Baász almost never chose the actual political situation or oppression specifically as a theme. Even the work entitled File, which depicts the typical layout of the surveillance dossiers made by the Securitate (Departamentul Securității Statului, the secret police of Romania, between 1948 and 1989) to find and target dissidents. The dossier is old, stained, and dirty and the pages are pinned together with a safety pin, which is also one of the key signs of the artist, dominating The Wounds of the Earth series.
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Step by Step is a mail artwork from the beginning of the 1980s which Baász made for a Hungarian exhibition. The stamp depicts a pair of legs tied together, which obviously carried ambiguous meanings at the time. Baász made it for the International Mail Art Exhibition curated by Antal Vásárhelyi and organized by the Young Artists’ Association in Budapest in 1984. The work was highly celebrated and published the same year in Élet és Irodalom [Life and Literature], a Hungarian weekly, as an illustration for János Bencze’s article Szabadlábon [At Large]. The artwork provoked a conviction from the Romanian embassy in Budapest and ultimately served as a pretense for the interrogations to which Baász was subjected by the Romanian political police between October 3 and 8, 1984. It was during this interrogation-series that Baász formulated his ars poetica.
The real importance of the selected work is actually of another nature. The genre merits emphasis, as it is is the key to the whole piece. In the 1980s, when communication was entirely supervised, mail art served as a perfect transmission tool among artists. The aim of creating a web of radical artists throughout Europe was a purely aesthetic and apolitical goal.
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Sfantu Gheorghe, Sfântu Gheorghe, Romania
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Before the fall of the communist regime led by Nicolae Ceaușescu in December 1989, performance art appeared only sporadically in basements and in private apartments. The birth of Romanian and Transylvanian performance art is closely linked to the artistic work of Imre Baász. The Burial of the Suitcase is one of the earliest of the very few performances carried out in Romania before 1989. Its message is linked to Chances of Survival, prompting people to discover the possibility of staying in Romania, softly accusing those who had left, but without pointing fingers.
The performance was carried out in 1979, near the town of Sfântu Gheorghe. Baász used his grandfather’s old suitcase, which he had taken with him when he had moved to America. He did not make a fortune and he did not stay there though: he returned home and continued his life where he had left off. This story showed that the time spent in a foreign place can more easily turn out to be wasted than time spent at home, even if it is spent struggling. Baász put everything in the suitcase which would be necessary for a real emigration, walked out of the town, asked for a saw, and buried the suitcase. In a way, the performance had a double goal: to symbolically protest against leaving the country and to give final peace to the ancestor’s suitcase in the soil of his homeland.
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Sfantu Gheorghe, Sfântu Gheorghe, Romania
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The Chances of Survival is the title of the three preparatory graphics and an installation presented on the first Medium exhibition as an installation. The date of the work is very important. In 1981, people from Transylvania had started leaving Romania due to the worsening living standards and the ethnic harassment suffered by people who belonged to the non-Romanian minority groups.
Baász, who has always been against emigration, thematized this process through his central work. The message was personal and universal at the same time. On one hand, by 1981, most of Baász’s friends had left Romania. On the other, the life of a minority society cannot and should not be compared with the life of the majority society, therefore the minorities should not concentrate on blending in .
The main motive of the works was a real-life fascine guarded by a white cage; it also included six photographs and three photocopies all showing the fascines. The installation used a photo taken at the funeral of philosopher Antal Kapusi showing six men. Baász distorted and scrabbled the images of the people who had already left the country.
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Sfantu Gheorghe, Sfântu Gheorghe, Romania
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In February 1983 SZETA published a contemporary literary and graphic anthology for charity fundraising, entitled
Feketében (In Black). The book launch was held at the editor Ferenc Kőszeg’s flat with the title of the invitation cards reading, “The Dignity of the Down and Out.” The publication had been organized over two years, as authorities had several times come close to thwarting it (confiscating the printed books, etc.). All in all, 38 authors and 22 artists contributed to the anthology, which was printed only in 300 copies, but two-thirds of the copies fell into the hands of the secret police. In spite of all of that, “In Black,” with its rare and precious copies, remained one of the most representative bibliophile samizdat publications, and a memento of civil courage and social responsibility of Hungarian writers and artists.
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