Novi Sad Orpheuses (EN) | ujvidekiorfeuszok

THE EXHIBITION

NOVI SAD ORPHEUSES

ÚJ SYMPOSION (1965–1992),

THE VOJVODINA JOURNAL

Új Symposion, a Hungarian-language journal published in Yugoslavia, maintained a courageous critical stance and a deliberate spontaneity. The creative community that grew around the editorial team and all but turned into a movement created a literary and artistic milieu in Vojvodina that was marked by a proclivity for experimentation. Struggling with the minority status of the Hungarian language, while enjoying an access to cultural knowledge that was fresher in Yugoslavia than in Hungary, the consecutive editorial teams and the associated generations of artists shaped the periodical with different emphases on literature, visual culture and social criticism, and varying degrees of readiness to comply with the demands of the cultural authorities. Though the history of Új Symposion may appear uninterrupted, it was constantly hampered by bans, lawsuits, and in 1983 by the dismissal of the editors, right up to the Yugoslav war, when it could no longer be maintained.

Besides the literature, this exhibition focuses on the exceptionally strong visual impact of the journal. The display outlines the look characteristic of each editorial team, introduces the key actors associated with the periodical, and illustrates some of its many links with Hungary. Novi Sad Orpheuses allows us to take stock of what is a still relevant literary-artistic achievement of cultural historical significance.

Those whose voices can be heard at the exhibition:

ÚJ SYMPOSION (1961–1974)

Conceived by Ottó Tolnai and edited by István Bosnyák, Symposion first came out in December 1961, as the literary supplement of the weekly Ifjúság. The periodical was started by students of the Hungarian Department at the University of Novi Sad, itself founded in 1959, who were encouraged by the example of two writer-professors, Ervin Sinkó and György B. Szabó. It was still but a supplement when it already met with acrimony, thanks to its sharply critical tone and the new-fashioned literature it espoused. The column called Beard Dryer rejected provincial, hackneyed, spurious literature with an unusual vehemence—mostly on the strength of the modern literature and philosophy the authors came to know in Serbo-Croatian translation. Symposion Könyvek, a book series, added momentum to the emergence of the Symposion authors as a movement, with the third volume, Kontrapunkt becoming the veritable debut of this generation. With the encouragement and support of Ervin Sinkó, in January 1965 the much-attacked supplement began a new life as a periodical in its own right, after it adopted the propitious epithet Új (New). The editorial office found home in a former ecclesiastical property in Novi Sad, the so-called “Catholic Home” (Katolikus Porta). The publisher was Ifjúsági Tribün, the operator of a lively debating society and exhibition hall next door.

As one leafed through the unconventionally large format periodical, its political, conceptual and aesthetic diversity was immediately striking. Though Új Symposion did not declare a programme, the establishment of diversity and the possibility of debate could be considered a conscious endeavour. Ottó Tolnai was the most important of the initiators, though the person of the editor-in-chief changed frequently.

The essays and literary works of the generation that came to the fore with Symposion – István Domonkos, László Gerold, Nándor Gion, István Koncz, Katalin Ladik, Ferenc Maurits, Ottó Tolnai, László Végel – were complemented by the theoretical writings of István Bosnyák, János Bányai and Imre Bori. The journal as a whole was marked by a sensitivity towards the visual arts. Initially the graphic design was lent some zest by the collages and visual quotes of Ferenc Baráth, Ferenc Maurits, Papp Miklós and later Bálint Szombathy. The typographical plays on semantics and syntactics created interesting transitions between literature and visual art.

In time, the rejection of homogenization and convention, the promotion of diversity, the interest in Croatian, Macedonian, Serbian and Slovene culture, the highlighting of otherness, and the creative freedom that prevailed at the journal, provoked a crackdown from the cultural authorities. Following some sabre-rattling, judicial proceedings were initiated in 1971, which ended in a condemnatory sentence and a break in the editorial work. The journal could always revitalize itself thanks to the active support of the Hungarian Department, and an editorial team that worked as an intellectual community. By contrast, the injection of new blood that the authorities enforced was but a smokescreen to hide the real motives, and made subsequent editorial boards cautiously retreat behind the bulwark of scholarship and theory.

