CZECHOSLOVAKIAN RADIO 1968 (1969-2016)

Maja and Reuben Fowkes: We'd be interested to know how you see 1968 and why
you felt the need to respond to the Soviet military intervention in Prague?

The IPUT (International Parallel Union of Telecommunications) is interested
in what it calls the "Third Method", which deals with any type of subject not
in a correspondingly contradictory way, as the conventional "Second Method"
does: "making is competing", but in a complementarily mutating way: "acting
is st.riking". (rem.: the "First Method" is simply drifting.)

I, the deliberate voluntarist, thought that the Prague Spring was a
successful result of a social mutation, the maturity of the majority's
consciousness, so it ended the class-struggle and let free speech and
uncensored creativity flow from every direction of the outdated Socialist
Democracy directly into Direct Democracy finally, as it was planned by the
anarchists, autonomes, and for a while by the Leninist soviets also some
decades earlier already.

On the day of 21 of August 1968, not knowing yet about the invasion
of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact armies during the dawn, Anastasia (gr.
Resurrection), my girlfriend, the daughter of the Greek communist partisan
evacuated to Hungary by the Kremlin during the civil war in Greece, and I
were sunbathing together at the lake Balaton, hoping that the Kremlin would
not dare to destroy the Neo Socialist System. There was a portable radio with
us – and suddenly we heard the news about the awkward, crazy, criminal act.
We jumped up and hitchhiked back to Budapest, ran to Cafe Hungaria to meet my
friends, and saw some old, renegade communists weeping on their little marble
tables there.

Although 72 Czech and Slovak civilians were killed and hundreds were wounded
by the armies of the „friendly, socialist countries” during the invasion,
the people did not resist with „Second Method“ weapons, but invented many
„Third Type Methods” for disrupting the military actions: like changing
the signposts to disorient the troops, or switching the street-names and
house-numbers in order to block the arrests, etc. When a military decree
prohibited the people from listening to the radio, a recipe was invented, and
since it did not request talent, skill, knowledge, mastership, virtuosity,
etc., anybody could make it in the sense of Fluxus, many people realized it:
"Listen to a newspaper-covered brick on the street!". So, the soldiers
confiscated thousands of this non-art-art pieces all around the country.

The Czechoslovak Radio 1968 was made in 1969 following the original recipe
slightly changed to a portable memorial against war as homage to the natural
inventiveness of the people: "Listen to a sulphur-covered brick on the
street!". It is an unlimited multiple, I made several of them occasionally
during the following years. (I don't know if it was made later by someone
else also.) An important aspect of the given procedure is that although these
types of non-art-art pieces have inevitably different formal realizations by
different people on different occasions, like for example any food made
according to a recipe, the objects are essentially the very same in respect
to their „bottom up” origin, function and aim. The other important aspect
of them is the mutation of the art, more precisely the mutation of Socialist
Realism to Neo-Socialist Realism: "non-art-art for and by all".

„(…)The Portable Trench for Three Persons (1969) treats the subject
similarly with the ‘Third Method”, it is a mutation of the montage, a
sort of ‘united montage’ by interbreeding the trench and the stretcher
where one can not separate the component parts in the compound anymore as it
can be done in the classical montage-mixture. The Trap – hommage à Prague
– (1969) environment constructed not entirely beforehand as it used to be,
but during and by an interbreeding action itself, related also to the
break-down of the Prague Spring’s political/economic/cultural change.
(…)” (Anna Stomosis: Intermedia and Interaction, 2000)

MRF: What reaction was there in Hungary at the time to political works such
as Czechoslovak Radio 1968 and Trench for Three?

It was enough to be an "Abstract" during the 40s-50s and Pop artist,
Actionist, Conceptual artist in the 60s-70s, – and although the mentioned
non-art-art pieces had no „Second Method“, direct, poster-like political
meanings either –, one became banned as heretic and even a subject of
chargeable offence by the degenerated military-mercantile bureaucracy. The
monolithic mass-media was servile, it denounced, condemned and censored all
the new type of regroupings of the given, especially the slogan of IPUT:
„All prohibited is art! Be prohibited!“. Evidently, the majority of the
people were in the drift of the „First Method“, they did not see and were
not aware of this ridden „non-art-art-history“-process, the above
mentioned action-objects did not compete with, for example, the competitive,
„Second Method“ sports.

The Brick was shown in a private place, so it was not followed by immediate
punishment, the group-show – where the Trench was presented – was banned
after three days, the Trap-environment was closed down immediately after its
opening at the show-room of the Association of Young Communists (the
Stalinist „Second Method“-equivalent of the Hitler-Jugend) of the Central
Research Institute for Physics, and idiotic interrogations and
repressive-intolerant punishments as abuses of administrative authority
followed them.

Anyway, all this is for the glory of: everybody is interested –
instinctively at least – in the general program defined by T. Leary and
adopted by IPUT: „SMI2LE!“ – Space Migration, Intelligence Increase,
Life Extension! – then and now and ever.

Budapest, 2 March 2008 *

ST.AUBY Tamás
(superintendent of the International Parallel Union of Telecommunications,
agent of the Neo-Socialist. Realist. International Parallel Union of
Telecommunication's Global Counter-Arthist.ory-Falsifiers Front)

* Interview first published in Maja and Reuben Fowkes, eds, Revolution I Love
You: 1968 in Art, Politics and Philosophy (CACT Thessaloniki, 2008).

Supported by Slovak Arts Council.