N 2007, the National Museum in Warsaw exhibited the part of its collec

Part I  ·  Moving People
The Balatonboglár event was crowned by the third and most direct action 
of shaking hands performed between every member of the Czechoslovakian 
and Hungarian groups of artists. Both groups consisted of the most signifi-
cant artists of the time. The Hungarian group included Imre Bak, Péter Le-
géndy, László Méhes, Gyula Pauer, Tamás Szentjóby, Péter Halász, Béla Hap, 
Ágnes Háy, Péter Türk, György Jovánovics, Gyula Gulyás, Miklós Erdély, and 
László Beke; and the Czechoslovakian group included Vladjimir Popović, 
Petr Štembera, Rudolf Sikora with his wife, Jiří Valoch, Gindl, Jiří H. Koc-
man, Peter Bartoš, Stano Filko with his wife, and the wife of Tamáš Pospiszyl.
The individual handshakes were photographed and organized by Jenő 
Boriszov in the kind of table used to calculate the distance between geo-
graphical spots, in which the distance can be found in the intersection of the 
geographical names placed both vertically (names of Czechoslovakian artists) 
and horizontally (names of Hungarian artists). The visual matrix showed the 
relevance of both the notion of distance and the idea of approach. It consti-
tuted the symbolic apology and reconciliation conducted on a personal level. 
As Gyula Pauer said on behalf of the Hungarian artists: “we have reconciled 
and that was essential.”
797
 The work was therefore a peculiar rank-and-file ac-
tion of solidarity—the intellectual construction of Miklós Erdély. The joined 
hands recalled the motive used extensively in 1848 as the symbol of fraterni-
ty.
798
 The project realized in practice the slogan justifying the Warsaw Pact 
invasion, namely “fraternal support.”
Artists participating in the event represented a specific age group—most 
of them were studying in the period between the political occurrences of 1956 
and 1968. Some were engaged in revolutionary acts. Fifteen-year-old Györ-
gy Galántai prepared the posters for the demonstrations, which had conse-
quences for his career as he was refused acceptance to the art school. The old-
est among the participants was Miklós Erdély, born in 1928, who, as a student 
of architecture, organized the action 
Unguarded Money in 1956, which was 
recognized as the first Hungarian happening. The money collected by the 
artist on the streets of Budapest was left unguarded, thus demonstrating that 
revolutionary Budapest was a space of social trust. A significant proportion 
797 Ibid.
798  The motive is present on the plinth in the picture created as a project for the competition for the symbolic 
representation of the Second Republic by Ange Louis Jane Lange. 
of the participants were born between 1939 and 1944: 1939 (Bak, Jovánov-
ics, and Popović), 1941 (Pauer and Galántai), 1943 (Türk), and 1944 (Beke, 
Méhes and Szentjóby). Stano Filko was slightly older (1937). The young-
est were Petr Štembera (1945), Péter Halász, Jiří Valoch, and Rudolf Sikora 
(1946), Péter Legéndy (1948), and Ágnes Háy (1952).
Thus, the act of shaking hands served for the group of intellectuals made 
up of students as the reconfirmation of the reliable Hungarian–Czechoslova-
kian student bond, strengthened by numerous historical facts.
799
The space of the Balatonboglár Chapel defined by Beke provided a room 
for the artistic dialogue of both groups of artists. Most of the exhibited works 
extended the idea of cooperation by applying the discourse of mail art. 
Stamp 
Activity Love by Jiří H. Kocman, Telegram by Endre Tót, or Envelopes by 
Imre Bak characterized the space of the dialogue in geographical terms.
The crucial example of such an interpretation was 
Telegram, a work by En-
dre Tót, created in the series of mail art works sent to the West through Yu-
goslavia. It reads: “I write to you because you are there, I am here.” The essen-
tial division in the “here” of the sender/artist and the “there” of the recipient 
determines both the autotelic and the political meaning of the work. This is 
the directly formulated information concerning the Wall’s existence sent to 
Western Europe. And although the destination is reached—the mail crossed 
the geographical border of censorship—the aim still cannot be reached. The 
language appears to be the strictest censor—the telegram’s communication 
remains illegible because it is formulated in Hungarian.
