Bálint Szombathy has in his work from the late sixties until today, at the middle of the fi rst decade of the XXI century, passed through diverse and dramatic strategies and tactics of avant-gardes, neo-

avant-gardes, conceptual art and post-avant-garde, being yet an artist who has always used artistic languages of actuality to react to bio-political technologies of regulation and de-regulation of ruling politics – from the real and self-management socialism through late socialism and post-socialism to actual transition in the context of an unfolding globalism. Szombathy is an artist who has in an exceptionally subtle manner connected intuitive reactions with refl ected conceptualizations in establishing and performing of his works. His creations are entirely founded in a post-Duchamp and, no doubt, post-Kassák tradition of an artist as an actor who recognizes and reacts to the world by very appearances of the world in their transfi gurations towards potentialities of actual artistic practices. He has in a critical way explored artistic productions after painting – one of important and identifying specifi cities of his work is a fact that he never painted. Szombathy is a true and unique artist after painting. Therefore, close to the artists of Italian poor art (arte povera), he is an artist nomad, who is not determined by a particular medium, but who operates with diverse media realizing his interest and conceptual demands. Szombathy is also a political artist who was not an artist in politics or in the service of politics, but an artist who has used big or small personal, local, international or global politics as an instrument of his artistic, as well as biographical confl icts, guests and reactions. His artistic work has, really, in a consequent way realized what is recognized and interpreted as ’relational aesthetics’, which means as exploration of complex worlds of visual, apparent, object, media and conceptual in contemporary culture and society. Also, what determines Szombathy’s work along all registers of his creativity, making him a truly exceptional authorial fi gure on artistic scenes of Voyvodina, Serbia, ex-Yugoslavia, Hungary and Eastern Europe, is that he is included in complex policies of structuring and restructuring of social, cultural and artistic processes of real/self-management socialism, late socialism, post-socialism and a transitory era of globalism in the East and the Southeast of Europe. His later work in the period from the eighties till today is the work presenting the power of art in political and ethical confrontation with social machines of power. In his work, he is also quite close to a Slovenian movement NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst), post-Soviet artists of Sots Art and Perestroika art, i.e. to hybrid productions of a contemporary artist in the Era of Culture. Szombathy’s artistic practice is today, after almost forty years of activity, still challenging and still provocative in relation to art as well as in relation to the politics of the world that changes before us and with us. Confrontation with those changes, fl uxes of global machines, is a central problem issue of Szombathy’s art.

Miško Šuvaković2005

Photoperformaces / Public Art

B A U H A U S Novi Sad, 1972

L E N I N I N B U D A P E S T Budapest, 1972

R E M E M B E R ! Komárno; Venice, 2010–2011

Walking with the fl ags of three former socialist countries, Checoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the USSR

The best known and crucial actions of Bálint Szombathy in his early stage were the photo-performances Lenin in Budapest and Bauhaus, both executed in 1972. Bauhaus was fi rst presented at an exhibition of the Bosch+Bosch Group held in Novi Sad.

Using a tablet with the title/name ‘Bauhaus’ written out on it and the strategy of declaration/pronouncement, Szombathy established a direct connection between the hired room in an attic he lived in after moving to Novi Sad and the school/workshop based in Weimar and Dessau which used to be a cult-ranking institution of the advanced tendencies of the European art in 1920’s.1 Through a series of skillfully arranged scenes close to the Behaviour Art, what undergoes re-examination are the conditions under which a particular realistic situation in life is taken out from its social context and included into a context of art. The constructivist principles and order of Bauhaus are here brought into opposition to the existential, socio-cultural context of the artist’s living in a hired room. The typical real-socialist interior from Novi Sad, or Budapest/Cracow/Prague, is recognizable and geographically identifi able owing to the presence of a relief bust of Yugoslavia’s Marshal, Josip Broz Tito, an iconic marker of the lifestyle practised through the Yugoslav pattern/model of (real) socialism. The socio-artistic ambience is registered by a still camera which – reaching the condition of impersonalized view – registers different ‘stage-directed’ situations within which even the image of the artist himself occurs: in that way, the artist is at the same time a protagonist but also a neutral spectator of his own action. The reiteration of similar motives through a number of variants thus turns into a research in linguistic codes of the medium itself, the medium used by the artist while registering chosen situations.

