On the samizdat works of László Rajk
"In order to plan and construct a utopia in detail, and to protect it from the corrosive influence of this imperfect world, a certain spatial detachment is required." The quote is from Boris Groys' study The Underground as Utopia, and he is speaking of metro construction in the Stalinist era, "which made it possible for the first time to carry elements of hell over to heaven, and to realise a synthesis of the two dimensions." True, there was little time to delight in the beauties of the metro's princely form, since people generally viewed it as a mere means of public transport - the thought occurred to few other than the architects themselves that this was really the grandiose blueprint for the Communist city of the future. A little farther off in time and space, a Hungarian architect describes the last remaining "surface bastion" of utopia" - an undisturbed space for autonomous reflection and the satisfaction of natural human needs - as follows: "The only man-made space where you can be yourself today is on the throne". To be on the WC is a "key position".
In dictatorships, an underground living space is also a metaphor for non-conformity. Samizdat was one of the means of transport that brought us where we are today. László Rajk was at home in this world, both as architect and disseminator of "banned literature". Above and beyond his architecture, Rajk belongs to that group of multi-talented individuals who refused to adhere to the discipline of their training, but rowed across to other artistic domains with equal ease. In Hungary, many of the older and younger generations alike lived a life of adventure through engagement with the fine arts, and even abandoned their careers for it. These include Miklós Erdély, Tibor Gáyor, one of the leading figures of the new Hungarian avant-garde and, from a younger generation, the late Tibor Szalai, all of whom gave a new impulse to the fine arts with their architectural knowledge. Others, such as Rajk himself or Gábor Bachman, urged the rejuvenation of their own discipline by injecting it with their experience in the fine arts, film or theatre.
In the early Seventies it was not easy for a freshly graduated architect burning with ambition to start out on a career. The building of apartments on a grand scale had turned into mass production, the narrow range of blueprint types were themselves produced in "design factories", which, despite the best intentions, bore no resemblance to intellectual workshops. Architects who wouldn't cede to the exhortations of the authorities - and the accompanying requirement to be their representative - or who were unwilling to live under the pressure of a compulsory career path, turned automatically to architectural utopias and the visual arts. This phenomenon has cropped up more than once in the course of history. The French utopian architecture of the late 18th Century, the Russian constructivist movement of 1910-20, or the deconstructionist architecture that grew up in Hungary in the Eighties, all built on revolutionary precepts and a vision of utopian. These were times of forced idleness, but also of preparation. The visionary designs remained, they were left deliberately unrealised, and this liberated the creative fantasy caged within the limits of the traditional architectural process. László Rajk's detour was partly caused by his own difficult circumstances, partly by the attraction of the explosive transformation in the fine arts which took place in the Sixties. Along with avant-garde intellectuals everywhere he too experienced how the artistic canon ended definitively in the twinkling of an eye, and offered, for the first time, an effective alternative for the reform of art types generally.
From the end of the Seventies, Rajk along with Ágnes Háy, Béla Nóvé and the members of the Inconnu group designed the illustrations for the samizdats of the AB Kiadó (AB Press) publishing house, but he also created independent works - generally comic strips. The modest infrastructure of the samizdat publishers did not allow for perfect techniques, but the taste of forbidden fruit was not spoiled by the evident imperfections in their execution. Silk-screen printing - which was a significant technological advance on stencil production - was in reality a discovery of pop-art. Mechanical reproduction put an end to the supremacy of the unique original, and made art easily accessible to everybody. In these golden days, the reproduction of samizdat texts and their swift dissemination to the audience was more important than their aesthetic appearance - the essence was in the idea rather than the image. Later on, probably when a second public switched over to a second economy, the visual aspects of the book's constitution and purpose arose as a legitimate demand.
In the interaction of image and text, the illustration may act as a passive companion or it may help in the understanding of the text. In Rajk's work it is generally the latter which dominates. The design of the cover to a samizdat publication was an exceptionally exciting task. A succinct synopsis, condensing the essence of non-conformist political studies or silenced literary works, demands of the designer an arsenal similar to that used by the authors themselves. The visual goal was none other than the demolition of the system, or the exposition of its falsehoods. Among the best known of László Rajk's works are the cover designs and illustrations for The Eye and the Hand: an Introduction to Politics by Tamás Gáspár Miklós (1983); In the Absence of All Compulsion by Béla Szász (1984; published in English as 'Volunteers for the Gallows', Norton, 1968); The Aesthetics of Censorship by Miklós Haraszti (1986; published in English as 'The Velvet Prison - Artists Under State Socialism', New Republic Books, 1987) and 1985 by György Dalos.
Beyond its concern with book aesthetics, samizdat publication, willingly or not, revived the progressive tradition of agit-prop art. It returned credibility to Kassák's idea that certain kinds of creative arts have the power to agitate and transform society as 'instruments of struggle', 'question and exclamation marks' or 'signposts'1. For the second audience of the Seventies and Eighties, however, no visual code had been created to match the political rhetoric, since the political opposition endeavoured to avoid the appearance of either institutionalisation or of a typical 'movement' organisation. In the architect's work, space was given both to the tastes created by Communist iconography and the production of individual codes, combined more often than not with a good dose of humour and irony.
The comic books he published with AB Kiadó - Flying into Lichtenstein is Dangerous and Key Position - are independent works. In the Sixties the popular comic book was discovered for artists by Roy Lichtenstein, who was enchanted by the innocent optimism of the banal stories. Rajk's work is influenced by American pop-art, but he translates this into a typically East European sensibility in his own stories. In essence, however, he identifies with the basic principles, which perceive a given culture as aggressive and takes aim at its more blatant manifestations. On the other hand, whereas American pop art keeps a cool three steps distance from the represented world, Rajk is ironically sentimental and his stories have a nerve-jarring realism. He takes over certain elements of the American comic book - sound effects and speech clouds - but all these, informed by a sense of social criticism and flashes of inspiration, take on a far more emphatic role with an entirely different significance. It is difficult to imagine Tarzan or Minnie Mouse being made to utter expressions like "The architect is falling deeper into a trap. He takes no notice of his changing role," or "The committee for improving the civic centre system has come up with the crazy idea that bicycles don't work because our civic centres aren't good." Rajk's invisible figures struggle against a trivialising rhetoric and a commodified visual world - he defends his heroes from his hiding place in the topoi of recognisable works from art history or decisive historical events 'Key Position', modelled on the mirror metaphor, is Rajk's lavatory-philosophy. He attempts to define the identity of the Eighties intellectual with the paradigm of the mirror and 'being' on the latrine. The WC offers both meditation and concealment - it is a closed field. The WC is a stronghold, which must be occupied and then protected. One must fight for it. The WC is a one-person throne, where we alone are lords of our own thoughts. The WC is the speck in the eye of power. It is the crash test of patience. (Particularly if it is an outhouse boasting its own infrastructure, quite independent of the public sewage system). The WC is the symbol of self-identification and self-knowledge, comparable to a mirror. The one thing which can be seen only in a mirror is the self.
László Rajk's samizdat works occupy a special position, not only within his own oeuvre, but also in the history of illegal publishing activities. This current collection offers a taste of what was for many a hidden dimension of the Kádár era, while at the same time presenting material evidence on the career of a talented artist.
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Translation by Stephen Humphreys