Information Crossings. On the Case of The Fighting City, in Afterall, Issue 31, Autumn-Winter 2012.

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!e material exhibited had been in the criminal record o"ce since noon; at #pm those who gathered despite disturbing news could only listen to the inauguration speeches altered to fit the new circumstances. Instead of pictures and documents about ’#$, it was only words — easy to erase from the memory — that remained, and the occasion. — Tamás Molnár/Inconnu 2

Published in the samizdat journal Hírmondó, these words reported the ‘opening within empty walls’ of the exhibition ‘A harcoló város’ (‘!e Fighting City’) in a private apartment in Budapest, on "# January $%#&. Organised by the artists’ group Inconnu, it was to display Hungarian and international artists’ tributes to the $%'( Revolution, rea)rming the persistence of the uprising’s spirit not only for its veterans, but also for a younger generation who linked the legacy to present demands addressed to the lengthy regime of socialist leader János Kádár.3 Scheduled for "* October $%#(, for the thirtieth anniversary of the Revolution’s beginning, the exhibition had to be postponed until January because of police harassment of its organisers as well as attempts at sabotage. !e Hungarian authorities had in fact been aware of the project since the publication of its first call for participation in the Hungarian independent press and the Western media in the summer of $%#(; from then on, Inconnu’s activities were increasingly surveilled and the process of planning ‘!e Fighting City’ was conscientiously reported to the national state security

by several agents, some of them close acquaintances of group members. O)cial attempts to dissuade Inconnu from pursuing its goal were unsuccessful, and a+er half a year of collecting material and elaborating the exhibition’s catalogue, the date and location for ‘!e Fighting City’ were finally fixed: on "# January $%#&, at the private domicile of Inconnu member ,bor Philipp. In order to prevent any

intervention from the authorities, this information was very quickly communicated to a restricted circle of persons. !e artworks were scheduled to remain on view for two hours, before being auctioned to benefit the Szegényeket Támogató Alapítvány (SZETA, Foundation to Help the Poor), an illegal organisation struggling against the increasing poverty in Hungary, a taboo issue under Kádár’s regime. Despite Inconnu’s e-orts to keep the exhibition secret, Philipp’s apartment was searched by the police a few hours before the opening. !e exhibited pieces were declared illegal artefacts with hostile purposes and

Information Crossings: On the Case of Inconnu’s ‘"e Fighting City’1

— Juliane Debeusscher

Juliane Debeusscher looks at the exhibition ‘"e Fighting City’, cancelled by the authorities in Budapest in #$%&, to reveal how Hungarian artists and dissidents took advantage of information channels to denounce state censorship.

‘WM 26’ [author’s alias], Szabadnép, 1987, object, detail. From police records of images destined for the catalogue of ‘The Fighting City’. Courtesy the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security (ÁBTL), Budapest

1 The research presented in this essay was realised thanks to a grant from the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP) of the French Ministry of Culture in 2010. It is based on interviews and archival material kept at the OSA Archivum (Open Society Archives), the Artpool Art Research Centre and the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security (ÁBTL), all in Budapest. The author is indebted to the archivists of the three organisations, who assisted her in the research, as well as to Péter Bokros for agreeing to revisit his experience as a member of Inconnu.2 Tamás Molnár/Inconnu, ‘Harcoló város. Megnyitó üres falak között’, Hírmondó [samizdat journal published by ABC Press, Budapest], no.23, January—February 1987. Quoted from the English version of the article, ‘The Fighting City: An Opening Within Empty Walls’, in Demsky Gábor, Gadó György and K!szeg Ferenc (ed.), Roundtable: Digest of the Independent Hungarian Press, vol.1, no.1 and 2, 1987, pp.29—31. 3 Beginning on 23 October 1956, the uprising aimed at reintroducing political pluralism in the context of a Communist one-party system. Violently broken up by the Soviet troops intervening on 4 November 1956, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was, along with the Prague Spring of 1968, a symbol of resistance against Soviet oppression supported by national puppet governments and a constant reference for Eastern European dissident movements.