Lenin in Budapest took place in 1972, immediately after the closing part of the public May-the-First celebration in the capital of Hungary: Bálint Szombathy walked along the streets of Budapest carrying a placard with an image of the leader of the Soviet Socialist Revolution. The photo-performance was a multiple play with the image/myth of the chosen model, place and context (both artistic and political) within which the action was taking place (carrying through the streets of Budapest of a photo/placard with Lenin’s image put up onto a stick). But the artist’s own (artistic) intentions were also part of the play.2 It was a committed act, a gesture of strongly loaded irony, which in the milieu of the performance provoked all sorts of response and thus resulted in a direct (physical and mental) involvement of the audiences into the process of the work’s execution. At that time, Budapest was still fully aware of the consequences of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the heavy reprisals and Soviet interventionism, and, in spite of that, the aftermath efforts to de-Stalinize the Eastern-European society which was ultimately aimed at reaching the ideal of “socialism with a human face”, as the revolutionaries of Prague put it it in 1968. The time was characterized by soft totalitarianism accompanied by gradual liberalization of the Hungarian society which was mostly refl ected in the tolerant attitude toward the institutions of alternative culture and society. In the said context, as soon as in early 1970’s, the artistic activity of Bálint Szombathy functioned as re-examination of the language of politics. Szombathy’s intentions could be described by the words of Mladen Stilinović, Croatian artist who wrote: “The subject of my work is the language of politics, or the ways in which the language is refl ected in the daily life... It is the question of how to manipulate that which so obviously, so impertinently manipulates you.” 3 In a record of his, written in those days, Szombathy said that, in the case of Lenin in Budapest, his intention was to “explore possible semantic situations of V. I. Lenin’s image

1 „In Novi Sad, I declared an attic place – my home at the moment – to be a Bauhaus of my own and, using a tautological controversy, zeroed in on the sociological immanence of art.” Bálint Szombathy, Stežući šaku peska – Ispovest o isparavanju moje ars poetike, (Squeezing a Handful of Sand: A Confession on the Evaporation of my Ars Poetica) published in Hungarian in the review Híd, No. 2–3–4, 1997.

2 „In the spring of 1972 I carried a portrait of Lenin along the streets of Budapest, taking it into a compromising ambience, having realized that even a provocation organized under the wings of aesthetic can be art, considering that each human gesture that generates radical thoughts can be taken as art in the bosom of the society which was by Joseph Beuys referred to as art form even in its universality.” Bálint Szombathy, Stežući šaku peska – Ispovest o isparavanju moje ars poetike (Squeezing a Handful of Sand: A Confession on the Evaporation of my Ars Poetica), published in Hungarian in the review Híd, No. 2–3–4, 1997.

3 Mladen Stilinović, Tekst nogom (Footwritten Text), Zagreb, 1984.

and the milieu in question where meanings of diverse authoritative messages (e.g. placards...) occur.” Departing from such an attitude of the artist, we actually speak about the process of “converting the icons of revolution into the signs of revolution which no longer bear a direct reference to the ‘effective features’ of the referent but do with its place within a symbolic order”. 4 Likewise, some parallels of this work by Szombathy can be found to the gesture of Braco Dimitrijević of 1971: Oversized photos of chance passers-by from Zagreb streets are put up by the artist onto some special-occasion panels reserved, until then, for President Tito or the highest-ranking fi gures of the Communist Party. However, while the gesture of Dimitrijević is conspiciously deprived of personalization, Szombathy – in his effort to disclose the structures of power – uses the strategy of fi rst-person speech, exploiting his own body which in a number of situations turns into an object of art, a medium through which an idea is given visual articulation, that is, gains a form. In that way, the artistic practice turns into a practice of self-representation, while the body of the artist gains the character of an object, subject and medium of art – all at the same time.

