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A Signal Into the World - WAR ∩ AVANT-GARD ∩ KASSÁK

This exhibition in the Kassák Museum in Budapest takes the visitor to the intellectual world of the first Hungarian avant-garde journal.

A Tett (The Deed), founded in 1915, was Lajos Kassák’s first journal and it heavily opposed the culture of war on cultural and social grounds too. This exhibition elaborates on how this journal resisted and criticised, through its leftist, social-conscious and critical approach, the culture of war, in which the prejudiced and condemned enemy was the core element. The journal represented a radical position in an artistic as well as in a political sense. However, for today’s readers, this might not be obvious. After one hundred years, the points of reference to which A Tett was radical and subversive are blurred and, for a contemporary reader, some of the ideas even sound jeopardising the reasonable interest of the military in any given war.

The exhibition depicts those national and international contexts in which the journal looks like a signal into the world. Hence the title of the exhibition. However, the curators did not intend to critically celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the journal’s first publication. That would rather restrict the interpretation of the journal to its stepping up against the war and to focusing on its aesthetic values as a museum of early avant-garde path-finding attempts. A Tett gave politically motivated and artistically valid answers to a context that disappeared a long time ago. From primary sources, the exhibition reconstructs the journal’s most important contexts: the culture of the war, the journal’s artistic and political hinterland and Kassák’s ideas about international art.

The anti-war attitude of A Tett is conspicuous if one compares it to the pro-war rhetoric of the mass media. When the first issue was published in 1915, the daily newspapers, with their over 100.000 daily circulation, were propagating the culture of war. This massive sea of pro-violence was the context in which the journal was immediately regarded as an internal enemy.

A Tett was linked to the futurist movement in belligerent Italy.

Kassák’s journal confronted the culture of war through an attitude that interpreted art as a political manifesto and raised the possibility of a drastically different artistic behaviour in Hungarian art. The exhibition follows the intellectual development of the journal: the radical re-interpretation of those ideas which were revealed by the Galilei-circle (a group of free-thinking university students around 1915), by the futurist and expressionist exhibitions of the National Salon (an association with an exhibition hall created by a group of artist and collectors who were dissatisfied with the official art policy and ideology of the state) and by avant-gard movements around the turn of the century. However, Kassák’s journal was more than the simple sum of the parts. The exhibition illustrates the process through which A Tett was being shaped by absorbing ideas from the German expressionists, L'Abbaye de Créteil, G. B Show and ever from pro-war futurists.

Infographics play a vital role in the exhibition as a unique way of visual analysis. Certainly, the curators did not give up on their own interpretation, but they wish to offer a lot of space for the visitors’ interpretations. The infographics mediate complex relationships without summarising and wrapping them into a pleasant narrative. It intends to highlight those controversies which make A Tett and its time exciting even today.

Curators: Gábor Dobó and Pál Szeredi Merse

Open until 27 September 2015