ÚJ SYMPOSION (1974–1983)

From 1974, the journal, whose format had been reduced in 1971, was edited by Magdolna Danyi, Antal Bognár, Erzsébet Csányi, Erzsébet Juhász and Beáta Thomka and became more moderate, with visual experimentation giving way to a programme of introducing readers to new trends and authors in literature and theory through erudite essays and translations. The journal provided young authors, who came from the Hungarian Department, with publication opportunities. They included Attila Balázs, Béla Csorba, Kornélia Faragó, Ottó Fenyvesi, Alpár Losoncz, Viktória Radics, Zoltán Sebők and János Sziveri, who shaped the content while being eager to open towards different media.

János Sziveri and the other new editors who followed Magdolna Danyi and her team in 1980 also came to know restrictions imposed by the cultural authorities, including censorship (the banning of the issue on eroticism). As a form of “punishment,” in 1979 the publishing rights were transferred from Ifjúsági Tribün, a liberal-minded organization, to Forum, a publishing house that was easier to control. The announcement of a project, the study of György B. Szabó’s work for a year, can even be considered a programme, that of taking stock of Új Symposion’s achievements, and charting the conditions of society and culture. The opening towards issues of public life also became manifest in the column called Centripetal Tail (a pun on the former Centrifugal Corner), a forum for sharply critical, topical journalism. More and more of the “youthfully zealous” writings were criticized for their ideological or political stance, while this editorial team became responsible for such compelling issues as the highly popular Polish number, the instalment on hermeneutics, or the special issue that celebrated the 60th birthday of Miklós Mészöly. János Sziveri and the other editors were politically persecuted, their careers and livelihood were ruined. The last Új Symposion Sziveri edited appeared in April 1983.

ÚJ SYMPOSION (1984–1992)

Following a hiatus of almost a year, the journal was relaunched with Tibor Purger as editor-in-chief, who had studied political science and had no background in literature or editing; despite all his efforts, Sziveri’s fellow editors were unwilling to cooperate. Deprived of its base, the journal lost its literary edge and lustre. Bálint Szombathy, who returned to the periodical in 1985, breathed a new life into its form and content, making each issue a surface for graphical experiment, and also ensuring a preponderance of art-related writings. He could now demonstrate his neo- or trans-avantgarde affiliations over an extended period. Thanks to his connections to Hungarian circles, the journal’s authors included a great many art historians, theoreticians and visual artists, mostly from the underground scene. Reporting on developments in international art became another forte of the journal, which released more and more thematic issues not only on art, but also on architecture and music. From the late 1980s, a generation of writers who were younger than Sziveri et al., and who had not been involved in their political and literary scandal, was exposed more and more often. Their debut almost coincided with the belated rehabilitation of Sziveri and his editorial team. The interests of those who participated in the proceedings ran a wide gamut: János Sziveri was terminally ill, the young “new guard” were bewildered and anxious, the former cultural practitioners were less and less cooperative.

In 1989 István Beszédes won a competition to become editor-in-chief of the journal, and his editorial team included both members of the third generation, and the youngest contributors (Róbert Hász, Kálmán Jódal, Ferenc Kontra, Ildikó Lovas, Tibor Papp p, András Urbán, Csilla Utasi). Their ambitious programme of “creative coexistence,” “free thinking” and “the European value of universal otherness” soon became conspicuous, while the embracing of Új Symposion’s past could be detected in such gestures as naming the opinion column Free kick / horse / footnotes. With the start of the Yugoslav Wars in 1991, a troubled period set in, with new editors-in-chief, and as the men went into emigration to get away from military service, work eventually became impossible. As a kind of closing gesture, the last issue was comprised of the journal’s bibliography.