It was by the above-described actions Bauhaus and Lenin in Budapest that Szombathy added the genre of photo-performance to the corpus of his artistic output; photo-performance is herein a performance of delayed/postponed duration/effect, considering the fact that – in the case of Bauhaus – it takes place without the presence of an audience, for the audience witnesses it only via the artist-provided (photo-) documentation. At the time of staging these actions, Szombathy published his study Znak i slika (The Sign and the Image) wherein he, relying on Barthes’ structuralist theory of photography, pointed out the essential distinctions and points at which his own work went beyond the framework of the famous theory: “While we called an ideogram a sign, a photograph remains an image and does not turn into a sign... Substitution of an object with a sign has a dual quality: in language, we move from the object to the sign, and on a photo we move from a sign to the object... What we expect from a photo is that it shows or corrects reality from some new aspects... My photos, in the obscure fl ood of pictures of our time, fi x some spontaneous manifestations of the world.” 5 Bearing in mind the well-known thesis by Caroline Tisdall which says that provision of a larger-than-necessary corpus of information implies loss of sense in the work itself, that is, deviating from the normal practice of structuralist photography, Bálint Szombathy “does not go beyond what has been singled out of the general by means of photography”. What matters most to the artist is that “multiple signifi cance of the picture does not happen, that the segments singled out on the image do not, via themselves, mislead to another thing, for otherwise the object of the image turns into a sign and goes astray to some other decoding procedures.” When selecting his own examples, Szombathy primarily “turns to the structures which partly create themselves, those on which the mutual connection of the parts gradually grows into a composite system of interdependent fi rm connectedness of signs”.6

Miško Šuvaković2005

4 Dejan Sretenović, To majka više ne rađa – Portreti revolucionara iz zbirke MSU i drugih kolekcija (No Mother Can Give Birth to Men Like These Again: Portraits of the Revolutionaries from The Museum of Contemporary Art and Other Collections), cat.ex., Muzej savremene umetnosti, Beograd, 2004, pp. 2–3.

5 Balint Szombathy, „Znak i slika” („The Sign and the Image”), Novine, Galerija Studentskog centra, No. 41, Zagreb, March 1973, pp. 2.

6 Balint Sombati, Sedam godina grupe Bosch+Bosch (The Seven Years of the Bosh+Bosch Group), Bosch+Bosch, cat.ex., Muzej savremene umetnosti, Beograd, 1980, pp. 3–11.

F i v e p o i n t e d

[Work in progress]1971–2012

In Money We Trust, 2012

Flags, 1971–1972

Red and Black, 2012

T h r e e W a y s – D e c o n s t r u c t i o n o f Y u g o s l a v i a1974–2011

H a i l !

[Work in progress]2009–2011

F o o t b a l l g r a m m e

[Work in progress]1970–2010

F a c e O n F a c e

[Work in progress]2010–

W e W e r e H e r o e s

[Work in progress]2002–2010

C i t y s i g n s – V i s u a l S e m i o l o g y

[Work in progress]1972—2012

According to Bálint Szombathy, his artistic work has little to do with producing, creating material objects, but it aims for creating models of new linguistic systems or discovering the already existing, yet insuffi ciently known linguistic forms. Therefore, in Szombathy’s work

the central place is given to semiologic explorations in the fi eld of visual art.1 However, apart from particular investigations of the ‘semiologic’ as sign-related, he considered important the general platform of semiologic work in art, in the sense of critical and pro-theoretical artistic exploration of functions and effects of signifying in daily life, culture and politics. Szombathy’s idea of a semiologically oriented art is close to a concept of semiotic art of an English artist Victor Burgin. According to Burgin, semiotic art2 is an effect of a step beyond from conceptual analysis of the art ‘itself’ (or a ‘nature’ of artistic situations) towards analysis and deconstruction of a production of meaning in institutional ‘apparatuses’ of a modern consumers’, media and mass culture. In other words, concepts of ‘semio-art’ perform a turnover from art as art as art and art as idea as idea (ref. Joseph Kosuth), which means from a conceptual elite oriented meta-art or analytical art, towards an art as a symptom of mass and public culture. However, their positions greatly differ since Burgin regards and provokes subjects of mass media consumption within late capitalism from the end of the seventies and the early eighties, and Szombathy explores micro/macro ideological constitutions of usage, performing and consumption of collective and individual ideology in late socialism and post-socialism. Burgin’s semio-art inclines towards theoretical psychoanalysis and a question of incompleteness of a consumer as a subject, and Szombathy’s semiologic art develops towards studies of ideology and a question of fragmentariness of late- and post-socialist individual and collective subjectivity in the areas of entropic discharging of Eastern Europe, especially in crisis-struck regions of a breakdown of second Yugoslavia.

