Katalin Cseh-Varga and Kristóf Nagy | The Anti-Football of the Hungarian (English)
Channel: CEAD / Central European Art Database
Date: 2016-04-21

„This was an event with the aim to turn football into art. As some kind of elementary insanity would have obsessed us, we had run all around, kicked the ball back and forth, it was a real artist game, an absolute anti-football.” (*) This is the way how one participant of the football action of 1972, namely Gábor Attalai, remembered an event-based art piece conceived by László Lakner and organized by László Beke.
As a unique example of a “conceptual performance” combined with a complex exhibition proposal, Beke submitted a draft to Harald Szeemann on an anti-football game to be played between a team of leading figures of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde and a team formed by the eleven most important international artists to be realized at the Documenta 5. In our paper, by presenting and analyzing ephemeral materials linked to this fluxus-like anti-football action, we aim to approach the project through the relationship between a national collective of “progressive” artists and the international art world of the seventies. We would like to understand the performative and de-materialized nature of this project as the emergence of an international language being present at both sides of the Iron Curtain. Beyond this our paper will focus on the self-positioning idea of setting up a Hungarian national team and challenging the leading international artists in the context of the Documenta, that was not only the core of the art world but also an institution of the Cold War divided Europe. Therefore we aim to examine the internal tensions between the anti-football project’s de-materialization that correlated with the international trends and its self-proclaimed Hungarianness that referred to a national artistic paradigm.
(*) Gábor Attalai quoted in Fehér, Dávid. „”Nem hiszek a túl direkt dolgokban...” Beszélgetés Attalai Gáborral.” [Interview with Gábor Attalai] Ars Hungarica. 2011/3. pp. 110-122, here p. 118.