Haris, László: Cage Action, Documentary Photographs No. 1–7. (1973/2012)

archív pigment print
Purchased with support from the National Cultural Fund, 2016

LÁSZLO HARIS participated at the exhibitions of the Szürenon group (a group of artists disillusioned with surrealism and non-figuration: “sur et non”) and at the chapel exhibitions in Balatonboglár from the late sixties. For ten years, he exhibited his photographs in art exhibitions, along the works of neo-avant-garde artists. Between 1973 and 1980, as exhibition opportunities became scarcer, he created conceptual works, performances and actions, either alone or with artist friends; these elements are combined in his work associated with the era of the “illegal avant-garde”. The cage was set up in 1973 in his garden in Csepel by Haris’s friend, the poet Mihály Balázsovics, and he invited his friends to talk about the construction. The cage was then not only a symbolic but a real representation of the increasingly limited exhibition possibilities for neoavant-garde artists and, in a broader sense, of the party’s totalizing control, which marginalized and stigmatized all political dissenters. The discussion was followed by an action with the participation of the host, sculptor Sándor Csutoros, art historian Ottó Mezei, graphic artist József V. Molnár, and Haris, who documented the events. The series of works selected from the photographs was titled Top down Approach of the Antropoid Cage, but the dedication to Csutoros was only added after the sculptor’s death in 1990. The persistent, uncompromising and stubborn character of Csutoros – whose wife was sentenced to prison in 1973 in a show trial – was a model for Haris. The work is still relevant today.