In several papers and authorial books Szombathy condensed his observatios about spontaneously created systems of signs i.e. languages developed in a human living environment. It is characteristic that aesthetic factors were being pushed into the background; he understands aesthetics or aesthetical, in the framework of theory of information, as a quantity of aesthetic information, i.e. he regards a quantitative and not a qualitative characteristic within a cultural and social exchange/reception. His activity is based on an attitude that “art is not a closed sphere...” Szombathy has announced his semio-position as a program in the text Introduction into Creativity (fragments from the studies in 1973):

A task of an artist is to publicize the given contents of conscience, i.e. to create conditions for his announcement to be widely accessible. Phases of pedagogical aspect include ‘comprehension’, ‘choice’, ‘demonstration’ and ‘elevation’. In solving those pedagogical devoirs, (aesthetic) sensibility and (artistic) expertise are of greatest help. Aesthetic and artistic terms have defi nitely lost their signifi cance, and are thus to be used only until new expressions for the mentioned notions are invented.3

He developed ‘semiologic research’ demonstrating how the mechanisms of production, trade and consumption of meanings, sense and values are reconstructed, i.e. of power and identifi cation in the concrete political culture:

For me, creativity is not connected with production, with producing material objects, but, as Enzo Mari, I strive to establish models of new linguistic systems, or in much more precise terms, to detect the already existing but insuffi ciently known linguistic forms.4

In order to explore political powers of the actuality, he has resorted to diverse semiologic strategies – from visual poetry,5 over process art, land art and a performance, to conceptu al art. For instance,

1 Bálint Szombathy, Gábor Tóth, Phisical and semiological information, Experimental Art Publisher, Leeds, 1975.; and Bálint Szombathy (ed.), Poetical Objects of the Urbanical Environment, Experimental Art Publisher, Leeds, 1976.

2 Victor Burgin, Between, Blackwell, Oxford, 1986.3 Balint Szombathy, Uvod u stvaralaštvo (fragmenti iz studija 1973.), published for the exhibition of the Bosch+Bosch

group, Galerija Studentskog kulturnog centra, Beograd, 1975.4 Balint Szombathy, 1978, p. 49.5 Balint Szombathy, Poetry – Concrete Visual Poems 1969–1979, Forum, Novi Sad, 1981.

in books Physical and Semiologic Information6 and Poetical Objects of the Urbanical Environment7 Szombathy collected photographic works which document details, i.e. objects-signs of daily life. Signs of everyday life are understood as objects which should be revealed as specifi c poetical potentials, by locating them and by photographic indexation. It was a post-Duchamp move of searching for ordinary, trivial or quotidian, which by the artist’s decision and selection becomes shown as relevant and potent as a work of art in a context of cultural structuring. The artist has seen his work as a direct intervention in epistemological fi eld of presenting the meanings of trivial reality (walls: Mural Findings, 1972–78, grave crucifi xes: 36 Fixatives, 1973). On the other hand, it was the really worn-out or marginal objects which were chosen. A choice and presentation of such objects had a provocative function: to excite and draw attention to the minor issues from the daily life. By doing so, a confrontation with a moderately modernist painting and photography was achieved: moderately modernist artists were prone to ‘beautiful’ in the particular of the daily, and for that particular beautiful they sought an extraordinary and universal aesthetic truth of human in general or of natural in general; an example could be a function of still life or of a modernist landscape of Vojvodina. On contrary, Szombathy’s photographs of trivial everyday objects were photographs of particularity itself, fragmentariness, isolation, non-exceptional. Literal presentations of objects in a photograph were a confrontation with the very world, the ‘void’ and ‘impoverished’ world of real-socialist provinces. For example, a series of photographs Bauhaus (1972) is a document of a photo-performance which the artist performed in the attic of the building where he rented a room when he fi rst came to Novi Sad. Photographs show a neglected, shabby and poor real-socialist space, with a transparent with big bold letters arranged as a word BAUHAUS. The nature of a real-socialist space is indexed by a photograph of the Marshal Josip Broz Tito placed in the background. This is an exemplary, and most probably one of the most important early works of Szombathy. Because the semiologic relation of visual (photography of a wrecked room) and the verbal (word BAUHAUS) text is performed as an inter-textual relation of the confl ict of ideas of BAUHAUS (geometrism, constructivism, parole: less is more, ideology of new, high architectural and design modernism) and the appearance and looks of a real-socialist everyday life (small overfi lled and shabby space). Szombathy has by semiologic relating of a photo-picture and the title problematized a traumatic relation of aesthetical capacities of real-socialism and an ideality of great modernism. It can be concluded that the semiologic way of thinking led Szombathy from the apparent in an art work (modernistic aesthetics) towards presenting the relationships (objects, texts, texts and objects, acts and behaviors) within culture and therefore brought him closer to the concept of art work which Nicolas Bourriaud shall in the nineties interpret as “relational aesthetics”8.

