Abstract
Hungary’s history was as troubled as Eric Hobsbawm stated Europe’s past in Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991. Dictatorships followed each another right from the end of WWI until the system change in 1989, but among all the authoritarian regimes socialism existed longest. After the thawing atmosphere of the second half in the 1960s, critical tone was articulated in the Neo-Avant-Garde’s “second public sphere”. A form of criticism against any kind of hierar- chical repression arose from performative and intermedial artworks and still didn’t disappear even in postmodern times long after the fall of the wall. The paper will focus on three-dimension of hierarchical bondage: being chained through the other, trough the authorities and through history. All artists’ works (that of El Kazovszkij, Tamás St. Auby and Little Warsaw) are meant to show inner relations between the body, its representation, authoritarian practice of control respectively performance and intermedia art.
Highlights
The expression of “hierarchy” in the title of my talk doesn’t necessarily refer to the communist dictatorship as such, but to any kind of order that the chosen artists relate their work to. To put it another way: the examples I will talk about represent no rebellion against hierarchy, but an indirect criticism on social, political, cultural and even deeply personal issues
The “second public sphere” is the emblematic place, where one can break through the publicity of the official regime, where autonomous spaces appear or are protected, where methods of a counterculture are developed to make a difference in opinion visible (Behrends, 2010)
Experimental art projects after the system turn often cross the border of the historically connoted “second public sphere”: they occupy public spaces, which haven’t been yet recovered from official representational mechanism and they are in a way connected to Hannah Arendt’s “space of appearance”, because they focus on social, political and—as mentioned before—personal criticism
Summary
The expression of “hierarchy” in the title of my talk doesn’t necessarily refer to the communist dictatorship as such, but to any kind of order that the chosen artists relate their work to. The strategy of reflection in the experimental art scene (even beyond the symbolic turn of 1989) could possibly be equated with the understanding of a “second public sphere” or “parallel culture”.
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