IPUT - International Parallel Union of Telecommunications
Infinitesimal Eros, or Sexual Voting Booth Counterrevolution for Children
IPUT - International Parallel Union of Telecommunications)
INFINITESIMAL EROS,
or Sexual Voting Booth Counterrevolution for Children
(Neo-Hedonist Happening/Environment - Neo-Masochistic Performance/Installation)
On view: 8/11/2024 - 5/01/2025
Opening: 7 November 2024 (Thursday) 7pm, Trafó Gallery
Prologue: Emese Kürti
Compassistant: Márton Dobay
Behind the drumkit: Balázs Pándi
Provocation: Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermair: 4' 33" Generation Gap
Actionists: Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermair & Wolfgang Obermair
Moscow-Munich Axis Duo
Conductor: Tamás St.Turba
"...I'm not saying that I know the solution, I don't have the solution, but as a living being and a survivor being, I do certain things, for example I strive to create visual information that is very definitely in contradiction with the system, the aesthetic-visual system that Europe, and actually the whole world, has been trying to crystallize since the beginning towards the beautiful and the good. I am trying to turn this visual practice, that is to say, the making of images, on its head, and I am trying to locate and recognize the space in which I am making something bad and ugly, as if to prove that we can colonize even those areas that are forbidden. I have always been interested in the forbidden. "1
The International Parallel Union of Telecommunications (IPUT) was founded in 1966 to collectively operate a level of reality parallel to the status quo, with the central idea: Art: kitsch. - History: kitsch; Art: everything that is forbidden. Be forbidden!
IPUT, so the International Parallel Union of Telecommunications was founded in an effort to counterbalance and complement the activity of the IUT, the International Union of Telecommunications. Founded in 1864, after the invention of Morse code, the IUT controls all telecommunications equipment and information channels, keeping free telecommunications - which also threatens power relations - under control. We do not know what IUT does exactly. To counterbalance its activities, the IPUT wants to change the direction and purpose of technology according to the level of technological development, using the instruments of direct democracy. Replacing the labour dogma with the strike dogma, it practises and propagates the strike on the basis of the Subsistence Level Standard strike in progress, demanding the introduction of a Subsistence Level Income at the expense of the war budget, in the face of production and overconsumption.2
It is the interlocking of strike activity that both enumerates misery and enumerates war, the forbidden fruit of the mess-tin. Tamás St.Turba, in an interview with him, summed up the task of the IPUT in this way: ‘When, in the spirit of Radical Hedonism, Aesthesis is posited in an existential outlook as the highest possible concept and when the sole divinity of the AEA (the Aesthetic Absolute) is the object of worship, the devil is also an aesthetic category. IPUT deals with saving this devil from Myth.’3
Tamás St. Turba4 (Szentjóby, Szetjóby, Szjauby, Mentjóby, St.Auby, Emmy (Emily) Grant, St. Aubsky, T. Taub, szenytyóbi etc.) is a non-artist-artist, Trust.ee in bankruptcy of IPUT (International Parallel Union of Telecommunications) and agent of NETRAF (Neo-Socialist. Realist. IPUT's Global Counter Arthist.ory-Falsifiers Front).
St. Turba broke with traditional poetry in 1966, the year of the first Hungarian happening (entitled The Lunch. In memoriam Batu Khan), which he conducted together with Gábor Altorjay and Miklós Jankovics. From 1963, he translated essays by Béla Hamvas, and from 1966 he translated, reproduced and distributed texts related to Fluxus in samizdat. He became involved in the Mail-art movement. In 1966, he founded the International Paralel Union of Telecommunications - under the pseudonym Parallel Course/ Study Track. IPUT started to deal with the St.Rike in 1972 which led to the Subsistence Level Standard Project 1984 W - Make a chair! - (LSP1984W) programme in 1974 that builds on the mutation-basis of Duchamp's diversion (Non-Art as Art) transcended by George Brecht (Non-Art as Art as Non-Art-Art).
