Tag Archives: Communism

Hungarian Art: Tamas St. Auby’s Portable Intelligence Increase Museum

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Q: What is a “Portable Intelligence Increase Museum”?
A: A laptop.

No, this isn’t material from a dated Sci-Fi novel. Nor is it part of some absurdist imaginary critique of Communism that the main record of Hungarian ‘unofficial’ art had to be gathered and held surreptitiously on one man’s laptop. It might be absurd, but it is true. The main historical record of Pop art/Conceptual art/Actionism in the 1960s came from non-artist Tamas St. Auby‘s laptop.
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Tomas St. Auby was born in 1944 and has lived in Budapest, save for a 20 year expulsion by the Communist government. He ‘quit’ his art career early and begin to establish himself as a non-art artist, arranging the first Fluxus happening in Hungary (which the secret police came to and actively detailed in their notes). In 1968 he established IPUT, the International Parallel Union Of Telecommunications, a fake organization in which he has held and still holds a series of positions. His confrontational approach did not go down well with the communist authorities and St. Auby was forced to leave Hungary in the mid-70s.

He returned to Budapest in 1991 and joined the newly-founded Intermedia Department of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts. In 2003, he established the Portable Intelligence Increase Museum, an interactive computer-based exhibition that expose the gaps in official accounts of Hungarian art of the 1960s and 70s which he had documented. Over 1100 works by about 70 Hungarian artists have since been shown throughout Europe.

St. Auby holds a key position in the history of Hungarian art not only for the influence he continues to have on a younger generation of artists, especially through his teaching position, or his role in disseminating Fluxus happenings throughout Hungary, but for his documentation of art that would otherwise be forgotten.

As Culturebase puts it:

“St. Auby has recently been doing what Hungarian and international art historians might have yet to do. In 2002, St. Auby founded the Global Front of Anti-Art History Falsifiers of the Neo-Social Realist IPUT (NETRAF), in whose name he presents the Portable Intelligence Increase Museum. This interactive object makes the Hungarian avant-garde (from 1956 to 1976) accessible for the first time through objects, photos, films and documents.”

Free Store?! Groovy, baby

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10th Street, Manhattan used to be home to a free store, above.

What do British communists, San Francisco hippies, and free stores have in common? The name ‘diggers,’ among other things.

In 1649, British communists called themselves diggers and tried to create Utopian, moneyless societies. Mainly small agrarian communities, these died out by 1651, in part because of efforts against them by the King’s Privy Council.

A group of performance artists in San Francisco, founded by Emmett Grogan,took the name ‘diggers‘ in the 1960s . Riding on a wave of hippieness, the movement grew as they too tried to create a moneyless society. They put on performances in the parks and streets, making San Francisco their stage. They spawned the first free stores in the United States, and have also been credited with the spread of whole wheat bread in America. Going back to the agrarian roots of the movement, these diggers baked bread in 2 pound coffee tins and gave it away. Recipe here.


This led to a free store on 10th Street in Manhattan, where according to a New Yorker Talk of the Town article from 1967, the shop was “crowded with Negro and Puerto Rican children, old women speaking Middle European dialects, barefoot runaways with glazed eyes, stumbling winos, and gaily ornamented hippie couples, all picking through boxes full of used shoes or fingering racks of soiled clothing or burrowing under piles of miscellaneous junk spread out on rough wooden tables, which line the walls.”

Has the digger movement entirely died out since then? If you remember the New York Times article from last summer, not at all. Dumpster diving was exposed as part of a freegan community. The ‘freegan‘ lifestyle was (dubiously) celebrated as “scavengers of the developed world, living off consumer waste in an effort to minimize their support of corporations and their impact on the planet, and to distance themselves from what they see as out-of-control consumerism.”

Sounds like the 1960s diggers and 1650 agrarians have found their modern day equivalent. You’d think free would sell itself in the most practical way, yet these groups all developed a socially conscious ethos that supported their anti-establishment view of the good life.

Peace and Love.

Maddening Queues of Soviet Russia

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Imagine you’ve been waiting in line to buy a pair of shoes. Imagine you’ve waited all day and all night with hundreds of people. Can you imagine how dull that is?

This is the subject of the book I’m reading, The Queue by Vladimir Sorokin. If you went to school in the U.S., you probably came across the book 1984 by George Orwell. Well, I’m halfway through a Russian novel written in 1983 the follows much the same line of poking fun at the communist system. The Queue was the debut of this popular contemporary Russian author, and in it he tackles form with an absolute appropriateness to the subject that exploits every angle, or rather the straightness, of the line.

How does the subject of waiting in line influence the structure? Brilliantly, that’s how. The narrative is actually nameless dialogue of innumerable people in line, making conversations and noises as they stand there. One comes to recognize certain voices, like a little boy and his mother and a young man hitting on a girl named Lena. Even so, it feels like overhearing the hum of the crowd, as people complain about the sun or their feet in short, colloquial snippets. The chain of dialogue moves as the line moves. For example, a segment of the line twists itself to a courtyard with benches where they nap. After settling in, the reader finds page after blank page while they sleep. The text on the pages even looks like a line.

Yet as the reader finds, this farcical line in the Soviet Union is anything but straight. The humor of the book comes from the deadpan depiction of people moving backwards instead of forwards in the queue. Humor, immediately recognizable as it is, is difficult to pin down. The Queue rests on a recognition that waiting in line in a perhaps futile attempt to purchase anything, of the difficulties of merely waiting to do so, such as the Georgians cutting in front and pushing the whole crowd back, is not reasonable, and is incongruous with the society that Communism purported to establish. The absence of the author’s voice keeps the novel from taking on a didactic or even very dark aspect. The Queue is a comedy, but a rather dull one, as waiting in line has little to recommend itself.

Despite the cleverness of the structure, it’s also difficult to become involved in fiction without engaging characters. The struggle of the line seems the struggle of faceless individuals, but not of people despite hearing their voices speak throughout. It’s also because the characters do not act–they wait and wait in line. Following orders is not the inspiring stuff of novels, though it is perhaps truer to life. Only halfway through, and here I am critiquing the novel. This is less unfair that you might think. A disappointment of the novel is the extended stasis of the plot, and leaves me thinking the line will continue forever, without them ever buying the shoes of rumored American-make and brown leather.

Ah, Russians on the joys of communism..The novel really is interesting in itself, but believe me when I say it fully explores its chosen topic. No one, no where need ever write about queue in Soviet Russia ever again. Sorokin has filled that niche.