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confiscated, along with other items related to Inconnu’s clandestine publishing activities (such as printing machines and leaflets). Legal proceedings were brought against Philipp, who was also fined for being in possession of unauthorised material. Despite the seizure of the entire exhibition, a small group of artists and Hungarian dissidents gathered at Philipp’s house to celebrate the event. Speeches were delivered by Tamás Molnár and Róbert Pálinkás, two members of Inconnu; Sándor Radnóti, an art critic and member of the opposition; and Ottília Solt, founder of the SZETA. Pointing at the repression instituted by the regime as well as its particular bureaucratic manifestations, Inconnu posted the o)cial orders of seizure on the walls, and accompanied them with a short video realised during the event’s planning, showing the confiscated works.4

A Collection of Anti-Communist and Empathetic Views !e .$ works were contributions from Hungarian and foreign artists (from the US, the Netherlands, Great Britain and Yugoslavia): paintings, drawings, graphic works, objects, ceramics, photographs and a short story. !ey represented identifiable motifs that related to the events of $%'(, including soldiers, tanks, prone or dead bodies and references to particular episodes, like the Hungarian Writers’ Union’s desperate call to the international intelligentsia for help, in a painting sent by the artist Jessica Douglas from London. !e Soviet intervention and Hungary’s situation of captivity were evoked by images of mousetraps, spiderwebs and immobilised objects or bodies. !e word ‘szabad’ (‘liberty’) appeared behind a grid, and an anonymous author titled the representation of a barbed-wire triangle S%ocialista Demokrácia . Another anonymous drawing represented a walled-up Hungary, with a ‘'(’ sign hidden behind bricks and starry arrows converging on it. A stitched-up mouth, unable to speak, was among Inconnu’s works. Its form recalled the shape of Hungary, as did the wheels of a tank in another drawing. !e group also imagined a commemorative plaque renaming squares and streets of Budapest a+er Imre Nagy and other important protagonists of $%'(. Ágnes Háy’s line drawings figured raised hands, crowds holding weapons or the Hungarian flag with a hole through it in place of the symbol of the People’s Republic; they showed people gathering around the monument of the poet Sándor Petofi, or near the head of a Stalin statue lying on the ground. In general, local artists adopted as symbols flags, the Hungarian colours and the tricolour rosette — recalling the kingdom of Hungary, which preceded the institution of the People’s Republic. !e events of $%'( had indeed been a strong amplifier of nationalist feelings and demands for recognition of the state’s sovereignty. Hungarian artists also relied on a visual imaginary incorporating historical references such as the national revolution of $#.# and its heroes, like Petofi.5 In contrast, the international participants focused their attention on the Soviet military intervention and the particular moment of the uprising’s crushing, reflecting a perception of the event filtered by Western mass media. Some works and letters expressed a deep empathy with the Hungarian people. O-ering his short novel for publication and translation, Stephen O’Harrow, a professor at the University of Hawaii, wrote some accompanying notes: ‘I send it along in the spirit of your commemoration activities and in the hope it will serve to let the Hungarian friends past and present know that we remember them.’ Similarly, New York artist Norman Rubington described the drawing he sent as ‘a direct emotional record of this tragedy’ that reproduced his feelings while reading a notice of the Revolution’s defeat in a Paris newspaper. !e empathetic feelings expressed by the international contributions probably influenced the authorities’ aggressive, and even iconoclastic, reaction to the exhibition. In fact, the collective and commemorative nature of the event partly explains the violence of the repressive answer, which went as far as the complete destruction of the artworks — unusual in the context of the $%#/s. !is destruction was brought to light in $%#%, when state functionaries finally responded to Inconnu’s repeated claims for the restitution of the pieces by admitting that they didn’t exist anymore.

4 See the Editors, ‘The Fighting City’, The New York Review of Books, 7 May 1987, available at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1987/may/07/the-fighting-city/?pagination=false (last accessed on 15 June 2012).5 This exaltation of national symbols has curious resonances in the present, if we consider that in the post-communist period, some members of Inconnu became close to the nationalist Right; rather than a dismissal of their past dissidence, this conversion should illuminate the existing connections between certain forms of anti-communism and post-communist nationalisms.

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By chance, visual traces of the material collected for the event, consisting of a series of photographs intended to illustrate the exhibition catalogue, were kept in the police’s records and are today part of the Hungarian State Security archives in Budapest. Along with a corpus of documents related to ‘!e Fighting City’, including various agents’ reports, letters and publications, they are a precious source for a partial reconstruction of the facts, in particular the authorities’ concerns about the exhibition, expressed exclusively in internal confidential communications.6 As we may infer from this summary, the case of ‘!e Fighting City’ provides many lines of exploration that address alternative cultural and political practices over the last decade of State Socialism in Hungary, and more generally in central Eastern Europe.

