Katalin Ladik and the Hungarian Neo-Avant Garde

By Lara Mashayekh

‘I am an androgyne: a liar. Therefore sincere.

I am an object of art, a centaur. –Quote from Katalin Ladik, ‘Follow Me into the Mythology’, 1981.

Katalin Ladik, Blackshave Poem, 1978, Silver gelatine print, 40 x 30 cm, acb Gallery, Hungary. https://www.artsy.net/artwork/katalin-ladik-blackshave-poem-10

Katalin Ladik is a celebrated Hungarian artist, performer, and poet. Born in 1942 in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia (present-day Serbia), Ladik is primarily known for her neo-avant-garde performance style and acoustic influences through collage, photography, happenings, and physical performances. Ladik divided her time living and working between Serbia and Hungary, where she developed a reputation for her visual and audible poems. In many of her works, Ladik reflects upon her unique position as a Hungarian minority in Yugoslavia—as a woman in a patriarchal society and an individual whose hybrid identity is comprised of two distinct cultures. Wanting to break free from the confines of language and stereotypes, Ladik produced a series of works that explore the dimension of language and media culture through poetry. 

Katalin Ladik, Blackshave Poem, 1978, 12 photographs, gelatin silver prints on paper, 388 × 293 mm, Tate.

Unlike those working in other Eastern European countries during the Cold War, artists in Central Eastern Europe worked under an authoritarian state. After Stalin’s death in 1956, artists in Hungary struggled to gain artistic freedom, trapped in what is today referred to as the ‘ice age’ of Socialism. From 1956 until the 1980s, Hungary was under the dictatorial control of János Kádar, which impacted its cultural production and introduced shifting censorship laws to which artists were made subject. Ladik’s subversive acts made her one of the most controversial performance artists of the period, leading her to leave a strong legacy in the region. Commenting on this legacy, the prominent art historian Láslzló Lakner has called Ladik ‘the Yoko Ono of the Balkans’.

In the 1960s, Ladik started writing for the Hungarian neo-avant-garde literary magazine Uj Symposion, as well as acting in theatre ensembles. In Ladik’s early poetry of this period, she would recite quasi-surrealist erotic poems in Hungarian in front of Serbian and Croatian audiences that did not understand her. This gesture may have been intended to convey her loyalty to the Yugoslav art scene, and echoed her experimental approach.

Katalin Ladik, The Queen of Sheba (1973), Cut-and-pasted printed paper and press type on printed paper, 23 x 32.5 cm., MACBA Collection. https://www.moma.org/collection/workslocale=en&utf8=&q=ladik&classifications=28&date_begin=Pre-1850&date_end=2020&include_uncataloged_works=1&page=&direction

Ladik’s vocal compositions depended on the materiality of sound, and the stripping of language of its semantic and emotive meaning. The use of collaged materials to accompany her poems enabled Ladik to visually represent the hybridity of her language. What’s more, the incorporation of a visual component into her works allowed for more participatory audience engagements. One of Ladik’s collages titled Queen of Sheba (1973) reflects the hybridity of the artist’s language and of her identity, as she makes use of musical scores, magazine clippings, maps, sewing patterns, and instructions, all of which covertly reference female stereotypes and folklore.

Ladik’s works became entrenched in the culture of mass media and often incorporated local, literary and folk art by appropriating its traditions and creating a narrative twist, such as in her Balkan Folk Song series, 1973. Her ‘sound poems’ often consisted of guttural and animalistic sounds, layered with musical innuendos and background noises. Such objects were visualisations of Ladik’s poetry. The ambiguous task of deciphering between sounds, theatrical acts and documents adds to the sensorial experience of her work. Ladik’s unique alphabet intrinsically becomes an extension of her body and voice. Finding paper to be too plain, she began to use her body as a medium for communication, tantalising audiences through her individualist and political expression. 

Katalin Ladik, Balkan Folk Song No. 4, 1973, Cut-and-pasted printed paper and press type on printed paper, with audio recording, 23.2 × 32.1 cm, MoMA. https://www.moma.org/collection/workslocale=en&utf8=&q=ladik&classifications=28&date_begin=Pre-1850&date_end=2020&include_uncataloged_works=1&page=&direction

In the 1970s, Ladik often performed naked, like a shaman. She relished in creating acts that were in flux and differentiation. Her poetry is characterised by its encounter with Hungarian folk poetry, and, more largely, with archaic mythology in relation to modern civilisation.

In 1970, she explained her artistic intent: 

‘I want to engage my audience in a kind of a ritual, a public ceremony celebrating the unity of body and spirit. This allows me to spouse every spectator. This is the deal: I am naked and the audiences are relieved of prejudice.’

Ladik’s notorious performance Blackshave Poem from 1978 is a testament to her proclivity for satire, as she ironically comments on gender clichés. In the performance, Ladik wears lace lingerie over long-sleeved black clothing. Piece by piece, Ladik removes her lingerie and proceeds to apply shaving cream onto her black clothes, face, and armpits—representing the act of shaving. She (somewhat problematically) mimics ‘black’ skin, as the title references, through wearing black garments. This first performance of the artwork took place in Ladik’s apartment in Novi Sad, Serbia in 1978 and was performed specifically for the camera, without the presence of an audience. In the last moment, the artist shamefully covers her crotch with her hands, as if to gesture that she was stripped bare.

Ladik later referred to the performance as an ‘inverted striptease,’ and went on to perform it on numerous other occasions at public venues in Zagreb, Novi Sad, and Budapest. Each variant of the performance encompassed different actions in one event, ranging from poetry to phonic to movement-based performances.

