D O C U M E N T/ I N T R O D U C T I O N

MIkLÓs erdÉLy, ernsT bLOch, kurT
gÖdeL, and hIdden green

sÁndor hornyik

Hidden Green was Miklós Erdély’s fi rst solo show, a mysterious envi-
ronment1 he created in a cultural center2 on the outskirts of Budapest in
1977. Thanks to Eszter Bartholy, we have access to Erdély’s own inter-
pretation of the work. Any interpretation of his interpretation must take
into account Erdély’s preoccupation with problems of art theory at the
时间. One of the key documents of this engagement is his grand two-
part lecture3 on montage at the College of Fine Arts in Budapest in 1975,
in which he interprets montage theory and practice within the frame-
works of art history and fi lm theory as well as psychology (creativity)
and philosophy (epistemology). At the time, Erdély was also planning
an exhibition on montage and a lecture series on the history and theory
of utopias, as well as being actively involved in art pedagogy within the
limits placed on him by the existing institutional infrastructure. The art-

1
2

Hidden Green [Bújtatott zöld], Budaörs Cultural Center, February 11–25, 1977.
Hungarian neo-avant-garde artists—marginalized and, 在某些情况下, explicitly banned
from the offi cial art scene, their work rejected by the Lectorate of Fine and Applied Arts—
often presented their works and actions in cultural centers on the outskirts of the offi cial art
scene with the help of cultural workers there, bypassing the offi cial jury selection system.
The Mór Jókai Cultural Center in Budaörs, where Erdély built his environment in a com-
munity hall, was such a venue.
Erdély presented two lectures on montage theories, which lasted three hours each. Cf.
Miklós Peternák, “Beszélgetés Erdély Miklóssal 1983 tavaszán” [“A Conversation with
Miklós Erdély in Spring 1983”], Árgus (1991/5): 81.

https://doi.org/10.1162/artm_a_00316

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ist launched his “Creativity Exercises” workshop in 1975,4 with which he
attempted to revolutionize artistic creativity through happenings and
actionism, making use of the methods of contemporary psychology and
pedagogy.5

Since the 1960s, psychological theories of creativity had sought to
explain the emergence of new, innovative intellectual solutions to scien-
tific, 技术性的, and everyday problems, partly in response to the
demands of the scientific-technological revolution.6 In Erdély’s thought,
this connection between theories of creativity, 一方面, 和
everyday and scientific practice, 在另一, was being extended to
include artistic creativity, within which he identified montage as a key
method for generating new meaning. In an epistemological sense,
Erdély considered montage to be the creative combination, or confronta-
的, of formerly independent and unrelated insights and pieces of
知识.

In this epistemological context, the environment of Hidden Green
can be understood as such a confrontation of different kinds of artistic,
scientific, and everyday ideas. One interpretation of Hidden Green has
survived in a text by Eszter Bartholy,7 published in a special 1983 问题
of the journal Magyar Mu˝hely devoted to Miklós Erdély; it is translated
here for the first time. Due to the formal and informal censorship
regimes in Hungary, Magyar Mu˝hely was published in Paris, and it was
one of the most important journals of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde.
Bartholy’s text, which is written in a style reminiscent of reported
speech, includes Erdély’s own authorized interpretation of Hidden

Erdély transformed the sculpture workshop at the cultural center of the Ganz-MÁVAG
Locomotive and Machine Factory into a workshop on creativity exercises. The revised sculp-
ture workshop first ran under the name Motion Planning and Execution Exercises and was
based on innovative drawing practices, which were designed to animate, disturb, and hin-
der the process of drawing and also allowed and invited the models to move, even trans-
forming the traditional roles of the artist and the model. 例如, participants had to
draw each other while drawing or to continue another participant’s drawing. For a descrip-
tion of the exercises, see Dóra Hegyi, Zsuzsa László, and Franciska Zólyom, 编辑。, 创造力
Exercises: Emancipatory Pedagogies in Art and Beyond (柏林: Sternberg Press, 2020), 45–84.
For further details, see Sándor Hornyik, “Creativity, Collaboration, and Enlightenment:
Miklós Erdély’s ‘Art Pedagogy’,” in Hegyi et al., Creativity Exercises, 183–203.
The Hungarian translation of Erika Landau’s comprehensive volume Psychologie der
Kreativität (München: Ernst Reinhardt, 1971) was published in 1974.
Eszter Bartholy graduated in art history at ELTE University in 1979 with a thesis on fin-de-
siècle villa architecture in the vicinity of Budapest. She became an editor at Corvina
Publishing House in the late 70s, and she did not publish anything on avant-garde or neo-
avant-garde artists other than Erdély.