6 ÁBTL 4.1 A—2020, Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security, Budapest. The dossier includes the photographs and letters received by Inconnu from participating artists. The historian and archivist György Sümegi recently published a study based on documents related to ‘The Fighting City’ kept in the State Security Archives. The essay, in Hungarian, includes a selection of reports and letters, as well as reproductions of the photographs of the artworks. G. Sümegi, ‘Inconnu: A harcoló város/The Fighting City, 1986’, in György Gyarmati (ed.), Állambiztonság és rendszerváltás (The State Security and the Regime), Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2010, pp.169—210.

Inconnu, graphic work produced in the context of Budapest’s Cultural Forum, 1985, detail. Courtesy Artpool Art Research Center, Budapest

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!e event was documented and reported through various means, reflecting distinct sources of information whose production, uses and forms of transmission I woulddesignate ‘practices of information’. !e identification and analysis of such sets of operations bring to light the intricate relation between the state politics of censorship and the strategies of making public that developed out of the Hungarian alternative scene in the $%#/s. How did this antagonism mark the decade and shape the negotiations between the leadership and its opponents? How could cultural practices face these tensions and possibly resolve them? !ese questions are, in the case of ‘!e Fighting City’, connected with issues such as the legacy of $%'( and its international projection; the use of bureaucracy against the system which produced it; and, in parallel, the use of information as a force for sociopolitical change.

Between Artistic and Political ActivismFounded at the end of the $%&/s in the provincial city of Szolnok, Inconnu was initially composed of Péter Bokros, Tamás Molnár and Mihály Csécsei. !e exact moment in which the name ‘Inconnu’ was fixed is unknown, but it was most probably in the early #/s, when Bokros and Molnár moved to Budapest, a+er the group’s activities were banned by Szolnok’s local authorities on the grounds that they disturbed public order and spread unorthodox ideas and behaviours. Once established in Budapest, the group incorporated

Inconnu, ‘Inconnu Retrospective’, 1984—85, illustration from the exhibtion catalogue Retrospekt. Arteria Press, unpaginated, detail. Courtesy Artpool Art Research Center, Budapest

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Róbert Pálinkás, Philipp and Magdolna Serfozo, as well as several occasional collaborators. Inconnu frequented most of the places where uno)cial culture could be seen in the capital: the Young Artists’ Club (which tolerated progressive culture despite its a)liation with the Hungarian Young Communist League [KISZ]); the Bercsényi Kollégium, the entry hall of a students’ dormitory converted in the early #/s into a meeting place for artists; and the Psychiatric Institute of Budapest. In December $%#., Inconnu created Arteria, an umbrella structure without a permanent location, which combined the functions of independent publishing house and art gallery. Arteria not only framed Inconnu’s activities, but also hosted initiatives by other artists and activists.7 Inconnu’s multifaceted production followed two main lines. !e first explored political graphic art through leaflets, posters, stickers, badges, self-published magazines or mail art pieces.8 Like several Hungarian artists and groups, Inconnu actively participated in Mail art’s international network, a channel of experimentation and social interaction relatively preserved from o)cial pressures. !e name of the group referred to a trick used to evade obstructions to mail exchanges: swapping the sender’s and the receiver’s details on the envelope. As letters from individuals that the authorities considered suspicious were o+en sent back marked as ‘Unknown receiver’, a falsified ‘Inconnu’ (‘unknown’) stamp, reproducing the o)cial design of postal services, was applied on the receiver’s address, misleading the controllers. In this way, the letter directed to an ‘Inconnu’ was sent back to its origin, i.e. the actual receiver.9 Performance constituted the group’s second line of work. Some actions adopted sadomasochist gestures inspired by Viennese Actionism, while others focused on the expression of dissenting political views. Inconnu’s critical stance could be perceived in numerous works, such as the altered maps of Hungary exhibited in ‘Magyarország a tiéd lehet’ (‘Hungary Can Be Yours’), held at the Young Artists’ Club in $%#.. !e provocative pieces in part caused the exhibition to be censored, for they depicted a country swallowed up by the Soviet Union.10 In June $%##, Inconnu realised an intervention in ‘parcel */$’ (or ‘plot */$’) of Budapest’s cemetery. !e name ‘parcel */$’ referred to an area of the cemetery where executed bodies of partisans of the $%'( Revolution (among them the then Prime Minister Imre Nagy) had been anonymously buried. In homage to the martyrs, Inconnu erected several kopjafák, or engraved wooden pillars traditionally placed on graves. !e unauthorised, native monuments were removed by the authorities right a+er their installation.11 An openly satirical tone characterised the ‘viral’ images and slogans spread during the Cultural Forum of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) that took place in $%#' in Budapest. A stylised portrait of a Mona Lisa wearing a custom o)cer’s suit was distributed through various channels (stickers, pins, prints, illustrations on samizdat and Western magazines), mocking the hypocrisy of the Cultural Forum’s international participants, who carefully evaded the problem of censorship in Communist states and preferred the consensual version of ‘Helsinki kitsch’.12 !e expression, coined

