Endre Tót
The late 1960s marked a conceptual shift in Hungary, as elsewhere. At that point, even those artists who still engaged in painting began to confront the question of art’s dematerialization. With his professional educational background, Endre Tót was a sociocultural outlier in the context of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde groups and can be regarded as one of the most sensitive protagonists of Fluxus and conceptual practices during this period. An elusive figure who consciously distanced himself from the local community in favor of the international one, Tót broke radically with painting after 1971.
Following his success at the Paris Biennial that same year, he proceeded to develop his European and overseas mail art network with astonishing deliberateness. Tót introduced a number of non-traditional media to the local scene, while he sent his postcards, questionnaires, artist’s books, and Xeroxed documents to all corners of the world using the postal services. His exchanges put him in dialogue with Fluxus artists such as Ben Vautier, Ken Friedman, George Brecht, John Armleder, Gilbert & George, Yoko Ono, and Dieter Roth. During the early ’70s, he evolved some of the basic ideas—such as “Nothing/Zer0” and “Rains and Gladnesses”—that were to pervade his activity in subsequent decades, which he would spend in Cologne, Germany beginning in 1980. These works, which number among conceptual art’s earliest manifestations in Eastern Europe, engaged with universal and poetic concerns. As his Fluxus colleague Ken Friedman expressed in the Museum Ludwig catalogue Who’s Afraid of Nothing (1999): “Endre Tót’s zero-code pieces give a discrete and particular voice to the emptiness of the void. No other artist has done this in quite the same way. This is Tót’s genius and his importance.” Tót systematically introduced humorous gestures into contemporary visual art as a wry response to the banal conditions of bureaucratic socialism. “We lived in and absurd world,” commented the artist, “in which it was only possible to react with absurdity.” E.Kü.
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