The screening machine used by Pesti Workshop was once made by András Mengyán, who we talked to not only about the creative community, but also about his highly successful career. Selected from the Central Bank of Hungary (MNB) collection, the material showcasing the work of the Pesti Workshop is part of a series of exhibitions involving several cities in China.
How did the journey of Pesti Workshop begin:
It was a long time ago; we were very young then. I graduated from the College of Applied Arts in 1968, working in design and fine arts. I got married in 1969, my wife is Dr Judit Kovács, a lawyer, and we have been living together for almost sixty years. In 1971 I visited a friend in Stockholm who was working for a Swedish design group. It was there that I met one of the design collectives, who were designing equipment and machinery as a team for various industrial companies – something that really appealed to me. After my return home, my brother János Fajó and I talked a lot about founding a collective, a joint workshop. He already had a very good working relationship with Imre Bak, István Nádler and Tamás Hencze. They all liked the idea. Afterwards Ilona Keserü and I joined them, and that’s how the Pesti Workshop was founded in 1974. Nádler – who had great connections in the municipality of District VI – acquired a basement in Benczúr Street, and I designed a screening machine. At that time, it was not possible for anyone to use a printing machine (this was considered such), but we were very lucky that Imre Bak worked at the Institute of Popular Culture, where Iván Vitányi was the director, and he allowed the Pesti Workshop to print art folders for the Institute. We also received some copies, but in fact the Institute of Popular Culture owned the folders of the international and Hungarian artists.
Were you monitored during these activities?
No, we have never received any checks. The Workshop worked well until 1980, we produced a wide variety of reproduced graphics, including folders by progressive, contemporary Hungarian and international artists, and we were also lucky to be able to exhibit them in the Józsefváros Gallery, which was run by János Fajó. I had a successful exhibition there in 1976, where I showed my series titled Logic of Forms. From the beginning, I was interested in systemic design and thinking.
Why did you choose the College of Applied Arts instead of the Academy of Fine Arts?
My father, János Fajó (of Slovakian origin) worked as a shoe upholstery designer, later he had a shoe accessory retail shop in Békéscsaba. My maternal grandfather was a mason. My mother, Ilona Mengyán’s (of Polish origin) family of craftsmen moved to Hungary in the 1700s, as did my father’s family. The tradition of handicrafts can be seen in all branches of the family. I myself wanted to be a painter from the age of six. In Békéscsaba there was a Transylvanian painter of minor noble origin, József Mokos, who lived in our Zsíros street. He recruited us street kids (including Károly Gaburek, János Fajó, András Harmati, and others). Our teacher Mr. Mokos led a drawing class, and we owe a lot to him, because many of us have become excellent artists or drawing teachers.
At the College of Applied Arts at the time, a modern, progressive design course was starting, and I chose to attend because the decorative painting course I had my eye on originally hadn’t started, so I went to mechanical design. I was accepted in 1963, but as I had no industrial background, I was sent to work in industry for a year to gain experience. I worked in the locksmith and maintenance workshop of Kner Printing Company in Békéscsaba as a labourer.
The design course proved to be a fantastic choice: besides drawing and shaping, I learned about technologies, materials, learned to think as a designer, in an innovative way, but most of all I learned to execute my ideas by hand, which I later used to great advantage. Four of us started the course, two girls and two boys (I was 19), one of them got married in our first year and dropped out, another girl went to silicate class to become a ceramist, and my male colleague defected to Sweden after graduating, so I was the only one left in the class.
How did this become an autonomous career as an artist?
I was doing three things at the same time: doing design work, which provided me with a secure living – my thesis at the Institute of Agricultural Machine Development was on the design of vineyard and wine machinery – and then in 1973 my former teacher Aladár Németh invited me to teach, first as a lecturer, later as an assistant lecturer at the College, where I taught Format Studies, and alongside that I built my fine art career, creating and exhibiting. Occasionally I even worked 24 hours a day, but more often I completed 16-hour days.
In the seventies, I won prizes at several international exhibitions, even though we had no idea at the time of the professional movements taking place in Western Europe or America. We had no information, or only sporadic information. At College, we got some information thanks to our teacher Dr György Vámosi, who taught twentieth century architecture but also secretly introduced contemporary art. This way we had some, but still little, knowledge of the latest professional trends. The only place one could study albums and books was in the library of the Fészek Klub, and later in the library of the College of Applied Arts. Yet, somehow – by complete accident – I got involved in the international mainstream, and that’s how I got the international awards.
I have always been interested in research, looking for ways to approach the world of forms in a rational, logical way. Dóra Maurer and her husband, Tibor Gáyor (they were living in Vienna at the time) helped the Pesti Workshop and its circle to build our international network. The support of Imre Kocsis, who lived first in Munich and then in Düsseldorf, also contributed to the fact that we were able to exhibit regularly, mainly in West Germany. Of course, we often had to leapfrog the official routes, for example, I once sent graphics in a cylinder to Krakow as if they were posters, otherwise they wouldn’t have been allowed out of the country.
In 1980, I joined an international creative group (Arbeitskreis), where members organised symposia in Finland, the then Yugoslavia and other countries. In Motovun (Yugoslavia, now Croatia) I met an American guy who, after coming to visit us at Aradi Street, invited me to come to New York to stay with him.