Thus, the incessant translation manifests itself as the inalienable compo-
nent of international cooperation, both in terms of the signifiers and signi-
fied, which are not universal, but shaped by social, historical, and geograph-
ical factors. In terms of meaning, the event in the chapel was determined by 
such communication—the artists did not share a language—despite the fact 
that they had all been taught Russian. They communicated in the process of 
translation using some English and some of their own languages. There was 
no universal language that came to the rescue. There had been no semantic 
field of negotiated meanings, as the historical reality had proved.
799 Jerome Karabel “The Revolt of The Intellectuals: The Origins of The Prague Spring and The Politics of 
Reform Communism.” IRLE Working Paper No. 20-90, 1990, http://irle.berkeley.edu/workingpa-
pers/20-90.pdf.

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Part I  ·  Moving People
The forcible example of the work recognizing this shortcoming would be 
the project of the action by Péter Halász, which was not executed—probably 
due to the striking resemblance with the proposal of Beke. Halász was the 
founder of the experimental theater, established in Budapest in 1969, later 
known as Squat and banned six months before the end of January 1972. This 
resulted in 1976 in the group leaving the country with one-way immigration 
documents.
The project of Halász would enable us to define this cooperation as being 
based on the essential lack of certainty of the shared dictionary or common 
field of meanings, founded exclusively on trust and the essential difference. Art-
ists would shake hands in the space of the chapel, blindfolded; this would force 
them to find their way to each other using the spoken language as their tool. 
Moreover, the action—unlike the executed version of Beke—would create the 
possibility of handshakes among the members of national groups, indicating 
national divisions as the result of the events of 1968. Such an event would es-
tablish an interesting link with Erdély’s action of 1956 and Szentjóby’s
 Expul-
sion-Exercise, Punishment-Preventive Autotherapy—the action realized during 
the 
Direct Week, at the beginning of July 1972. It was probably the most signifi-
cant action conducted within the Hungarian art scene in terms of defining the 
space of the creation as appropriated, nerved with various discourses of power. 
The artist was sitting in the chapel with a bucket on his head allowing visitors 
to ask him politically related questions, despite being aware that the chapel was 
under surveillance. Szentjóby thus interpreted this communication as the pro-
cess of interrogation based on both risk and trust.
During the 
Direct Week, Péter Legéndy exhibited the work of art Plum 
Dumplings, which was shown at the Hungarian–Czechoslovakian exhibition 
as well. Alluding to the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the work used the ready-
made container of fruit-filled dumplings on which one of the photographed 
dumplings had been replaced by a three-dimensional dumpling. The work, 
equipped with the manifesto propagating the dumpling as the “measure of 
our safety,” replaces the hard bullets of political facts with the soft ammuni-
tion of the dish descended from Czech cuisine and spread over the borders by 
means of customs, entertainment, and invitation, polemic toward the politi-
cal geography of the present, pointing to an alternative one, disregarding the 
boundaries created by censorship and restrictions.
Some artists, such as László Méhes or Tamás Szentjóby, used the tool of 
language to relate to cooperation. Méhes made his intervention illegible by 
writing with a white crayon on the white surface of walls. Szentjóby coined 
the slogan “Rob nieco aby som mohl pomahat”—“Do a little to be able to 
help yourself”—written with some mistakes in Czech. The action consti-
tuted a polemic gesture toward the Marxist notion of labor and super-pro-
duction. For the Hungarian artist, the act had the status of helping to liqui-
date the consequences of the totalitarian regime and was therefore defined by 
Szentjóby as a minimal amount of work, just the absolute essentials. The art-
ist was very much aware that the individual was not in a position to compete 
with the scope of the machinery of the communist regime. Hence, the no-
tion of minimal labor—distorting the logic of the ideology. This construc-
Radomska Fig2. 
Figure 28.2. 
Péter Legéndy, 
Plump dumplings, 1972. Artpool Research Center in 
Budapest, courtesy of Júlia Klaniczay and György Galántai.

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Part I  ·  Moving People
tion, similar to Havel’s “power of the powerless,” was inviolable for totalitari-
an logic, like a fly for a sledgehammer.