SZENTENDRE

Új Symposion’s first issue in 1968 featured paintings by Endre Bálint on its front cover, and an informed review by Krisztina Passuth on its pages. The airy arrangement of the montages inside the journal seemed to echo an observation by Passuth: “Bálint finds his home among objects, walls and hovering dream-creatures.”

The two weeks he spent in 1968 at the Macedonian Prilep’s artist colony provided Pál Deim with essential inspiration, which found expression in the sacred-themed Monastery series. One of its pieces were used on the front page of Új Symposion’s January 1969 issue. Deim’s emerging individual style is meticulously analysed in Krisztina Passuth’s essay, “New endeavours in the art of Szentendre,” which also discusses László Balogh and László Kósza Sipos. In the second half of the 1960s certain art historians came to a consensus over what imbued a painter’s art with that distinctive “Szentendre” quality – the acknowledgement of the constructivist heritage epitomized by Lajos Vajda –, and Passuth aligned herself with them in her opening remarks.

We complemented the “front-page” piece from Pál Deim’s Monastery series with another work from some ten years later. László Kósza Sipos’s structure-based drawings are reminiscent of those that appeared in the journal. Presented in pairs, László Balogh’s works evince a departure from the sight and a move towards constructivist order.

While the essay Passuth dedicated to Lajos Vajda in 1967 appeared in Híd, a literary journal, Új Symposion did select from the artist’s drawings on several occasions during this period. Új Symposion’s own comprehensive, vivid overview of Vajda’s oeuvre was authored by Imre Krajczár, who drew on the lessons of the 1966 retrospective exhibition in Szentendre. But before all this, author and painter György B. Szabó, the doyen of the Symposion collective, published his drama on Lajos Vajda in Híd: “Written in the twentieth year after Lajos Vajda’s death, with the montage technique he was so fond of, using the evidence of persons dead and live, writings and eye-witnesses, to serve as a testimony, example and memorial.” During his investigations into Vajda’s art and thought, B. Szabó also met with Endre Bálint. The same experience – or perhaps the advancement of his tuberculosis, the illness that killed all three of them – may have led to the abstract line drawings, these highly intense, expressive compositions that still employ contours. Coupled with a drawing from Lajos Vajda’s late period, the similarity of their manner of execution is conspicuous.

For Tibor Bada and Béla Máriás, who started to publish in Új Symposion in the mid-1980s, the journal was an essential medium; marked by an open attitude towards diverse media, it encouraged the young artists who were exploring different genres. They founded a band, Tudósok (Scientists). The radical, alternative A. E. Bizottság, which they came to know thanks to Maximum rock and roll, a show on Novi Sad Radio, seemed a similarly brazen act bent on causing a flutter among the dovecots. They called on the band without an introduction, which led to mutually inspiring music making and artistic cooperation. Following the exhibitions of the Vajda Lajos Studio’s Szentendre Summer Free School of Art, Bada Dada and Béla Máriás had an exhibition, New Now, at the Vajda Lajos Studio in 1990. In 1991, Béla Máriás introduced László feLugossy’s work to the readers of Új Symposion. “Instead of trying to classify the universe, Lugossy acts like a universe himself, as well as an unavoidable filter, projecting his conceptual associations and psychic explosions of various magnitudes from his bold deck.” Poet and painter Gábor Cyprian Csajka, a member of the Vajda Lajos Studio, was also featured on the front page of Új Symposion, with a poem.

Máriás went to Budapest to avoid conscription during the Yugoslav Wars, and re-formed Tudósok with a new guitarist, Szentendre-based Bence Kovács. Bada Dada followed him a year later, and joined the band again. Tudósok performed at each of the three Little Hungarian Performance festivals between 1991–1993 (each time under a different name), and regularly contributed music and images to the exhibitions of the Vajda Lajos Studio.