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绿色的, probably made in 1980.8 Some portions reproduce Erdély’s ideas
literally, while other sections appear to reflect the artist’s thought and
intentions more liberally.

在 1974, Magyar Mu˝hely had awarded Erdély the Lajos Kassák Prize

for Collapsus med.,9 a collection of poems that distinctively combined
poetic, everyday, and scientific discourses. Such poetic combinations of
different styles also shaped Erdély’s artistic actions, 环境, 和
theoretical texts. 实际上, Bartholy’s analysis of Hidden Green, 也, sheds
light on the way that Erdély combines ars poetica and art theory, 尽管
directly reflecting on utopia and on the social function and significance
of art. Representing Erdély’s thought, Bartholy’s article follows avant-
garde traditions by linking social and artistic issues, even though Erdély
attributes meanings to utopia that are far more radical (and ironic) 比
did the historical avant-garde, contending that artists must consider not
only socially improbable, idealized phenomena but also scientifically
improbable and seemingly irrational ones, such as time travel or paral-
lel universes, in order to revolutionize society’s pragmatic mindset.

While the text about Hidden Green has every appearance of being

the interpretation of an artwork, Bartholy and Erdély, in a virtual dia-
logue with thinkers including Ernst Bloch, Kurt Gödel, and Allan
Kaprow, also make categorical claims about art theory and social theory.
These unusual pairings instantly reveal how boldly and provocatively
Erdély uses the theories of montage and creativity. The first half of the
article is a description of the environment of Hidden Green, 在哪里
Erdély’s use of the term environment is similar to Allan Kaprow’s.10 For
Hidden Green is not an exhibition in the classical sense, but an artwork
that intends to function as an environment, or a miniature cosmos,
rather than as an object. The objective of this environment is to affect
visitors and to change their thinking by exposing them to an alternative

Bartholy participated in several of Erdély’s projects, starred in his film Dream
Reconstructions, and once conducted an in-depth interview with the artist. Eszter Bartholy,
“Mélyinterjú Erdély Miklóssal” [“In-Depth Interview with Miklós Erdély”], in Hasbeszélo˝ a
gondolában, 编辑. László Beke, Dániel Csanády, and Annamária Szo˝ke (布达佩斯:
Tartóshullám, 1987), 203–12.

9 Miklós Erdély, Kollapszus orv. [Collapsus med.] (巴黎: Magyar Mu˝hely, 1974). The abbrevia-
tion med. stands for medical, ironically specifying the meaning of collapse. Erdély’s texts
mobilize several contexts and semantic layers of collapse, 破坏, and deconstruction.
From the vantage point of Erdély’s own montage theory, collapse is primarily a collapse (或者
demolition) of coherent meaning and a coherent—naive realist—worldview.

10 Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, Environments, and Happenings (纽约: Harry N. Abrams,

1965).

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现实. This is what Erdély wanted to achieve in Hidden Green by com-
bining hay and a “feeding station,” both reminiscent of the outdoors,
with a desk and chair, confronting an external environment with an
interior space. In the installation, these contrasting objects were linked
by green light and green color, both evoking rich symbolic meanings.
For Erdély, green was not only a symbol of nature and renewal but also
an allegory of hope. Bartholy points to the fact that in the thought of
Ernst Bloch, hope is linked to the theory of art and utopia.11 Bloch
argues that the main objectives of art are to create alternatives to the
given social and cultural order by imagining civilizations that work bet-
ter or differently, where people live more happily under a different set of
法律. 换句话说, Bloch argues that art must create forms for the
desires and social and techno-scientific utopias of humanity. In this con-
文本, Bartholy notes that “even though he [Erdély] did not know Ernst
Bloch’s philosophy of hope at the time, he would happily recognize later
that Hidden Green was a simple symbol of what Ernst Bloch stated in
his philosophy of hope.” However, it can be argued, to the contrary, 那
Erdély was indeed familiar with Bloch’s ideas at the time of Hidden
Green.12 In fact, the lecture series he organized in 1977 (entitled
“Utopia”) included a lecture (“Hope and Possibility”) about philosophi-
cal utopias and touched on Bloch’s ideas, 除其他外.

The phrase “hidden green” implies that the visitor needs to find

something hidden in the space of the environment, namely the green
that is both there—illuminating and permeating the entire space—and
hidden at the same time. Erdély concealed a green strip of felt behind
the feeding station in such a way that it could be found by the visitors.
Erdély notes, 在这方面, that the green strip could also have a disil-
lusioning effect, as it represented an ordinary “objectified green” in a
dreamlike space, failing to offer any kind of redemption or earth-shat-
tering profundity.