Miško Šuvaković2005

6 Bálint Sz ombathy i Gábor Tóth, Phisical and Semiotical Information, E.A. Publisher, Leeds, 1975. 7 Bálint Szombathy (ed.), Poetical Objects of the Urbanical Environment, Experimental Art Publisher, Leeds, 1976. In

cooperation with Katalin Ladik, Franci Zagoričnik and Gabor Tot.8 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relaciona estetika (thematic), Košava no. 42–43, Vršac, 2003.

B i o g r a p h y

Born in 1950 in Pačir (Voyvodina, Serbia).

Founding member of the Bosch+Bosch Art Group (Subotica, 1969–1976).

One of the pioneers of the ‘new art practice’ of the 60’s and 70’s in Yugoslavia.

Multimedia artist, art writer and editor. Author of several books on art. Editor of Magyar Műhely (Hungarian Workshop) magazine, Budapest.

Genres of art: installation, performance, electrographics, Eternal Network, post-conceptualism, visual poetry, art criticism.

Won Ludwig Kassák Prize, Paris, France, 1989; Forum Art Prize, Novi Sad, Yugoslavia, 1993; Middle European Post Card Prize, Kaposvár, Hungary, 1995; Sava Šumanović Prize, Novi Sad, Serbia, 2007; Mihály Munkácsy Award, Budapest, Hungary, 2008.

Grants: ArtsLink of New York (CEC International Partners, New York), 1997, 1998 – for collaborative projects with Csaba Polony, Oakland, California.

His works have been on display on art exhibitions in Austria, Poland, Germany, Spain, Italy, Hungary, Canada, USA etc. Participated in several hundred collective shows and art festivals all over North and South America, Europe, Asia and Australia.

S e l e c t e d o n e m a n s h o w s :

1973, Paris, French Window1976, Cracow, Galeria Pryzmat1979, Budapest, Club of Young Artists1980, Montreal, Vehicule Art Centre1993, Québec, Le Lieu1994, Budapest, Vasarely Múzeum2005, Novi Sad, Museum of Contemporary Art of Voyvodina2012, Budapest, Erlin Gallery

S e l e c t e d g r o u p s h o w s a n d f e s t i v a l s a b r o a d :

1975, Visual Poetry International, Gallery ‘de Doelen’, Rotterdam; ‘t Hoogt Centrum, Utrecht; Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Aspekte – Gegenwärtige Kunst aus Jugoslawien, Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna, Austria1977, Die Kunst der Avantgarde in Osteuropa Heute, Saal Hermann-Schafft-Haus, Kassel, Germany Oosteuropese conceptuele fotografi e, Technische Hogeschool, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

1978, Tendenzen in den Jugoslawischen Kunst von Heute, Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund; Staatliche Museen Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin; Kunsthalle, Nürnberg, Germany

1979, Tendenze dell’arte Jugoslava d’oggi, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, Italy1981, Yugoslav Drawing: Current Trends, University Art Gallery, State University of New York at

Albany, Albany, N.Y., USA1986, Vetrina – Produzioni culturali giovanili dell’area Mediterranea, Piscina delle Pavoniere,

Florence, Italy1989, International Invitational Artistamp Exhibition, Davidson Galleries, Seattle, Washington, USA1993, Exposition d’Oeuvres de Sources Éléctroniques, L’Institut Hongrois de Paris, Paris, France1993, 1995, 1997, OSTranenie – Internationales Videofestival, Bauhaus, Dessau, Germany1995, Poesia visiva e dintorni (L’ultima avanguardia), Ex Convento di San Domenico – Musei di

Spoleto, Spoleto, Italy1996-97, Mail Art – Osteuropa in Internationalen Netzwerk, Staatliches Museum Schwerin, Schwerin,

Germany; Museum für Post und Kommunikation, Berlin, Germany; Kunsthalle, Budapest, Hungary; Haus Dacheröden, Erfurt, Germany