Katalin Ladik, Blackshave Poem; Novi Sad, Narodna Biblioteka, 1978. Courtesy: espavisor, Valencia; photograph: Imre Póth

In Budapest, as part of a two-hour event, Ladik performed Blackshave Poem alongside an exhibition of her collages and scores. She simultaneously performed material relating to her Phonopoetica record from 1976, which includes voice interpretations of Hungarian visual poets’ works, namely that of Gábor Tóth and Bálint Szombathy, in relation to jazz sequences and phonic experimentation. 

Katalin Ladik, Phonopoetica, 1976, 7-inch-vinyl, Galerija Studentskog kulturmog centra, Beograd, MoMA. https://www.moma.org/collection/works?locale=en&utf8=&q=ladik&classifications=28&date_begin=Pre-1850&date_end=2020&include_uncataloged_works=1&page=&direction

Ladik challenges voyeuristic expectations by performing the act of body shaving as a defiant presentation of the conventions of female beauty. This ‘anti-strip tease,’ performed by someone who remains dressed, parodies the expectations of her audiences and challenges the male gaze. As art historian Emese Kürti has articulated, the grotesque quality and humourous aspect of the act with its taboo motif of shaving reflects the artist’s effort to shock and provoke, as well as her aim of eliminating gender roles. Ladik’s embrace of androgyny serves as a metaphor for her form of feminism.

Ladik faced press scrutiny after a nude performance at a poetry event in central Hungary in 1970. Her public nudity was received as an erotic provocation of the public. After her performance, a media response manifested itself in the production of nude photographs, which were published in the men’s magazine Start, and were deemed too pornographic and transgressive. Seeing her eroticized body as a vehicle for communication, Ladik increasingly shifted her interests towards positing feminist critiques through an androgynous position— a position through which Ladik’s performances like Blackshave Poem can be better contextualised. 

Importantly, Ladik never declared herself as a feminist. The type of art that was produced at the time in Eastern Europe did not directly align itself with western ideas of feminism and had different principles in mind. It is crucial to understand that many Eastern European women artists did not choose to identify as feminine or to associate with supposed “feminine art” due to their state of marginality, so as to avoid social backlash. As a consequence of such attitudes, many women artists embraced gender-neutral approaches to art. Thus, androgynous approaches granted them more freedom and an avoidance from hostility. 

The motif of bisexuality as a female subject is prevalent in Ladik’s poetry, as she uses it in her art as a tool for commenting on concepts of desire, pleasure, and the deconstruction of heteronormative power relations. Ladik’s refusal to submit herself to patriarchal norms and morals is expressed by her defiance and individualised sexuality. Her nude studio performances, as well as the unauthorized, unorthodox street acts by Ladik and others challenged socialist morals and the power of the police during the Communist era. Their politics of dissent reflect experimental artistic attitudes, disillusionment towards the Hungarian political climate of the 1960s and 1970s, and an increasingly ‘radical’ attitude towards gender norms and cultural defiance.

It is important to recognize these artistic contributions within their wider international context, for many (notably female or queer) artists have been written out of history, both in the historiography of Eastern Europe, as well as in current discussions of Eastern European feminism and political dissonance. Thus, it is important to remember how Katalin Ladik’s oeuvre, with its corporeal poetic forms and admonition to subjectivity, allowed for greater developments in the Hungarian and Yugoslavian avant-gardes.

Bibliography

Susanne Altmann, Hilke Wagner, and Katarina Lozo. Medea muckt auf: Radikale Künstlerinnen hinter dem Eisernen Vorhang. Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung, Walther Konig, 2019.

Barthes, Roland. ‘From Work to Text,’ in Image, Music, Text trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press, 1977.

Bingham, Juliet. ‘Katalin Ladik, Blackshave Poem, 1978’. The Tate Modern. Published March 2017. Assessed 3 January, 2020. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/ladik-blackshave-poem-p82087.

Brzyski, Anna and Piotr Pitrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe, 1945-1989. London: Reaktion Books 2011.

Cerwonka, Allaine. ‘Traveling Feminist Thought: Difference and Transculturation in Central and Eastern European Feminism.’ Signs 33, no. 4 (2008): 809-32. Accessed February 11, 2020. doi:10.1086/528852.

Folkerts, Hendrik. ‘Keeping Score: Notation, Embodiment and Liveness’. Published 24 March, 2016. Assessed 6 January, 2020. https://www.documenta14.de/en/south/464_keeping_score_notation_embodiment_and_liveness.

Ladik, Katalin. ‘Phonopoetica (Full Album, experimental/avant-garde, Yugoslavia/Hungary 1976)’, Published 24 March, 2016. Assessed 6 January, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCOlpf4qkXU.

Kürti, Emese. Screaming Hole: Poetry, Sound, and Action as Intermedia Practice in the Work of Katalin Ladik, Budapest: acb ResearchLab 2017.

Ladik, Katalin. ‘Artists: Katalin Ladik’. Documenta14. Published 8 April, 2017. Assessed 6 January, 2020. https://www.documenta14.de/en/artists/13488/katalin-ladik.

MoMA, ‘Katalin Ladik’, MoMA Resources. Assessed 6 January 2020. https://www.moma.org/collection/works?locale=en&utf8=&q=ladik&classifications=28&date_begin=Pre-1850&date_end=2020&include_uncataloged_works=1&page=&direction.

Szkárosi, Endre. ‘The Spatial Expansion of Language in Sound Poetry in Western and Eastern Europe’, in Yael Kaduri, The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Western Art, New York: Oxford University Press 2016, 426-454.

Ladik, Katalin. ‘Follow Me into the Mythology’, 1981. Translated by Jószef Aradi. Cited in https://www.documenta14.de/en/artists/13488/katalin-ladik.