The most prominent component of the environment that both high-

lighted and concealed green was a paradoxical object, an odd construc-
tion that Erdély and Bartholy in the article call the “cloud.” This cloud,
paradoxically supported by about fifty wooden slats, consisted of sheets
of paper, a wood pulp board, and a cover made of tracing paper. 在

11
12

Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung I–III (Frankfurt am Main: 苏尔坎普, 1959).
An excerpt from Bloch’s Prinzip Hoffnung on the utopian function of art was published in
Hungary in 1975 in the journal Világosság, which was a well-known intelletual source for
Erdély.

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Erdély’s interpretation, the cloud symbolizes art and its irrationality,
which seems to lend credibility to a positivist world view that relegates
everything to the realm of “art” that does not fit the scientific worldview.13
It may have been due to this richly paradoxical perspective that
Erdély would come to regret—as Bartholy reports in the text—not hav-
ing written on his cloud the name of Kurt Gödel, the famous Austrian
mathematician. 当然, Gödel’s name was only familiar to mathema-
ticians and historians of science at that point, and visual artists did not
reflect on his work at all. Erdély claims that it follows from Gödel’s
famous theorem that all hypotheses rely on an infinite number of pre-
suppositions and are ultimately unprovable. Bartholy writes that,
according to Erdély, “it follows from Gödel’s Theorem—and the object
with its support also alludes to this—that any statement rests upon an
infinite number of presuppositions and is, 像这样, unprovable. 这是
these presuppositions and prejudices that need to be uncovered.”

实际上, it was Pierre Duhem who, before Gödel, came to the con-

clusion that any scientific theorem rested on an infinite number of pre-
suppositions and that, 最后, the refutation of a theorem would
not indicate precisely which presuppositions were false.14 Several phras-
ings of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem (actually, two related theorems)
are known.15 The loosest and most general version states that it is possi-
ble to construct logically true statements in any system of axioms or
arithmetic system that are unprovable and irrefutable within the system
然后, 最后, mathematics and similar systems will never be
formally free of contradiction, so they can never be complete and pro-
vide a perfect description of reality. Gödel takes a classical logical para-
dox (the Epimenides paradox) as the starting point for his theorem,
which also implies that not even modern mathematics is immune to
paradoxes, which in turn undermines the validity of a completely con-
sistent rationalist and positivist worldview.

Paradox, the montage of contradictory statements, was a tool Erdély
used to unhinge everyday thinking and naive realism from the routines

Bartholy wrote that, according to Erdély, “brick by brick, the latest scientific world view had
slowly erected a buttress under the balloon meant to express the irrational nature of art
floating above things” (“Hidden Green”).
Pierre Duhem, La théorie physique: son objet, sa structure (巴黎: Chevalier et Rivière, 1914),
281.
Kurt Gödel, “Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter
Systeme,” Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik 38, 不. 1 (1931): 173–98.

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of goal-oriented rationalism. This is why he instructed his audience on
one occasion, as Bartholy reports, to recite Bertrand Russell’s paradox of
set theory each night as an evening prayer. A greatly simplified version
of this theory states that the set of sets that are not members of them-
selves is a member of itself only if it is not a member of itself.16 The
instruction to recite was probably delivered at Erdély’s 1975 lecture on
montage at the College of Art of the People’s Republic of Hungary,
where he discussed Russell’s discovery as one of the defining paradoxes
of modern science but also touched on Eleatic paradoxes, Zen Buddhist
koans, relativistic cosmology, and the semiotic theories of Julia
Kristeva.17 Using the ideas expressed in his montage lectures, Erdély
launched his own art courses, including “Creativity Exercises,”
“Imagination Developing Exercises,” and “Interdisciplinary Thinking,”
in opposition to the doctrine of Socialist Realism and the mimetic
(反射) theories that still dominated the College of Art at the time.

A few years after the lecture on montage, Erdély presented a guest

lecture at the Department of Aesthetics at ELTE University, 布达佩斯.
In this lecture, entitled “Optimistic Lecture,” Gödel’s and Duhem’s
names appeared in the context of a critique of logical positivism and
rationalism.18 This was also the time when Erdély adopted the notion
that the artist’s task is to borrow from science such thought-provoking
and “dislocating” (IE。, perplexing) tools and notions—such as the clock
paradox from the theory of relativity, or black holes and wormholes
from modern relativistic cosmology—in order to change the mindset of
everyday people and refute the idea that art is irrational, detached from
现实, or primarily a means of entertainment and leisure.

