Dr. Miško Šuvaković on Balint Szombathy
BÁLINT SZOMBATHY (born in 1950) is a well-known Yugoslav artist of Hungarian nationality. Bálint Szombathy started his artistic work during the late 60s. In 1969 he was co-founder of the Bosch+Bosch group, active in the towns of Subotica and Novi Sad. The group Bosch+Bosch was extremely important and influential during the period when real socialism made a connection between Western 'new' art, the then open Yugoslav art scene, and the art of East European countries (Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland). Balint Szombathy was among the leading artists and theoretician of the group. His work may be described as nomadic, he has moved in his research inside the late modernist culture. He juxtaposes the devices of historical avant-gardes (Hungarian activism, Yugoslav dadaism), American underground popular culture, and devices of high intellectually oriented art. Via his investigations during the seventies, Szombathy established a semiotic theory that he applied in his visual, environmental researches as well as in his artistic behavior. So that he was among the pioneers of Yugoslav and East European body art and environmental art between 1970–75. This was also the time when Szombathy started his theoretical investigations (semiology of urban space) that could be recognized as a domain of conceptual art. In other words, the artwork for him is not the definite object, but various possibilities expressed by language or by different examples of the artist's behavior.
At the same time when he realized works within visual art, body art, environmental works, and conceptual art, Szombathy also developed a literary practice within the domain of visual and concrete poetry. He also connected this literary practice with conceptual art. During the eighties Szombathy investigated new communication technologies (ranging from Xerox to fax and computer networks/Internet). At the time when socialist Yugoslavia fell apart, and when wars started, Szombathy started to make performances and installations as a politically engaged artist. His body and behavior thematize and point to the tragic drama and process in which one country fell apart. In this moments his early works from the late sixties and early seventies, make a connection with his works in which the artist is faced with metastasis of the politics during the nineties. Szombathy managed to show his body and behavior (by real allegories) the decomposition of socialism and appearance of local ethnic wars.
In every phase of his artistic career, Szombathy is sensible to actual artistic, cultural, and political changes. He works with traces (inscriptions) of reality. His media is the very culture, and society, i.e., geopolitics, and art.
During the last thirty years Balint Szombathy has exhibited his work at all important exhibitions of Yugoslav conceptual, performance and postmodern art. His work has been present in numerous European, American and Canadian art institutions. Today in Yugoslavia and Hungary he has a status of an actually and historically important artist.
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CHIMNEYS (GONE WITH THE WIND)
The Titoist Yugoslavia, which no longer exists, had six republics, with a capital in each of the six republics. The country's disintegration led up to a bloody war, and during ten distressing years, Yugoslavia finally fell to pieces. Each former republic had its own tobacco factory with its own brand of cigarette. These have remained up to the present day, but now they count as products of separate countries. The performance shows Yugoslavia's disintegration via the rite of smoking. The ashes of the smoked six different brands of cigarette are gathered in the end in the ashtray from Sarajevo, as it was in this city that the onetime federal state broke up for good and all. It was a confederation that had been conceived and governed in the thick smoke of coffeehouses, in the same way as the entire politics of the Balkans had been.
Balint Szombathy
Performans
Odzaci (Prohujalo sa vihorom)
Veliku školsku kartu SFRJ prostirem na pod. Pored svakog glavnog grada bivših republika postavljam po jednu pepeljaru i kutiju cigarete koja potiče iz određene republike i po mogućnosti u svom imenu sadrži neko geografsko obeležje (Opatija, Drina, Morava, Lovćen, Makedonija, Zeta, Srbija itd.).
Otvaram prvu kutiju, vadim cigaretu i zapalim. Povučem dim dva-tri puta, ostavljam cigaretu u pepeljari i prilazim sledećem glavnom gradu što znači i novoj kutiji.
Kada popušim svih šest cigareta sadržinu svih pepeljara sipam u "sarajevsku" pepeljaru koju zatim podižem i njen pepeo izdunem u vazduh. Performans se završava rečenicom: "Prohujalo sa vihorom!".
Balint Szombathy
