Hajas, Tibor: To the Streets with Your Message! I. (A Letter to My Friend in Paris) (1975)

Tibor Hajas’ university studies – started in 1965 – were suspended following an arrest for participating in street protests. He was later pardoned and set free. Hajas never received a formal art education, but he was a remarkable presence in the unofficial art scene – the so-called „second public sphere” – with the overwhelming force of his personality and intellect, reinforced by his total commitment. His poems were first published in 1967, he wrote essays and a novel; from the mid-1970s he started doing action art, and presented radical, self-destructive performances of disturbing impact. Hajas set as his goal the revision and transformation of socially and historically established forms of communication; he treated art as a form of gaining experience that is “inseparable from the meaningful idea of freedom”. He was killed in a car crash in 1980. A Letter to My Friend in Paris is the photo documentation of a street action, displaying sections of a letter written on buildings around Budapest, addressed to his friend living in Paris. An important aspect of this piece is its public nature: messages – akin to graffiti, but much more abstract – are placed in public spaces, available for all passers-by to look at or even add to. The backgrounds of the texts are banal urban settings that are at the same time important locations in the life of the addressee. Some of the ideas that come into focus through this work are the relationship of written and image-based communication, the issues of personal versus public realm, and the space and time-related characteristics of the message. “Be public, be direct” and “get your future replaced before its warranty expires” are the messages he shares with his Parisian friend and people roaming the streets of Budapest. K.Sz.