Erdély thought that ideas pulled from theories of relativity or quan-

tum physics that were developed by Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, 和
Born19 illustrated the way in which the discoveries of modern science
transformed everyday human thought. What particularly fascinated him

See Andrew David Irvine and Harry Deutsch, “Russell’s Paradox,” Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/russell-paradox/.
The lecture was published in an abbreviated version: Miklós Erdély, “Montázsgesztus és
effektus” [“Montage Gesture and Effect”], in Miklós Erdély, A filmro˝l [On Film], 编辑. Miklós
Peternák (布达佩斯: Balassi, 1995), 142–60.

18 Miklós Erdély, “Optimistic Lecture,” trans. Katalin Orbán, in Report on the Construction of a
Spaceship Module, 编辑. Vít Havránek, Dóra Hegyi, and Georg Schölhammer (纽约: 新的
Museum of Modern Art, 2014), 5–6.
Erdély read popular science writings by Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr,
and Max Born, a selection of which were published in Hungarian in the 1960s.

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about the theories of relativity and quantum physics was their propo-
nents’ ability to articulate, in everyday language, scientific theories that
contradicted everyday assumptions regarding the operations of macro-
cosmic and microcosmic relations.

Erdély dated the revolutions of modern mathematics and physics to

the early 20th century—in art, the age of the heroic avant-garde—and
connected them to the philosophy of science, specifically to Paul
Feyerabend’s Dadaist epistemology20 and to Arthur Koestler’s theory of
creativity. Feyerabend proposed that his epistemology, which incorpo-
rated explanatory elements from nonscientific sources such as alchemy,
voodoo, 和政治, was not unlike Dada and anarchist practices.
Koestler, in his turn, invented the concept of bisociation to refer to the
scientists’ creative technique of intuitively connecting previously unre-
lated theories.21 It was in this spirit that Erdély’s Hidden Green—both
the text and the environment—connected romantic folk culture (这
feeding station), the modern culture of socialist education (the cultural
中心), the romantic theory of utopia in Marxist aesthetics (Bloch), 和
the paradoxes of modern logic (拉塞尔, Duhem, and Gödel).

True to the spirit of actionism and happenings, Erdély showed up

in person at his installation every day, took the oddly extended “surreal”
broom and swept the hay out of the perfect white circle (关于 1.5 m in
diameter, roughly the same size as the “cloud”) that was surrounded by
它. To him, the white circle symbolized the pure, reflective rationality of
science that could also admit contradictions. Bartholy interprets this
action as a metaphor for the way we can rid ourselves of social roles,
cleansing ourselves of deeply ingrained mental schemas:22 “Whoever
has any openness toward the transcendent will not accept the status of

20 Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (纽约: New Left Books, 1975).
21 One of Koestler’s examples is the discovery of electromagnetism, in the course of which
Ampère and later Maxwell unified descriptions of chemical magnetism and physical elec-
tricity into a single theory. Cf. Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (纽约: Laurel, 1964).
This was also basically the goal the artist set for himself and for his participants during the
“Creativity Exercises” workshop and its successor, the “Imagination Developing Exercises,”
which were launched in the fall of 1977. The latter workshop was devoted to the linguistic
and cultural roots of common stereotypes of art and reality, and it confronted participants
with the absurdity and paradoxes of Zen koans. Erdély’s own theory of art, the theory of the
cancelation of meaning, certainly shows the impact of Zen. For the influence of Zen on
Erdély’s art theory, see Miklós Erdély, “Theses for the Marly Conference of 1980,” trans.
John Batki, in Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since
20世纪50年代, 编辑. Laura Hoptman and Tomás Pospiszyl (纽约: Museum of Modern Art,
2002), 99–101.

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100

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being attached to a role, this attire easily accepted by others. One cannot
wear a costume to the last judgment; an area directed upward needs to
be kept clean, as if naked, just in case, whether the transcendent aspects
of the human being exist or not. The sedimented roles need to be
brushed off it.” On a related note, in his lecture on montage, Erdély sug-
gests that the goal of montage-based artistic practice is to have different
statements and perspectives cancel each other out semantically, 从而
helping the viewer realize that there is no single reality and no represen-
tation or description of reality that can, 像这样, be trusted. He com-
pares the ensuing void and purity to the Zen Buddhist experience of
satori.23

To complete the installation Hidden Green in terms of pedagogy
and activism, Erdély urged visitors to write down, with a green pencil on
white paper placed on a small desk illuminated by green light, 任何
thoughts the exhibition evoked in them. It is a testament to Erdély’s
holistic thinking and humor that he took a donkey to the exhibition
space during its closing, fed it the hay that was part of the installation,
and didn’t fail to note that the donkey carefully avoided the bright white
circle symbolizing scientific rationality, sensing its transcendent quality.