COURAGE

łączymy kolekcje

One of Ogoyski's Samizdat Publications: Ogoyski, Petko (1981). Tritsvetie. Trohi ot hlyab. stihove i aforizmi [“Tricolour. Bread Crumbs. Poems and Aphorisms”] Sofia.

The published texts were mostly in an allegorical style, partially using the form of local folk humour. Criticism of the communist regime was hidden in the form of (local) folk tales, folk jokes, poems, and aphorisms. After the end of the socialist state, numerous events were organized in which Petko Ogoyski participated and used materials of his collection (s. Events).

The typewriter in the Ion Monoran Collection is the Olivetti “Studio 44” that the poet and revolutionary used when he transcribed and organised his poems and journalistic writings. It was purchased at a price of 2,000 lei, which at the time was equivalent to a teacher’s monthly salary. Ana Monoran recalls that he bought it in 1984, the year in which their daughter Oana was born. This means that his possession of such an item came under the provisions of Law 23 of 1971 and Decree 93 of 1983. Under the terms of the former, which dealt with the protection of state secrets, typewriters, duplicating machines, and photocopiers had a similar status to weapons, ammunition, and explosive substances. Because duplicating machines and photocopiers had great subversive potential, Decree 93 of 1983 forbade their possession by physical persons. The same decree mentioned that, out of all the means of multiplying texts, “physical persons may only possess typewriters.”

The status of typewriters was severely regulated. Anyone who acquired or inherited a typewriter had to register it within thirty days from the date of acquisition or inheritance. In order to have a typewriter legally in one’s possession, it was necessary to have an authorisation of possession and use, and at the moment of obtaining this authorisation, one had to provide a “writing sample” for the typewriter in question. The “writing sample” had to be renewed each year, so that the communist authorities could have as accurate as possible a record of typewriters and would be able to detect their use for the multiplication of clandestinely disseminated materials.

Ion Monoran’s Olivetti “Studio 44” typewriter was used to put together many of the materials published after December 1989 in the newspaper Timişoara, a paper that is an emblematic for the local mass-media after the fall of communism. Indeed, for many weeks Ion Monoran accommodated the editorial office of this publication in a room in his home.

Photo series of spontaneous actions at the chapel: Once we went, May, 1972 (Photo: Dóra Maurer, participants: Miklós Erdély, György Jovánovics, Tamás Szentjóby, Tibor Gáyor)

“There was a grid put across the chapel door, originally from a fence, but applied horizontally and not vertically. Jován stood on it, and the others automatically began to find their places, too. Szentjóby lay down on a branch and stuffed his long hair into his shirt, so his hair was not floating like Jován’s in the photo. Erdély placed himself in the door, bent over, as if he had been glancing out from there, while Tibor lay on the ground, as if that had been another direction, too, and only the smoke of his cigarette revealed which direction was up. Erdély held up a poppy and said that if we photographed it, it might look as if it were the chapel bell. Then they were jumping down from a bench, Erdély, Tibor, and I think Jován, too, as if they were jumping on top of the Badacsony, i.e. as if they had been touching the mountain with the shape of their bodies.” (Dóra Maurer, 1998)

As part of Infermental 6, Antonio Muntadas and Hank Bull initiated the Cross-Cultural Television project. In this framework they asked artists from around the world to record materials from local television programs and submit them for compilation with other project materials.

Miklós Peternák, together with László Beke and Gyula Száva, decided to make a Hungarian submission. On 22 November 1986, they used a Betamax recorder (a format since obsolete), provided by Gyula Száva, to record their contribution.

They sat in front of the television all day, waiting for some part of the programing that they liked, and then recorded it. A little more than three hours fit on the Betamax tape. However, it turned out that they had missed the deadline for posting contributions to Vancouver.

Miklós Peternák did not want to waste the work they had invested in the recording, so with the help of a friend in a video studio he edited a shorter, “watchable” version of the tape: they ran the material through a mixer in real time while adding special effects.

The resulting material reflects not only the Hungarian television programming of the time, but also the contemporary technical circumstances characterizing television receivers and video technology. The record—which contains black and white fragments of the program, often ghostly, poppy images, and sometimes even stripes (the image “runs”)—treats these mistakes as esthetical features.

Years later, this idea led to a project called Medium analysis (Watching Television), at the Intermedia department of the Hungarian Academy of Arts. Initially, it was held every other year, then stopped, but rather recently students themselves restarted the series. Today it is a festival-like event throughout the building, with several parallel programs.

There was an intention to organize these events on the original date of the Medium analysis. It later turned out that this date, 22 November is also important in terms of media history, because it was the first time that broadcast television was interrupted, in this case, in order to announce the death of John F. Kennedy (“the birth of breaking news” as Stephen Kovats called it at an analysis session).

“An Open Letter to the Yugoslav Public” was sent on 12 February 1971 and was signed by individual members of The Group for New Arts – February and KÔD from Youth Tribune: Branko Andrić, Slavko Bogdanović, Čedomir Drča, Janez Kocijančić, Vladimir Kopicl, Božidar Mandić, Miroslav Mandić, Mirko Radojičić, Ana Raković, Dušan Sabo, Slobodan Tišma, Vujica Rešin Tucić, Peđa Vranešević and Miša Živanović. A copy of the letter is in the possession of Slavko Bogdanović.
This event was followed by strong media repression. Authorities in the cultural sphere who were party functionaries were ordered to criticize the artists in the sharpest possible manner. In Pantelić’s opinion, some of the artists of the time even repressed their memories of these events to such a degree that they do not even remember being a part of avantgarde groups.