Hungary’s history was as troubled as Eric Hobsbawm stated Europe’s past in Age of Extremes. The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991. Dictatorships followed each another right from the end of WWI until the system change in 1989, but among all the authoritarian regimes socialism existed longest. After the thawing atmosphere of the second half in the 1960s, critical tone was articulated in the Neo-Avant-Garde’s “second public sphere”. A form of criticism against any kind of hierar- chical repression arose from performative and intermedial artworks and still didn’t disappear even in postmodern times long after the fall of the wall. The paper will focus on three-dimension of hierarchical bondage: being chained through the other, trough the authorities and through history. All artists’ works (that of El Kazovszkij, Tamás St. Auby and Little Warsaw) are meant to show inner relations between the body, its representation, authoritarian practice of control respectively performance and intermedia art.
The original version of this paper was first presented at the annual conference of the College Art Association on February 15, 2014 in Chicago, USA. It was part of the session Performance Art in Central and Eastern Europe chaired by Amy Bryzgel and Pavlina Morganova—many thanks to both of them for accepting my presentation’s draft and giving me advise how to improve it. I am also very grateful to Scott Kushner for revising this piece and for not becoming tired in encouraging me to sharpen my thoughts. And last but not least: I appreciate the support of Júlia Klaniczay, György Galántai (directors of the Artpool Art Research Center) and Dóra Halasi (archivist at Artpool) who made the intense research phase possible while preparing this article. Without the financial help of the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies at the Ludwig-Maxilians-Univer- sity Munich the publication of the paper wouldn’t have been possible—thank you for that.