It was as early as in 1970-71 that Endre Tót radically broke up with painting in a traditional sense and made the first one in the TÓTalJOYS series, an A5 piece of cardboard with a printed text on it: I’m glad that I could have this text printed. The fact that he lived in Hungary at the time, in the midst of censorship, contextualized this statement in a way that a politically subversive subtext was easily associated with not only this particular sentence, but with most of Tót’s artistic textual utterances and unconventional interventions. The film that records his first street action within the TÓTalJOYS series was made in Geneva on the occasion of his 6 months stay there on the invitation of John Armleder and Galerie Ecart. According to Tót’s own recollection, he had been thinking about extending the textual series into action for quite a while but this possibility was unconceivable within the Hungarian political circumstances of the time. Yet the work itself echoes this duality or ambivalence of the two political regimes and their dissimilarity between expressing private opinion on the one hand and controlling public space on the other. (Katalin Timár)
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