in Cold War Hungary, Cristina Cuevas-Wolf and Isotta Poggi (eds.) (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2018)
2. K. Balázs (personal communication, August 14, 2021)
3. Péter Sinkovits, Introduction of the publication Document 69–70 (1970), tranzit.org http://tranzit.org/exhibitionarchive/texts/document-69-70/
4. Alfred M. Fischer, “Absent and Still Present” Endre Tót: Who’s Afraid of Nothing, Absent Pictures, Alfred M. Fischer (ed.) (Cologne: Museum Ludwig, 1999)
5. Orsolya Hegedüs, “Conceptual Actionism: Addendum to the interpretations of the series Very Special Gladnesses by Endre Tót.”Tót Endre: Very Special Gladnesses (Budapest: Robert Capa Nonprofit Ltd., 2017)
6. Klara Kemp-Welch, “Affirmation and Irony in Endre Tót’s Joys Works of the 1970s.” In Art History & Criticism 3, Art and Politics: CaseStudies from Eastern Europe, Liniara Dovydaityte (ed.), Kaunas (Lithuania: Vytautas Magnus University, 2007)
7. Ken Friedman, “Endre Tót: Silence at the Turning Point” Endre Tót: Who’s Afraid of Nothing, Absent Pictures, Alfred M. Fisched (ed.) (Cologne: Museum Ludwig, 1999)
8. Ken Friedman, “Young Fluxus: Some Definitions.” Young Fluxus, Ken Friedman and Peter Frank with Elizabeth Brown (eds.) (New York: Artists Space, 1982)