7 An interesting case is Inconnu/Arteria’s collaboration with the SZETA. Since its foundation in 1979, among its numerous actions against poverty, the organisation invited artists to donate works for benefit auctions (as in the case of ‘The Fighting City’) and to contribute to publications like the charity anthology of graphic works Feketeben/In Black (1982). 8 Inconnu’s publications included Hard Giccs Magazin (1979), Ismeretlen Földalatti Vonal-Akcionista folyóirat (Unknown Underground Line-Actionalistic Journal, two issues published by Punknown Press, 1982—83) and Inconnu Press (seven issues published by Arteria Press, 1984—87). Arteria Press also published Inconnu’s exhibition catalogues Retrospekt (vol.1 and 2, 1984 and 1985), A harcoló város (The Fighting City, in collaboration with ABC Press, 1987) and 10 éves az Inconnu csoport (10 Years of the Inconnu Group, 1988). Part of this material is available for consultation in the Artpool Art Research Centre, Budapest (Documentation on the Inconnu Group).9 See Géza Perneczky, ‘Ungarn/Hungary’, in Kornelia von Berswordt-Wallrabe and László Beke (ed.), Mail Art: Osteuropa im Internationalen Netzwerk, Schwerin: Staatliches Museum Schwerin, 1996, pp.35—55. 10 See Artpool’s page dedicated to ‘Magyarország a tiéd lehet’ (‘Hungary Can Be Yours’): http://www.artpool.hu/Commonpress51/defaulte.html (last accessed on 15 June 2012). For an overview of the censored exhibition, including Inconnu’s contributions and its subsequent reconstitutions, see Juliane Debeusscher, ‘Interview with Artpool co-founder Julia Klaniczay’, ARTMargins online, 7 June 2011, http://www.artmargins.com/index.php/5-interviews/633-artpool-cofounder-julia- klaniczay (last accessed on 15 June 2012). 11 Reiterated six months later, in the climate of a collapsing regime, the same initiative happened without incident. Inconnu’s kopjafák were left on site and cohabited with the monument conceived by György Jovánovics, which won the official competition organised after 1989 for a martyr’s memorial. On memorial politics about 1956 during the communist and post-communist phases, including the interventions of Inconnu, see Reuben Fowkes, ‘Public Sculpture and Hungarian Revolution of 1956’, Inferno, vol.7, 2003, pp.39—53. 12 See Miklós Haraszti, ‘Helsinki Kitsch’, in Istvan B. Gereben (ed.), Defiant Voices: Hungary, 1956—1986, Center Square, PA: Alpha Publications, 1986, pp.92—94. English translation of ‘A Helsinki Giccs’, Beszél!, no.15, 1985.

