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)