Endre KovácsOn the Road

 "... Throughout my life, I have sought new possibilities within photography in the technical realisations and thematic treatments that each era has made possible."

On the Road

With the death of Endre Kovács in 2020 we are now presenting a completed oeuvre in the Csikász Gallery of the House of Arts Veszprém.
Endre Kovács was born in Budapest in 1947, and from an early age he was socialized in a community of literary, scientific and artistic people that defined the era, which laid the foundation for his open-minded approach to the world and the diversity of his choice of photography techniques and subjects. He worked for the Hungarian National Gallery, art magazines and publishers.
Between 1966 and 1974 he was an active participant in the Hungarian avant-garde movement, a collaborator and photographer at the Kassák Theatre (later Squat Theatre) founded by Péter Halász, first in Budapest, later in Paris and Rotterdam. After his defection in 1974, he studied at the University of Fine Arts in Geneva, where he graduated in film and video, at a time when video was one of the most progressive media in the visual arts. As a member of the Swiss Hungarian artists' colony,he was also an active experimenter, even in the seventies. Apart from audiovisual works and experiments, Endre Kovács' most important genre has always been photography.

Opening speech by Can Togay:

Good evening!
We are at the exhibition of Endre Kovács. Bernadett Grászli, director of the House of Arts Veszprém and Gábor Áfrány, curator of the exhibition have asked me to give the opening speech at the photographer's posthumous exhibition. I would like to dwell on the term "posthumous". The official title of the exhibition does not include this adjective. I thought of it because it seemed to me that it was a common term for an artist who has been dead for a short time and who has begun something in life that will only be completed after his death. If I understand it correctly the people alive, that would be us here, gathered to attend the opening of Endre's exhibition, the first time these works have been presented in this way. In that sense, the exhibition is posthumous, because here the artist's life and death are flowing into a stream, as it were, as we are confronted with the works. No offence to this reflection, but I cannot talk about Endre Kovács without remembering his death, which is so recent that it is still inseparable from his figure.

One of the reasons why I was invited to give the opening speech was the fact that Bundi and I have known each other for a very long time. I knew him by that nickname many, many years ago. My view of his works is therefore not at all unbiased, and I would much prefer not to have to deal with them, not to have to give this opening speech, and in return we could spend time together again.

For me, Endre Kovács is, on the one hand, a friend who has matured over many years of acquaintance, on the other, a working relationship based on shared works and worlds, and thirdly, an artist whose work I am still familiar with every day, as I am now, thanks to the Csikász Gallery.Perhaps I also feel close to the terms unexpected culture and forbidden art, because they describe the story that Bundi and I were part of, in that order. As for me, I was caught unawares in this world, which was a theatre company. And from that moment on, everything that happened was unexpected, until the authorities finally declared it forbidden.

Ladies and Gentlemen! We are here at the exhibition of an original artist with refined taste, open-mindedness, an instinctive sense of proportion, and a special sense of humour.

I met Bundi in the early seventies in a community that was then, and still is, known by many names. It was called underground, avant-garde, parallel culture. I like the term, which originated from Tamás Szentjóby: that this medium represented forbidden art. I also find the term used by Ádám Tábor, he called this narrow world and its events "unexpected culture".

Perhaps I also feel close to the terms unexpected culture and forbidden art, because that is the order in which they describe the story well that Bundi and I were part of. As for me, I was caught unawares in this world, which was a theatre company. And from that moment on everything that happened was unexpected, until the authorities finally declared it forbidden.

I myself was a Benjamin of this society at the age of fifteen, and now, more than fifty years later, I am increasingly called upon to pay tribute to and/or bid farewell to that generation, who, as young men much older than I was at the time, had their heads held high in the face of both power and culture, supported by that power and into which - at least so these fog-riders held - the power manipulated and lulled the culture and also the commoners, who needed bread into the everyday life of the dictatorship. And we regarded everyone as a commoner, even if they had a 'big names', who was not making art that was forbidden, but art that was officially allowed.

I saw these youths as wolves, roaming the streets in their wild beauty, initiating duels with these times, which, for its part, has only dared to show itself in the form of cowardly informers, police officers, council representatives, directors and waiters, and which, in this very way, tried to sap their vitality, their desire to create, to eliminate their truth, or at least to make it sound ephemeral, vanishing and of no interest to anyone.

These were grey times, but the artists of the forbidden and the unexpected culture sometimes opened a crack in them, and something that for a moment seemed like freedom flowed in. But that air was also quickly contaminated by miasmas of lies, duplicity, pettiness and resignation, and the artists of the forbidden were the most strangled, for it was their freedom in a world where the word freedom was most often taken by those who gained power through bloodshed.

In the midst of these free wolves, these wild youths, Bundi always struck me as a mysteriously intermingled 19th century English dandy, a refined and polite gentleman with a soft laugh, called by his sense of morality and his considered commitment to freedom to join this pack, to become their companion, but who, even in the midst of his rebellion, does not give up his distinged hold on a bourgeois world.