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by Miklós Haraszti, ironically designated ‘a common o)cial culture of Yalta-Europe’, referring to the post-War geopolitical reorganisation of Europe by which central Eastern Europe became part of (or, depending on the point of view, handed over to) the Soviet sphere of influence. In the wake of the International Helsinki Accords, signed in $%&', Cold War diplomacy entered a new phase which was characterised, Haraszti argued, by the use of an Orwellian ‘Newspeak’ common to both parts.13 Budapest’s Cultural Forum made this fact obvious, where a majority of Western representatives remained hypocritically silent about the violation of human rights and basic freedoms occurring in Communist countries, preferring to reinforce inter-state strategic alliances. ‘Helsinki kitsch’ was, then, a scathing allusion to Western democracies’ indirect complicity with Communist dictatorships, and the disappointment it caused among opposition movements in the East. Merging avant-garde references with popular culture and political activism, Inconnu’s counter-agitprop language seriously irritated the Hungarian authorities. !ough the group considered itself firstly an artistic entity, it moved indistinctly between the artistic and political frames. Its works also illustrated political samizdat like Demokrata and Bes%élo, and were reproduced in Western magazines reporting on dissident activities, such as Index on Censorship or East European &eporter. Because of these overlapping engagements and their virulent forms of expression, Inconnu su-ered the usual treatment accorded to political opponents: constant surveillance by state security agents, harassment, police searches, severe fines and travelling restrictions. !e numerous points of contact between uno)cial culture and political activism have o+en been underappreciated in studies focusing on the last Communist period, which generally maintain the divisions among academic disciplines and their related fields of investigation.14 !e case of ‘!e Fighting City’ and the atypical figure of Inconnu might help re-situate cultural production into a broader field of social practices, forming what the sociologist Elemér Hankiss designated a ‘second society’: a dimension of social existence distinct from the sphere of o)cially recognised activities, which embraced parallel economies, oppositional politics and subcultural or alternative artistic trends, and had its proper — second — public sphere.15

Against Repressive Legality: Self-ExposureInconnu was supported by a key figure of the Hungarian democratic opposition, the ‘$%'(er’ György Krassó. Authorised for emigration to London in $%#', Krassó moved with him his Budapest-founded publishing house Magyar Október (Hungarian October), which became one of the most active émigré news agencies. In addition to its publication in the Hungarian independent press, the first announcement of ‘!e Fighting City’ was internationally distributed with his assistance.16 A small insert published in !e New York &eview of Books on $. August $%#( stated: ‘Inconnu, an independent art group, and Arteria, a samizdat publisher in Hungary, are sponsoring a fine arts competition to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the $%'( Hungarian Revolution. !e theme

13 The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe was held in Helsinki in August 1975 with the participation of 35 countries. In exchange for the recognition of national sovereignty and the inviolability of their borders, the Soviet Union and the European Communist states (except Albania) ratified the contents of the Final Act’s ‘Third Basket’ on human rights.14 Reference works on the Hungarian political opposition and its role in the process of democratisation rarely mention artistic production as a parallel vector of critical thought, or do so only superficially. See Barbara J. Falk, The Dilemmas of Dissidence in East-Central Europe: Citizen Intellectuals and Philosopher Kings, Budapest: CEU Press, 2002; Gordon H. Skilling, Samizdat and an Independent Society in Central and Eastern Europe, London: Macmillan Press, 1989; and Rudolf L. T!kés, Hungary’s Negotiated Revolution: Economic Reform, Social Change, and Political Succession, 1957—1990, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. A deeper analysis of the interaction between the Hungarian alternative art scene and other forms of activism — identifying shared spaces and social circles, conceptual references and strategies of communication — would restore some connections helpful in challenging a view of artistic production and political dissidence as self-referential and hermetic fields of practice. 15 According to Hankiss, ‘the dichotomy of a first versus a second society did not divide Hungarian society into two groups of people in the 1960s, 70s and early 80s. The first society and the second society were not two distinct groups of people; they were only two dimensions of social existence governed by two different sets of organisational principles.’ Elemér Hankiss, East European Alternatives, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, p.87. See also E. Hankiss, ‘The “Second Society”: Is There an Alternative Social Model Emerging in Contemporary Hungary?’, Social Research, vol.55, no.1—2, 1988, pp.13—42. 16 Email to the author from Péter Bokros, April 2012.