Is this where your American career started? When did you first visit the US?
When I was still a student, as I have already mentioned, Dr György Vámosi spoke about György Kepes, László Moholy-Nagy, Marcell Breuer and the Bauhaus. Fortunately, the College of Applied Arts invited György Kepes, who was then the head of the Visual Advance Studies Institute at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), to give a lecture. We started corresponding.
Then in 1980, at the encouragement of a colleague, I applied for a New York-based American fellowship ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies) and had to find a host institution, which became the Pratt Institute (New York), which was exclusively devoted to visual genres (architecture, film, video, applied arts, fine arts). My task was to study and research the educational activities of the New Bauhaus.
I spent a year in New York with my family, travelling all over the country doing interviews, so I often visited György Kepes too. The year passed, I came home and was appointed Head of the Institute of Basic Training at the College of Applied Arts where I had to manage a staff of 38. In the meantime, I was invited back to teach in America, and in 1986 I was approached by the Pratt Institute to develop the philosophy and program of a newly founded institute, the CDE (Center for Design Excellence), which has since been realized. During this time, I was commuting between New York and Budapest.
Didn’t you ever feel like staying there?
New York in the eighties was an incredibly attractive, fabulously stimulating place, people of many nationalities together, a real multinational cultural environment. I learned a lot there; it was like a second university for me or a professional training. We went to galleries and museums because every two weeks new works were being exhibited. It was fantastic, it gave me an astounding change of perspective. We talked a lot about it (staying there, I mean), but in the meantime my wife had built up her legal practice, I had a job as a head of an institute, we were living well at home, we had everything we needed.
When was the last time you went to the US?
Last year. I go almost every year. They just called me again because I received an award. I have not been forgotten abroad either, I am often contacted for interviews, photos and to publish my work. They would like to have old ones, but there are no works available from my old era, especially not from the seventies and eighties. I have some works, a basic body of work, the pictures that I lend to museums for exhibitions, which I never sell. I kept the works that reflect a cultural or social era.
What is the size of this body of work, approximately how many pictures have you kept?
I didn’t really paint many pictures back then, my visual programs contained mostly graphics, hundreds of them, which were then scattered all over the world. I worked a lot, teaching at college and then doing my own art and design stuff at home at night.
I’m preparing for a major exhibition at Kieselbach Gallery in mid-August called Interactions, but alongside the new work there will be some of my core material.
You also spent a lot of time in Norway. What led you there?
In 1985, a Norwegian professional delegation from the Universities of Oslo and Bergen visited the Hungarian College of Applied Arts, and they liked the basic training programme that I and my colleagues had put together. I was in New York in 1986-87 when I received a call from the rector of the University of Bergen asking me if I would be interested in a professorship as head of an institute and to send my portfolio. I sent it to him, but nothing happened for two years, so I returned home in 1987. In 1989, the rector called me to ask if I was still interested in the job, because I had been selected first in the international competition. I took the job. We spent 16 years in Bergen. I’m retired now and probably work even more than when I was young.
Is it easy for you to create? Have you never had a creative crisis?
Never. What annoys me is that ideas come and I don’t have enough time to implement them.
At the Rockefeller University, Professor Miklós Müller told me: “András, in science, if you add just one brick to your profession, it’s worth it”. I am committed to this too. What I am interested in is how I can add something to my profession. Something that broadens my thinking, affects my environment and human activity. To do this, I need to know the past, so as not to repeat what has already happened. I do not want to repeat myself. Autonomous art must have a philosophical foundation on which to build our activity. This is how I have always worked, first I would create a philosophical idea and then I would start looking for the right visual tools, choosing the most appropriate one from my toolkit, which would visually create and reflect my idea and even have an aesthetic effect. I believe that philosophical, intellectual, professional and „enjoyable” aesthetic content must be integrated.
The MNB’s collection includes several important works of yours. A playfulness and a leap from plane to space characterise most of them. Can you tell us a little about your original creative intentions?
For these images, what I was curious about was the transition of a shape from one reference system to another. These works are also about the changing of truths. It is easy to see that with changes in dimension, truths also change. What is true in the reference system on Earth is no longer true in space, let alone on the Moon. We need to think differently in each reference system. But just because of the transition of a shape from one reference system to another reference system, these can still communicate with each other. And that’s the point, for these to be able to communicate with each other, to have some kind of connection, some interaction.
What are you currently working on?
I’m interested in three things in my art at the moment: what is beyond three dimensions, if anything, what does it look like visually? This is a fascinating question in itself. If it exists, how can I visualise it? The second is based on impressions. The third issue I am dealing with is polyphonic visual spaces. Thinking in context, multiple perspectives and seeing together.
What is related to this is the opposite of the representation of forms, namely, how can I give form to nothing? This raises a host of questions.
Is there nothing without something? The issue is very complex and there are many possible approaches. For me, I’m interested in the perception and the giving of form. Here we are talking about intervals between forms, negative forms, space itself, or, for example, invisible energies. If I take it to a fine art level, the question is how can human existence (space or, say, invisible energies) be influenced in a positive way? Is it possible? – And how can it be conveyed visually, if at all?
All my current questioning, professional (visual) activity and attempts are about interactions and thinking in context.