The imperfect and erroneous use of the Czech language established the 
perfect device in relation to the tragic political incidents of 1968. The nature 
of the “Czech error” was of both a political and a linguistic nature. It was 
the effect of an abortive belief on the part of the Czechoslovakian intellec-
tual elite in the seemingly universally valid language system and could there-
fore not possibly be cured by the alternative universal communication struc-
ture—of a linguistic, semantic, or moral character. The result of the artistic 
cooperation of Hungarian and Czechoslovakian artists in August 1972 was 
that it revealed the weakness of the network thus created. Although it was 
probably one of the most politically oriented moments of artistic coopera-
tion in communist Europe, the artists succeeded only partially in escaping 
the utopia of the universal system of communication, taking revenge on the 
universal system forcefully imposed on them. The historical fact of this co-
operation is hard to overestimate as it had an exceptional character, both in 
terms of content and its directly political nature.
T
 
he Foksal Gallery was certainly one of the few cultural institutions in 
Poland that could develop contacts with international partners in Social-
ist times. Thanks to its backing in the art community, mainly from Tadeusz 
Kantor and Ryszard Stanisławski, the gallery entered the international art 
scene during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This article will focus on two 
stages of its international experiences: Foksal’s participation in the “3e Salon 
international de ‘Galeries-pilotes’” in Lausanne (1970) and, a few years later, 
its attendance at the Edinburgh Festival (1972 and 1979).
When the Foksal Gallery was founded in 1966 by the art critics Wiesław 
Borowski, Hanka Ptaszkowska, and Mariusz Tchorek, some of the most re-
spectable Polish artists of these times, such as Tadeusz Kantor and Henryk 
Stażewski, joined the gallery. Foksal mainly presented exhibitions that prob-
lematized the artistic process itself. As a public institution on the margins 
of the state-owned Visual Art Workshops (Pracownie Sztuk Plastycznych, 
PSP), it received infrastructural and material support to organize its artis-
tic projects. While exhibiting modern and avant-garde art, the gallery kept 
an apparent distance from governmental endeavors to instrumentalize art. 
Thomas Skowronek
29
Crossing the Border: The Foksal Gallery from 
Warsaw in Lausanne/Paris (1970) and 
Edinburgh (1972 and 1979)

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Part I  ·  Moving People
However, Foksal’s combination of different institutional layers and artistic 
discourses provoked ambivalent reactions. In recent times, a number of pub-
lications have focused on the gallery’s artistic and institutional strategies. 
Marek Krajewski, for example, has analyzed the reluctance of the gallery to 
combine highly self-reflective art with contemplation about its social and po-
litical embeddedness. By so doing, Krajewski concludes, Foksal was taking 
the risk that its institutionally critical statements, finally, would turn into 
formalistic gestures.
800
 In a recent publication, Luiza Nader examined the 
conceptualistic traits of the art presented at Foksal. The author observed a 
change from a self-critical institution to a gallery, rather conservatively de-
fending its former status against the art community.
801
 Besides other pub-
lications, these studies refer to the controversial achievements of the Foksal 
Gallery.
802
 Within the scope of this publication, the present article wishes to 
continue the critical approach of these studies by examining some aspects of 
the genealogy of Foksal’s international affairs.
The idea of international contacts was central for Foksal from its very be-
ginning. Kantor’s words became a leitmotif for the gallery: “National art only 
matters when it transcends its own national borders. Otherwise, it becomes 
particular.”
803
 However, the sociopolitical system in Poland imposed certain 
restrictions. Therefore, for every exhibition that should be taken abroad or 
every foreign artist invited, official permission was to be requested. Corre-
spondingly, the first international experiences of the gallery began rather by 
chance. According to Borowski, one of the first contacts with members from 
foreign art worlds took place in Warsaw during the Seventh International 
Congress of the Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art (AICA) in 
1960. Here, the group of critics met with Pierre Restany, for example. Al-
800 See Marek Krajewski, “Strategie upowszechniania sztuki w Polsce w latach 1956–1989. Na przykładzie 
Galerii Krzywe Koło, Galerii Foksal i Gruppy” (PhD diss., Adam Mickiewicz University, 1997), http://
hdl.handle.net/10593/3505.
801  Luiza Nader, 
Konceptualizm w PRL (Warsaw: University of Warsaw Press, 2009).
