Tibor Hajas was a performance artist, photographer and film-maker. He died young but his artistic career was intense and hotly debated in the 1970s. Hajas was active primarily as a poet and writer until 1975. His powerful and socio-politically engaged vision set him apart. In the second half of the 1970s, he created his most important and mature work, which consisted mainly of actions and performances that he developed specifically for the medium of photography. Hajas distinguished himself from his contemporaries in the field of body and performance art in the 1970s – including Marina Abramović and Chris Burden – by advancing the photographic repercussions of his actions and performances as the true artworks, as opposed to being mere documentation. Yet Hajas could not totally dispense with performance and it was always his preferred medium of physical and psychological expression, one that allowed direct and penetrating communication.
Hajas tested his physical and mental stamina in most of his performances. He often combined a burning and oppressive indictment with the ambiguous and triumphant mentality of an actor who strives to please, affect and control his audience at all costs. Hajas’ actions often revealed substantive contradictions, such as narcissism versus self-hatred, life versus death and power versus loneliness. On a formal level, his performance work is often compared to that of the Viennese Actionists, a loose-knit group of artists that emerged in Austria in the second half of the 1960s (with Hermann Nitsch, Otto Muehl and Günter Brus as key representatives). The Viennese Actionists often made extremely radical performances that were mentally and physically gruelling. Because they did not usually perform in front of audiences, these artists also valued photography; it was just as vital as the performance itself and, again, transcended its documentary function.
Tibor Hajas always performed his actions in front of viewers, however, and often went to great lengths to involve them in his work. In the performance Dark Flash (1978) in Warsaw, for example, he was suspended by a rope from the ceiling of a gallery. In his bound hands, he held a camera, filming the audience until he passed out with bleeding wrists. Had the audience not freed Hajas in a timely fashion, he probably would have died. The end of the film shows a long period of hesitation: the spectators must decide what to do. They eventually help the stricken artist. The video and photomontages of Hajas’ performances and actions confront us with a poignant, frightening and cynical worldview. Hajas is considered a late representative of so-called ‘heroic individualism’, a late 19th-century ideology that champions the omnipotence of the ‘I’, based purely on the power of the mind. It was widely imitated in the 1970s, typically in contemporary Eastern European art.
