COURAGE

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During the Fluxus group tour of Eastern Europe in 1966, members of this American experimental group performed in the Museum of Czech Literature in Strahov monastery in Prague. The 1960s was witnessing a relative liberalization in cultural life in Czechoslovakia. At that time, information about international art, including Fluxus works, was accessible in Czech journals. There were also personal contacts between Czech artists (e.g. Jindřich Chalupecký, Milan Knížák, Jiří Kolář) and Fluxus. The performance in the Museum of Czech Literature was introduced by the Czech art critic and main organizer of this happening Jindřich Chalupecký. Mainly pieces by Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles were featured. Although it was an important event for Czech artists, enabling them to see what contemporary forms of action art looked like, the Czech audience did not really appreciate the performance.

Ernst Museum, Budapest, 16 April - 8 May 1966

One of the determining agents in the organization and history of the Studio of Young Artists was the board and the views represented by its members. After the election in 1964, artistic freedom and the integration of different tendencies became a priority. The board established a theoretic panel (for cultural-political reasons, the collaboration of artists and art historians earlier had not been nurtured or supported), and it encouraged members to be freer in their expressive experiments.

Negotiating with the ministry (and personally with the main cultural political decision-maker, György Aczél) the chairperson, István Bencsik, received permission to hold a “jury-free” exhibition (which meant that only board members would select the works due to spatial limitations). This “yearly exhibition” was the first to display non-figurative works, which were on exhibition in a separate room (with a surrealist and a pop-section as well).

The collection starts with the foundation of the Smoloskyp human rights publishing house, named after the poet Vasyl Symonenko. It was originally founded in Baltimore, US, in 1967. As one of the biggest publishers of Ukrainian dissident literature, it holds the largest collection of Ukrainian samizdat (Ukr. samvydav) and the material of the Ukrainian resistance movement (Rukh Oporu), 1960-1990. The phenomenon of Smoloskyp, however, goes far beyond the scope of a publishing house. Smoloskyp is associated with the hub of human rights activities of the Ukrainian diaspora. Smoloskyp took an active part in the campaigns for human rights in Ukraine, and (co)founded several human rights organizations: Smoloskyp Organization for the Defence of Human Rights in Ukraine, Washington Helsinki Guarantees for Ukraine Committee, and the Committee for the Defence of Ukrainian Political Prisoners in the USSR. Smoloskyp activists took part in follow-up meetings to the Helsinki Final Act (1975), held by the OSCE in Belgrade in 1977–78, Madrid in 1980–83, and Vienna in 1986–89. They participated at the International Sakharov Hearing and spoke at the US Congress. Smoloskyp organized a series of protest campaigns against political repression in Soviet Ukraine, and fought for the independent participation of Ukraine in the Olympic games. It ran information services in the US, Canada, and Argentina, widely disseminating factual information on political repression and the dissident movement in Ukraine. It cooperated with international human rights organizations (such as Amnesty International) and sent humanitarian aid to Ukrainian political prisoners. Its secret communication channels along with its own network of specially trained couriers allowed Smoloskyp to establish a two-way traffic of censored information and clandestine materials across the Iron curtain.

The event was the direct outcome of the anxieties of the political elite. The party and communist youth leaders were worrying about the growing youth interest in popular music. They realized that young people were influenced by rock and roll, the beat movement, and they frequented concerts which rapidly became hit events in socialist Hungary as in the West. The authorities also recognized that these events were more popular, the youth were singing the songs, dancing together, and, thus, these events had bigger emotional effects than political speeches. Accordingly, the political elite expected that youth attitudes could be shaped by the lyrics of popular songs and, therefore, cultural criticism could be avoided. Pol-beat came to Hungary from the West, where young people protested against consumer capitalism, alienation, mass production, and the Vietnam War. The Hungarian term for pol-beat was invented by Tamás Bauer. The protest song from the West (by Bob Dylan, Joan Baez) also became popular in Hungary.

The Vietnam War became the topic of the Hungarian protest songs, as well. This produced strange effects: if Hungarian youth protested against the Vietnam War and, thus, in their songs they reflected upon social problems in the West, they actually could confirm the legitimacy of power and, hence, the Communist Youth Federation supported them. In 1968, at a TV-show “Hello boys, hello girls” [Hallo fiúk, hallo lányok] Imre Antal, the host, called the pol-beat an innovative and useful genre and called on the audience to join the movement.