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of the competition is “!e Fighting City”.’ 17 Further details on the terms of participation followed — no restrictions in the dimensions or medium used; the works could be submitted under the artist’s real or working name, sent by mail or brought personally— as well as the mention of a ',/// forint prize (approximately £&/ at the time, or £$(' today) and the co-publication of a catalogue by ABC Press and Arteria. !e call ended with the five names and addresses of the persons in charge of collecting the material in Budapest: Péter Bokros, Tamás Molnár and Róbert Pálinkás from Inconnu; Sándor Szilágyi, co-editor of Bes%élo and organiser of the clandestine ‘Flying University’; and Jeno Nagy, publisher of ABC Press. !e public association of one’s proper name with politically oriented actions diverging from the o)cial line was still rare, even in the late $%#/s.18 Such exposure of personal information had double-edged consequences: it converted the subjects and their plans into easy targets for state censorship, but also functioned as a means of empowerment, since a)rmation and intentional visibility o-ered them public status. Any imposed silence could be noticed by local and international observers and divulged in the media, and for this reason it could visibly a-ect the regime’s legitimacy by revealing its repressive nature. ‘No censorship in Hungary’ was, in fact, a motto recurrently invoked by the leadership to defend its liberal model of state socialism. Kádár’s post-totalitarian regime based its

authority on a repressive legality which avoided physical punishment and direct confrontations with the transgressors. Social order was instead preserved through the marginalisation of critical behaviour and its exclusion from the first public sphere with the complicity of the o)cial mass media, which shaped the field of information and preserved it from counterproductive incursions. As János Sugár has recalled, ‘it was only access

to the general public and the mainstream media that was censored, not cultural production itself’.19 A central question was, then, ‘can anything be valid if no one knows about its existence?’ Hankiss’s opinion in this respect was categorical: the existence of a second society was vehemently denied by the ruling elites because they were convinced that ‘what becomes public becomes at the same time more real and gathers social and political weight’.20 !is making invisible created a prophylactic barrier, the immediate consequences of which were the inhibition and self-limitation of non-conventional expressions. Nevertheless, invisibility wasn’t an exclusive attribute of activities inscribed in the second society, as Hankiss suggested; state secrets were also a structural part of the first society, and their disclosure could seriously a-ect the government's stability. Unsurprisingly, the regime’s e-orts to keep alternative movements out of the first public sphere were proportional to its anxiety concerning their emergence.21 Aware of the weight of information practices in the exercise of power, Inconnu used media visibility with a double purpose: to ensure its immunity and to destabilise the authorities. !is attitude reflected a conception of art as an active practice, strongly connected with its political and social environment. Gabriella Ujlaki described this position clearly:

A show manifesting a foreign surge of solidarity and compassion couldn’t be tolerated, since it directly questioned the state’s version of the events as a bourgeois, anti-communist ‘counter-revolution’.

17 The Editors, ‘The Fighting City’, The New York Review of Books, 14 August 1986. 18 Among previous examples of identity disclosure is the letter signed by 34 Hungarian intellectuals in support of the imprisoned members of Chart 77 in Czechoslovakia, in 1977. Closer to Inconnu, the editors of the samizdat journal Beszél!, launched in 1981, took the decision to print their real names and contacts on every issue.19 János Sugár, ‘Schrödinger’s Cat in the Art World’, in IRWIN (ed.), East Art Map: Contemporary Art in Eastern Europe, London: Afterall Books, 2006, p.212.20 E. Hankiss, East European Alternatives, op. cit., p.92. 21 In March 1987, the contents of an ultra-confidential report released by the Politburo of the Hungarian Communist Party (dated 1 July 1986) started to circulate in independent and Western media. It revealed the authorities’ concerns about the opposition, and described the measures taken to reinforce the Party’s ideological line. Reporting the event, a journalist of Radio Free Europe mentioned the censoring of ‘The Fighting City’ as an example of the subsequent hardening of the government's line. ‘Secret Politburo Report on Opposition Published’, JR, 22 July 1987. HU OSA 300–8–47, Situation Report, Publications Department. Records of Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty Research Institute, Open Society Archives at Central European University, Budapest.

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For them the realisation of the autonomous personality … means becoming active, doing something, i.e. taking action. It is experimental art in the truest sense, not as an aesthetic category. Experimentation, which aims at pointing out to the viewers, more precisely, to the whole of society, the limits of the autonomy of the individual. !is is why the field of reality is more appropriate for artistic and social activity, since here the falsity of illusions and substitute gratifications is immediately revealed and the ‘condition humaine’ manifests itself in its own nature. 22