1998-2000, Body and the East – From the 1960s to the Present, Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, Slovenia

1999-2000, After the Wall – Art and Culture in post-Communist Europe, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Museum of Contemporart Art–Ludwig Museum, Budapest, Hungary; Nationalgalerie – Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany

2000, International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen, Germany (with performance)2001, Body and the East - From the 1960s to the Present, Exit Art, New York, USA2001, Polysonneries - 2nd International Live Art Festival, Les Subsistances, Lyon, France2002, NIPAF 02 – The 9th Nippon International Performance Art Festival, Tokyo-Aichi-Kyoto-Nagano,

Japan2002, Balkan Art – 3rd International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Centar za vizuelnu kulturu Zlatno

oko, Novi Sad, Yugoslavia2002, Vetrina Internazionale del Centro Nazionale di Drammaturgia 2002: Arte in transito. Rialto

Sant’ Ambrogio, Roma, Italy2002, Central-european aspects of the avant garde in Voyvodina, Museum of Modern Art, Novi

Sad – Belgrade, Yugoslavia2002, Fix02 – 5th Belfast Biennial of Performance Art, Catalyst Arts, Belfast, United Kingdom 2003-2004, Art-action: Recontres Internationales Paris/Berlin. Immanence, Paris, France; Podewil,

Berlin, Germany2004, European Performance Art Festival. Cultural Centre, Lublin, Poland 2004, Der Lange Atem – Meister der internationalen Performance-Szene.Europäische Performance Institut NRW, Maschinenhaus, Essen, Germany 2004, Wired Banks – oevers in verbinding. Las Palmas, Rotterdam, The Netherlands2004, Hungarian Contemporary Art, Gallery Saoh&Tomos, Tokyo, Japan 2004, Hungarian Digital Print, Millenáris Park, Budapest, Hungary2005, Avant-garde Art in the Region, 1915–1989. Gallery Center, Varaždin, Croatia2005, East Art Museum. An Exhibition of East Art Map – A (Re)construction of the History of

Contemporary Art (1945–1985) In Eastern Europe. Karl Ernst Osthaus-Museum, Hagen, Germany2008, Experiment in the Art of Yugoslavia in the 60s and 70s. Museum of Modern Art, Warszaw,

Poland2009, reallifepresence. Serbische Gegenwartkunst. Künstlerhaus Graz, Graz, Austria2010, Promises of the Past. A Discontinuous History of Art in Former Eastern Europe. Centre

Pompidou, Paris, France2010, art always has its consequences, New Media Center_Kuda.org, Novi Sad (SER); Muzeum

Sztuki, Łódź (PL); Tranzit.hu, Budapest (HU); What, How & For Whom/WHW, Zagreb (CRO)2011, At A Standstill. The Marinko Sudac Collection. Ship Galeb, Rijeka, Croatia

Selected Bibliography

Pejić, Bojana: Body-based Art: Serbia and Montenegro. In: Body and the East – From the 1960s to the Present. Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, 1998

Howell, Anthony: The Analysis of Performance Art. Harwood Academic Publishers, Amsterdam, 1999

Gržinić, Marina: Encountering the Balkan. The Radicalization of Positioning. In: Art in Europe 1990–2000, Skira Editore, Milano, 2002

Šuvaković, Miško: Art as a Political Machine: Fragments on the Late Socialist and Postsocialist Art of Mitteleuropa and the Balkans. In: Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition – Politicized Art Under Late Socialism. University of California Press, Berkeley–Los Angeles–London, 2003

Djurić, Dubravka–Šuvaković, Miško ed.: Impossible Histories – Historical Avant-gardes, Neo-avant-gardes, and Post-avant-gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918–1991. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge–London, 2003

Milenković, Nebojša: An Aesthetics of Freedom or Politics of Freedom (A Guide through the Art of Bálint Szombathy, 1969–2005). In: szombathy art – monograph. Museum of Contemporary Art, Novi Sad, 2005

Šuvaković, Miško: Performing of Politics of Art – Transitional Fluxes of Confl ict (Tactics of Political de-centering of Bálint Szombathy). Ibid.

Branko Franceschi: Bálint Szombathy. In: Standstill. Marinko Sudac Collection. Avantgarde Research Institute, Zagreb, 2011, p. 260.