802 For further aspects, cf. Marcin Lachowski, 
Awangarda wobec instytucji. O sposobach prezentacji sztuki w 
PRL-u (Lublin: Societas Scientiarum Catholicae Universitatis Lublinensis Ioannis Pauli II, 2006); Paweł 
Polit, “Warsaw’s Foksal Gallery 1966–72: Between PLACE and Archive,” 
ARTMargins, 23 January 2009,  
http://www.artmargins.com/index.php/2-articles/179-foksal-gallery-1966-72-between-place-and-archive; 
Thomas Skowronek, “Institutionelle Introjektionen. Poetiken der Galerien Foksal,” in 
Poesie Intermedial, 
ed. Jeanette Fabian (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2012), 181–217.
803  This article is based on an interview with Wiesław Borowski, Warsaw, 16 September 2010. All transla-
tions T. S.
though these first personal contacts did not result in cooperative projects im-
mediately, they paved the way for future encounters. Thanks to the photogra-
pher Tadeusz Rolke, such a personal relationship was responsible for Foksal’s 
first journey abroad, as well as the first foreign artists shown in the gallery. 
In 1967, a friend of Rolke’s, Lars Englund from Sweden, had an exhibition 
at Foksal. In the following year, the gallery members received a private invi-
tation to Stockholm. During this trip, they met with Pontus Hultén, at this 
time the director of Moderna Museet and the future founding director of the 
Centre Pompidou.
The “official” history of Foksal’s travels abroad begins with a visit by Pierre 
Pauli, the founder of Lausanne’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs. He came with an 
invitation to the “3e Salon international de Galeries-pilotes.” The “Salon” was 
an exhibition of art galleries taking place in the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-
Arts in Lausanne. In 1970 it was organized for the third time by René Berg-
er, Paul-Henri Jaccard, Pierre Pauli, and others (the previous occasions hav-
ing been in 1963 and 1966). In these years, a total of forty-three galleries from 
Europe, North and South America, and Japan exhibited at the “Salon.” From 
Eastern Europe, there were three institutions besides Foksal: the Gallery of 
Contemporary Art (Zagreb, 1966), the Galerie Art Centre (Prague, 1966), 
and the Moderna Galerija (Ljubljana, 1970).
804
 The Swiss agreed to cover all 
costs and to deal with any administrative matters. For organizational help, 
the gallerists turned to Kantor.
805
 To represent Foksal, the following artists 
were chosen: J. Bereś, Z. Gostomski, T. Kantor, E. Krasińki, M. Stangret, and 
H. Stażewski. They were accompanied by the three gallerists and the photog-
rapher Eustachy Kossakowski. Except for Kantor, all eventually left for Lau-
sanne.
806
Concluding from the countries the galleries predominantly came from—
in Western Europe and the United States—the “global” approach of these 
events was quite restricted. But considering the political division of Europe in 
East and West, the “Salon,” certainly functioned as a means of transgressing 
these borders. In the preface to the catalog of the second “Salon,” Berger men-
tions the antagonism of “America” and “Russia,” though he reformulates it at 
804  See http://college-de-vevey.vd.ch/auteur/gp123/index.html.
805  Thus, according to Borowski: “The project was done mainly by Kantor,” Interview with Borowski.
806  Kantor did not receive his passport to leave the country. Cf. Interview with Borowski.

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2. The Moscow Underground Art Scene…
Part I  ·  Moving People
the same time. Currently, Berger writes in 1966, it is the cosmos where the su-
perpowers continue their struggle. Nowadays, scientific discoveries are the 
foundation of supremacy. That is, Berger literarily moves the political conflict 
into space, extracting science as a means for knowledge production and con-
trol. Therefore, according to Berger, developments in the arts should be ex-
amined as meticulously as in other areas. For this reason, the author calls for 
“observatories” that would monitor ongoing processes, “research facilities” 
that would help to grasp not only “known constellations” but also “flashing 
lights” as well.
807
 “Truth,” Berger correspondingly continues in the preface 
to the third catalog, “becomes critique.”
808
 As a positive example, Berger dis-
cerns the Venice Biennale or documenta. And: “Somehow, the international 
salon of the ‘Galeries-pilotes’ pursues the same goal.”