"e Helsinki E'ectUjlaki’s idea of the human condition didn’t rely on universality; it was rather a ‘place- and time-specific condition humaine, the state of the crippled and suppressed East European people’.23 Inconnu was committed to making this condition known and to projecting it into the sphere of international relations. Distributed during the autumn of $%#(, while still in the process of being put together, a second public announcement related to ‘!e Fighting City’ exposed the di)culties met by Inconnu and introduced a significant argument: the sponsorship of four important intellectuals. !e support of ,mothy Garton Ash, Danilo Ki0, György Konrád and Susan Sontag, all close to the cause of Eastern European dissidence or involved themselves in the movement, fuelled the play of forces between the partisans of free expression and transparency, on the one side, and a Hungarian leadership with an attitude toward circulating bodies — whether press, artworks, letters or persons — that starkly contradicted its engagements in the field of international diplomacy, on the other. !e ratification of the Helsinki Accords in August $%&' legally bound the Soviet Union and its satellites to respect fundamental human rights and freedoms. Despite the ambiguities of high diplomacy previously exposed, the Accords provided social movements in the East as well as their Western supporters with a consistent argument for pressuring their governments with demands for political pluralism and autonomy. Regarding the cultural field, the Accords marked a paradigmatic change in the international status of Eastern European art — as a constructed category — by which, as Eva Forgacs has stated, ‘art in Eastern Europe was not any more the cause of a political avant-garde — the New Le+ — but a political-cultural issue elevated to the level of international policy’.24 !is state of a-airs is particularly well illustrated by the case of ‘!e Fighting City’. If the New Le+ had, Forgacs argues, used the Soviet and Eastern European avant-gardes to reinforce its ideological line from the late $%(/s on, contributing at the same time to legitimising its trade on the Western market, then the post-Helsinki situation, amplified from the mid-$%#/s by glasnost, transferred the attention of the international public opinion toward contemporary art. Embedding Helsinki values, ‘free artistic expression became an export article’; cultural manifestations were seen through a geopolitical lens and their example could fuel speculations aboutthe fate of Soviet-type regimes, in which progressive liberalisation was failing to balance the weight of an outdated model.25 In addition to mentioning these important contacts, Inconnu’s second public announcement deplored the harassment it had su-ered since the first call for participation. !e group published a list of artworks in its possession (all sent from the US and the UK) that had been meant for the exhibition, inciting every artist who had sent a piece that wasn’t reported on the list to send an o)cial complaint to the Hungarian Embassy in his or her country, since the work had probably been confiscated at a certain point in its journey to Budapest.26 !e announcements and letters of complaint borrowed classic forms of administrative communication. State bureaucracy represented for Inconnu both a target and an appropriate self-referential means to demonstrate the articulation of administrative forms of control and repression. In its ‘New Socialist Realism Manifesto’ ($%#'), the group stated its position:

The front cover of the catalogue of ‘The Fighting City’, 1987, drawings by Ágnes Háy, detail. From police records of images destined for the catalogue. Courtesy the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security (ÁBTL), Budapest

22 Gabriella Ujlaki, Retrospekt, vol.2 (exh. cat.), Budapest: Arteria Press, 1985, unpaginated. 23 Ibid.24 Eva Forgacs, ‘How the New Left Invented East-European Art’, Centropa, vol.3, no.2, May 2003, p.101.25 Ibid.26 P. Bokros, T. Molnár, Robert Pálinkás, Sándor Szilágyi and Jenö Nagy, ‘Announcement’, The New York Review of Books, 4 December 1986, available at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1986/dec/ 04/announcement/ (last accessed on 15 June 2012).

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!e global system of state bureaucracy is our paintbrush. Corruption, crises of all values, greed for power, autocracy, poverty, alienation, legal nihilism, lack of control, these are our pigments. […] We are subjects subordinated forever. Let’s create the art of voluntary work, the art of petition, request, complaint, the art of documents and data, the art of taxes, censorship, the art of investigation and interrogation, the art of jail, the art of protest, the art of revolution, the art of funerals, in other words, the art of T O T A L I T Y, the creative art of total presence! 27