St.Turba was charged by the pseudo-communist authority with porno-anarchistic subversion due to his non-art-artistic radicalism and participation in the Samizdat-movement, got arrested and was sent to exile in 1974. Being a Swiss citizen, he settled down in Geneva, CH. IPUT continued the LSP1984W-operation and established the Near-East-European Free University for West-European Jobless People (with Ast.Ronomy-, R’n’R- and St.Rike Departments). In 1987, he opened a gallery in Geneva with a No Profile, No Professional, No Profit, No Proli, No Program program. Since 1980, he has organized several Non-Art-Art Strikes in Europe. In 1989-90 he made a 365-day round-the-world trip. After the 1989 coup in 1991, on the day when the last Soviet soldier left Hungary, St.Turba returned to Hungary, and exactly one year later, as director of the Bartók32 Gallery, for three days he transformed the Statue of Liberty on Gellért Hill into the Statue of the Spirit of Liberty. In 1991, he became a lecturer at the newly established Intermedia Creche of the Hungarian Mercantile-Military Penalty-University of Fine Arts. In 1996, he presented Phase IV of LSP1984W, the Salvation History Ascent, at the Kunsthalle in Budapest. In 2001 the IPUT launched the Neo Socialist.a-Realist.a IPUT Global Counter Art History Falsifiers Front and published the NETRAF manifesto. In 2003, it organized the first grassroots, direct democratic referendum in Hungary on the issue of joining the Neutral Weaponfree Near-East-European Fluxus Green Zone. Also since 2003, it has organized referendums in favour of the Subsistence Minimum Allocation funded from the military budget. In 2012 he was kicked out from the Intermedia Creche because during and outside of his lectures he constantly called for cultural-legal-economic systemic change in the Creche, on and off campus - to no avail. "I am responsible for everything," he proclaimed in the Basilica. In 2013, IPUT presented LSP1984W at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest and published the bilingual interview book FIKA/BOGEY. In 2019, he opened the St James Hiram Bedford - St Helen Adams Keller - St Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen Holy Trinity Chandelier Basilica Archive in Káptalantóti, containing LSP1984W, and in 2020, IPUT founded the Basic Democracy - Basic Income Foundation in the same place.
Long live Basic Democracy! Long live Universal Basic Income! Long live Heterarchy!
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1 Tamás Szentjóby. Excerpt from the interview by Tamás Mészáros, MTV, 1990. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTCyGLbHc8o
2 Based on Tamás Szentjóby’s lecture The Inevitable https://www.c3.hu/scca/butterfly/IPUT/projecthu.html
3 BOGEY / FIKA (Fiatal Művészek Klubja / Young Artists’ Club) – Interview with Tamás St.Auby – Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Arts, Budapest, 2013, page 0.
4 The biography is based on the following texts:
- Article from the lexicon of the now defunct and inaccessible online journal Artportal. The author of the article is Tamás Szentjóby
- Emese Kürti's review of Tamás St.Auby's New Unit of Measurement (1965/2012) on the website of Ludwig Museum https://www.ludwigmuseum.hu/mutargy/uj-mertekegyseg
- Hedvig Turai: Past Unmaster: Hot and Cold Memory in Hungary. In Third Text, Vol. 23, Issue 1 (2009)
- Piotr Piotrowski (translated by Anna Brzyski). In The Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989. London: Reaktion Books. 2005
- Petra Stegmann: Tamás St. Auby: A striking non-art artist. Culturebase (2007) http://www.culturebase.net/artist.php?3843
- Emese Kürti: To Disorient the Troops. Tamás St.Auby’s exhibition in Karlsruhe, part 1. http://exindex.hu/print.php?l=en&page=3&id=773
Image credit: Tamás Szentjóby Tamás: Portable Trench for Three, 1969/2011 (stretcher bar, gauze, sulphur powder, glue, nail) Photo: Dávid Biró
Supported by: Basic Democracy - Basic Income Foundation, National Cultural Fund, Tibor Liska, Baron János von Beöthy, Káli Kövek
Not supported by: Hungarian Academy of Arts, Széchenyi Academy of Literature and Arts, Palace of Arts Budapest, Ludwig Museum Budapest, World Federation of Arms Dealers
