A gyűlölet múzeuma. Spions, 1977–1978
The Museum of Hate. Spions, 1977–1978

Summary/Abstract: This study aims at answering the questions of where and how the avant-garde scene of the 1970s, home of the art punk band Spions, was organised. Besides the semi-publicity created by extending the private sphere of personal residences, the second half of the decade found this scene returning to venues supported by the official cultural policy: the cultural centres. How was it possible for these supported venues to house forbidden shows? The answer lies in the transforming modes of social identification and recreation choices whose exhaustion was already visible, even for the sociology of the day. The avantgard scene, thus, did no more than repopulate these depleted cultural spaces. This transformation is signifi cant, as the creation of the Spions would have been unimaginable without cultural centres. In their case, the Ganz-MÁVAG Cultural Centre, under the directorship of Tamás Papp, provided the environment where the band first started during a lecture series about utopias. This fi rst Hungarian punk band, however, was far from ordinary; it was set up with the aim to develop poetics and create a musical idiom. The founders, Gergely Molnár, Péter Hegedűs (with György Kurtág, Jr) and Tibor Zátonyi, were originally involved, respectively, in neoavantgard art, contemporary classical music and photography. The band, arriving at popular culture from the exclusivity of avantgard aesthetics and contemporary classical music, was in many respects atypical and defied the logic of pop. Their communication was hierarchic, rather than emancipatory, and the thematics of escape, self-destruction and hate were characterised at the same time by the implicit criticism of state socialism and the New Left’s denunciation of capitalism. The Spions, using pop as a mere medium, reduced the people’s celebrated leaders to the same morphological level as the adored celebrities, fashion models and dandies.

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