809
 A “Galeries-pilotes” 
dedicates oneself to the “discovery of new talents.”
810
 Thus, Foksal was repre-
sented here as a scientific institution observing the development of art in Po-
land, based on the elastic paradigm of universalistic and modern art. Accord-
ing to Borowski, the focus stayed on art; no ideological or political issues were 
raised.
811
 Collateral to the proceeding artistic exchange, the participants en-
countered each other as professionals of perception. Each gallery observed ar-
tistic and institutional developments while at the same time being observed. 
Despite some sociopolitical differences, art galleries in the East and West had 
to cope with similar factors. Namely, the 
White Cube as one of the spatial and 
discursive conditions of exhibiting art, catalogs, and archives as administra-
tive devices or the task of interconnecting collectors, critics, and an interest-
ed public with artists and their art. Thus, the “Salon” functioned as an obser-
vational technology, confirming and reinforcing the ultimately scientific role 
of galleries that, in the words of René Berger, consisted in the production of 
knowledge and truth.
For Foksal, the sojourn in Lausanne was a gateway for further meetings. 
In Chexbres, they met with Theodor Ahrenberg, a collector interested in 
807  René Berger, 
Bedeutung und Ziel der internationalen Ausstellung der “Galeries-Pilotes.” Vorwort zum Kata-
log der 2. Ausstellung der “Galeries-Pilotes” (Lausanne: Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, 1966), 10.
808  René Berger, “Préface,” in 
3e Salon international de Galeries pilotes. Lausanne. Paris. Artistes et découvreurs 
de notre temps, ed. René Berger et al. (Lausanne: Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, 1970), IX–X, X. Transla-
tion T. S.
809 Berger, 
Bedeutung und Ziel der internationalen Ausstellung der “Galeries-Pilotes”, 11.
810 Ibid.
811  Interview with Borowski.
Eastern European artists, notably in Kantor. In Rome, Foksal stayed with 
the artist Achille Perilli who was among the first foreign artists exhibiting 
at the gallery (in 1969). Finally, the Foksal group also visited the Venice Bi-
ennale. After the exhibition finished in Lausanne, it moved to Paris at the 
end of October 1970, where it was exhibited in the Musée National d’Art 
Moderne. As before, the members of the Foksal group came to the exhibi-
tion. This time, it was Jean Leymarie, the director of the museum, who was 
an important contact person, as well as Pierre Restany, with whom the gal-
lerists refreshed their contact from Warsaw.
812
 Asked about the immediate 
consequences of the “Salon” for the gallery, Borowski referred to the direc-
tory that was created with contacts in Western art worlds.
813
 Furthermore, 
Foksal asked 
Studio International for a subscription. Subsequently, the gal-
lery received this and many other Western publications, such as 
Art Forum 
or 
Kunstforum. Thus, the “concrete” travel experiences were translated into 
an administrative compilation, where locations and persons were represented 
as junctions in a discursive network. Interestingly, this mapping was, in part, 
under way before Foksal left for Lausanne, thanks to Kantor or Perilli. The ef-
fect the journey had can be described as a realignment of a discursive map. 
Within this realm, future inspections of geographical spaces as well as exhi-
bitional projects were preliminarily staged. To give a negative example, a pre-
sentation of Beuys, planned in the 1970s, could not be realized due to inter-
ference from Polish officials.
814
 Thus, while this project remained inside the 
gallery’s administrative regime, it still “transpassed,” in its own way, national 
borders and geographical distances between Düsseldorf and Warsaw.
After the “Salon,” the next experiences abroad were in Scotland in 1972 
and 1979. Once again, the invitation to participate arrived from the outside. 
But, obviously, it was also a result of Foksal’s reputation, the gallery having 
become well established by then. And it was Kantor, once again, who func-
tioned as a key mediator for Foksal. Richard Demarco, one of the organizers 
of the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, was fond of the art he saw in the gallery.
815
 
Thus, he agreed to invite Kantor’s theater “Cricot 2,” together with Foksal, as 
812 Ibid.
813 Ibid.
814  Ibid., 16 September 2010. Similarly, in 2004 a major exhibition of Foksal in Munich did not materialize.
815 Ibid.

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