Checking today's NYTimes

[anna balint]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/20/international/americas/20FPRO.html

'X' Marks His (Disputed) Spot in Canada's Art Scene

By CLIFFORD KRAUSS

Published: March 20, 2004


TORONTO — Istvan Kantor has been banned from many of the finest museums for 
scrawling a large X in his own blood on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art 
in New York, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, the National Gallery of Canada in 
Ottawa and other galleries.

But in a sign that the establishment may be catching up with the 
"subvertainment" of Canada's leading shock artist, the National Gallery in 
Ottawa welcomed Mr. Kantor back on March 10 for the first time in 13 years 
with almost open arms. Escorted by several security guards, he received the 
Governor General's Award in visual and media arts, one of the highest 
artistic awards in Canada.



"I went back as king!" Mr. Kantor said of his award, laughing heartily over 
glasses of Argentine wine and French cheese in his loft studio on Toronto's 
industrial west side the other day. "It's a revenge for me. My work was 
always anti-establishment, anti-art art, anti-authoritarian, and now suddenly 
I have been recognized by the same people who at certain times put me in 
jail. Now I can talk, now I have the stage."

Mr. Kantor's award, more than $12,000, has set off a controversy over the 
legitimacy of granting public money to a purveyor of vandalism and arguably 
some of the most outrageous displays of bad taste in modern art. Among his 
more dubious achievements is a video showing two performers slashing the 
throats of two cats and wearing their bleeding bodies as hats (to express his 
rage at pet lovers who are hardened to their fellow man) and staging the 
burning of a car filled with white rats.

Born in Hungary in 1949, Mr. Kantor is recognized as the founder of Neoism, 
an international anarchist art movement that some critics liken to an 
updating of the Dadaism of Marcel Duchamp, who once declared that anything 
you called art was art.

"What are the limits?" Mr. Kantor asks matter-of-factly. "There are probably 
no limits. Art is very dangerous."

Mr. Kantor looks dangerous, demonic and sometimes lunatic, though he is an 
attentive and pleasant host. He laughs and smiles a lot, and he said he 
really did not mean to splatter a bit of his blood on a nearby Picasso when 
he smeared the MOMA wall in 1988, for which he spent his 39th birthday in 
jail and was fined $1,000 after years of legal wrangling. Separated from his 
wife, he speaks lovingly of his three children. "I'm sweet like a piece of 
cake," he smiles.

Nevertheless Mr. Kantor draws an ominous X with eyeliner on the side of his 
head above a stubbly haircut, symbolizing, he says, the world crisis that he 
has dedicated himself to exposing — one in which mankind has been taken over 
by the madness of technological overload.

All the clocks in his house are set at 6 o'clock, or happy hour. His drafty 
studio is strewn with idiosyncratic symbols and keepsakes like old steam 
irons and boxing gloves.

His library features a full range of 20th-century revolutionary writers and 
avant garde artists. On the wall is a photograph of guards struggling to 
control him at the National Gallery of Canada in 1991 and a wooden play gun 
modeled after the toy gun he pointed at Soviet tanks when they invaded 
Budapest in 1956.

In his new 72-minute video, "Lebensraum /Lifespace," which some critics have 
hailed as a brilliant display of two- and three-dimensional computer 
animation and computer processing of sound, he is one of the prime actors, 
performing a mock transsexual sex act. Explaining his video, he says it 
exposes "the post-Orwellian technological society in which everyone is under 
surveillance and everyone is using transmission systems like computers to 
send information out to everybody."

Mr. Kantor was born into an upper-middle-class family, and recalled that he 
had a happy childhood, swimming in the Danube on hot summer days. He started 
his artistic career in Budapest in the late 1960's, founding a band of 
musicians who played only instruments they had not been trained to play. He 
studied medicine but dropped out of school. Finding Communism oppressive, in 
1975 he left for Paris, where he played guitar and sang Hungarian folk songs 
in the subway for a year.

Still dissatisfied, he moved to Montreal in 1977. He kept moving and 
experimenting with avant garde art forms around Canada and the United States, 
living on the Lower East Side in Manhattan in the late 1980's, where he 
explored junk sculpture and using megaphones to make noise music. His 
experiments with megaphones led to a series of videos, including "Escape From 
Freedom."

Much of his most noteworthy recent video and live work includes the Machine 
Sex Action Group, a performance ensemble that explores the hardware of file 
cabinets and the pelvic motions of lovemaking in a disturbing brew of images 
that often look like rape or torture. "It's not dance, not really theater," 
Mr. Kantor said by way of explanation. "It's an experimental form that 
combines all of these."

Even trying to get Mr. Kantor to explain Neoism can be a challenge, in part 
because its essence as an art movement is to always be in a state of flux.

"You have to be an anti-Neoist to be a Neoist," he said in his typically 
satirical, dialectical sort of way. "It was very important for Neoism to get 
rid of all the artistic language of space and time and introduce a different 
language that was more using state and military and religious expressive 
terms that had been alien to art before, to subvert, to provoke, to ridicule, 
to make fun of that very used and abused language of art."

Pressed to explain, he added, "There's not just a bit of destructiveness in 
this. There's a lot."

If Mr. Kantor was once dismissed as a nut job and a nuisance, his recent 
award perhaps gives him a new respectability. Tom Sherman, a video art 
professor at Syracuse University who was one of the judges for the award, 
characterized his work as graphically sophisticated, even "elegant."

"He has a very visceral effect on an audience and he files a grievance for 
underdogs, people who are homeless and displaced," Mr. Sherman said.

Tako Tanabe, a seascape painter and also a judge, said, "There are too many 
polite artists in the world."

But editorials and essays in The Calgary Herald, The Ottawa Citizen and The 
National Post called his award an insult to taxpayers.

"He has elevated vandalism and public mischief to an art form," said a 
Calgary Herald columnist. "And that's why he forfeits any claim to taxpayer 
support."

Mr. Kantor said he welcomed the criticism, adding: "It makes people think. 
That's what you want."

He may even be mellowing slightly. He said he used the prize money not to 
underwrite some fresh artistic mischief but to pay off debts. Now he says he 
is thinking of selling some of his art to museums, though he says he may 
still draw his X in blood, given the chance and right mood.