Freedom tainted in this way has poisoned many, and left many with no choice but to tire of the struggle and finally decide to leave the place of their youth, the country where they were born and raised, where they learned love and friendship.

I won't list the names, but there were a lot of them, and one of them was Bundi, who one day went to the station with his wife Judith, using the so-called tourist passport and boarded the never-ever-again- train. Because that was the only train that existed at the time. My high school friend and then fellow actor Péter Breznyik accompanied them to Nyugati Station and gave them Krúdy's Szinbad (book) as a farewell gift.

A new chapter in Bundi's life has begun. The wave that swept abroad many banned artists, János Baksa-Sós, Árpád Ajtony, Péter Halász, Tamás Szentjóby and many others, including Endre Kovács, washed him away from his homeland.

We lost sight of each other. I heard he had applied to some art college and was going there, making exam films,and that he was going to graduate. Bundi's going to art college? Well, what kind of thing is that, I thought to myself. An artist going back to school?

This idea shows how we experienced the parallel culture in Hungary - remember, this is one of the many terms used to describe the non-conformism of the time - as a mature, autonomous art. And in many respects it was, even if nonconformism is a stigma that successive self-perpetuating freedom demagogues instinctively recognise and quickly force into one kind of conscious quarantine or another to protect public taste.

But I don't want to go through my friend's life from point to point. We are at his exhibition, and I know he would be delighted to have such an insightful presentation of a unique and original slice of his life's work. So I must hurry, lest I delay your meeting with your pictures.

Suffice it to say that it took almost a lifetime after the farewell at the railway station for the Bundis to return home, following the well-known twists and turns of world history. So 'never' became 'sometime', and 'sometime' became 1993. I had little news of this, all the more so because at the time I was living with my family in Finland, and the least I knew was that Bundi was back in Pest.

Two years later we returned home. We rented an apartment in Alsóerdősor Street and for a few weeks our main concern was the furnishing of the apartment. Zsuzsa drew my attention to a classified ad in which someone was offering a desk for sale. You can guess the punchline of the story... As we headed up the staircase at the address given, the banister and the stains on the walls looked more and more familiar. "I've been here before," I panted to Zsuzsa as we approached the fourth floor. But I only found out when and why, when at our bell a tall man approached, rattling keys in the corridor to open the security gate. When we reached the barred gate, we recognized each other at once. Bundi!, I said. Well, Can!" he laughed his characteristic moustachioed laugh.

Not long afterwards, he told me for the first time about the shoebox full of photographic negatives he had found on a shelf after his parents' death, photographs he could not decipher, though all the evidence suggested that he alone had taken them long before they had gone. It did not take much psychological knowledge to decipher the cause of his memory loss; his departure at that time forced him to confront his past and his country so radically that he consigned part of his memories, namely these photographs of Budapest and its surroundings, to the mists of oblivion.

One of the unforgettable times of my life was the time we spent together deciphering these pictures. That's how our work Temporary Amnesia was born.

I love Bundi's event images, portraits, the discreet and tactful approach he has taken to photographing built or natural landscapes and people. "Step closer", is Capa's admonition to the photographer; "Be observant", "Let it happen", Bundi's motto seems to be more the latter. I have always been grateful for the attention with which he fixed his gaze on the world, willing to suspend his own ego for the duration of the selection of the image size, and even, so to speak, his own life for the duration of the exposure.

But the images on display here are fundamentally different. They seem to be the most sophisticated and personal products of Endre Kovács's art. They are personal in the sense that the artist, setting aside all other considerations, questions not only the world but also his own vision of it. It is as if, to compensate for the self-abandonment he has made at the time of exposure, he extends these momentary times to infinity by the subsequent work of manipulating the original moments, adding to them new times, transforming them into works of art. Gábor Áfrány drew my attention to the quick reaction with which Bundi tried out and used newer and newer turns and achievements of technology almost the minute they appeared. The polaroid, digital technologies, photoshop, the smartphone lens - all are ways in which Bundi has turned a once-exposed reality into a means to an original, artistically relevant language. Copy, repetition, intensification, collage are linguistic turns that Bundi has used to shape modernist traditions in his own image and, with assured taste, to transform the object of his investigation into a convincing - let me put it most simply - beautiful spirit.

But however idiosyncratic and daring this language may be at times, it does not, for me, obscure the basic stance of the man, of the personality, of Bundi. The restrained, deep-feeling, delicate attention with which in the most extreme circumstances my friend has walked in this wolfish world as one who reminds those who listen of the loving, faith-filled and wise view of life.

Thanks are due to the Csikász Gallery, the House of Arts Veszprém and Bundi's partner in his last years, Karola Krassói, for lovingly preserving Bundi's works. It is also thanks to her that this exhibition was possible.

Thank you for your attention!