According to this programme, o)cial papers were displayed or published as ‘documents of political art’, turning the administration’s proper means and resources against it. Inconnu disclosed their letter of complaint sent on $ February $%#& to the Secretary of the Central Committee Pál Lénard. In it the group criticised the archaic system of cultural institutions permeated by Stalinist principles since the $%'/s, and, referring to the seizure of the artworks, condemned the authorities’ attitude, which ‘o-end[ed] and disturb[ed] public opinion everywhere in the world’. 28 !e inconsistency of state policies was highlighted by the assertion that ‘such brutal assaults on culture may be carried out, openly and cynically, by lawless national socialists, mad military dictatorships, hysterical totalitarian regimes — but not by the liberal institutions of a democratic constitutional state’. !e letter appeared in the Western magazine Index on Censorship under the title ‘No “Glasnost” in Hungary’, and was distributed across several media outlets, including the samizdat Hungarian press and the Hungarian outlet of Radio Free Europe. Contacted by a Western news agency, the dissident writer György Konrád, who was also one of the sponsors of the exhibition, denounced the ‘repudiation’ of the Hungarian Constitution’s assurance of freedom of expression and freedom for artists.29

27 Inconnu, ‘Karácsonyi manifesztum 3 az Uj Szocialista Realizmus’ (‘New Socialist Realism/Manifesto’), Inconnu Press [Budapest: Arteria Press], vol.1, no.2, 5 January 1985, unpaginated. 28 ‘No “Glasnost” in Hungary’, letter from Inconnu to Pál Lénard (HSWP), 1 February 1987, distributed by the Hungarian October Information Centre (London), Index on Censorship, vol.16, no.6, June 1987, pp.5—6.29 ‘Seizure of Private Art Collection Criticised in Hungary’, 12 February 1987, HU OSA 300–40–2, Subject Files in English, Hungarian Unit, Records of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute, Open Society Archives at Central European University, Budapest.

Inconnu, invitation flyer for an exhibition and charity auction for the Szegényeket Támogató Alapítvány (SZETA, Foundation to Help the Poor) at Arteria Gallery, 1985, detail. Courtesy Artpool Art Research Center, Budapest

Events, Works, Exhibitions: ‘"e Fighting City' | 83

Socialising National MemoryO)cially, the state reacted to these protests with silence and denial; internally, however, Inconnu’s initiatives were identified as hostile actions to be addressed by every possible means. As already mentioned, the objects confiscated on "# January $%#& were destroyed by the authorities. !is happened at two di-erent times: the clandestine press and printing material right a+er the seizure; and the .$ artworks in June $%#%, a few days before the reburial of Imre Nagy and other figures of the Revolution, which symbolically marked the entry of Hungary into the democratisation process. According to a confidential internal report, the reason invoked for this second destruction was that the objects did not satisfy the standards of public taste and had no artistic nor commercial value.30 As it seems di)cult to explain the violence upon the objects with an argument based on an aesthetic and economic evaluation, what was, then, the actual motive or trigger for annihilating a complete set of artworks? !e Hungarian regime had sought to avoid a crystallisation of empathy for the $%'( Revolution. A show manifesting a foreign surge of solidarity and compassion couldn’t be tolerated, since it directly questioned the state’s version of the events as a bourgeois, anti-communist ‘counter-revolution’, and challenged its monopoly on history. Presenting objects and ideas to an audience, whether limited or not, the exhibition constitutes an arena of production and transmission of information and, consequently, a significant vehicle for propaganda. ‘!e Fighting City’ was highly problematic for the state since its fundamentals — a publicised, commemorative act involving international supporters and contributors — escaped the authorities’ influence and perverted the Party’s attempt to export a model of culture apparently open to new languages and expressions. Not only did it introduce disruptive, alien perspectives on a sensitive issue, by establishing social and cultural ties regardless of any Cold War division, the exhibition sanctioned the Hungarian Revolution as a plural and transnational symbol of resistance, and gathered support for a collective processes of mourning. !e collection of ‘imported’ views, and their distribution via the complicity of independent media, weakened the state’s authority and its control over the establishment of the historical narrative. In other words, ‘!e Fighting City’ irrupted into the historical and memorial — therefore, political — construction of an event that played a determinant role for the structure of power of the Hungarian Communist regime. At the intersection of various influences and currents of action, Inconnu’s ‘!e Fighting City’ becomes a model for the exploration of the practices of information’s role within cultural production in the late socialist era.

30 ÁBTL 1.11.1 45–3/10/1990, Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security, Budapest. Quote from the minutes of a meeting between representatives of the Ministry of the Interior and of the City Council, 1 June 1989. The research and translation of the documents from Hungarian language were possible thanks to Béla Nové’s helpful support.