Endre Tót
Editions
year 1971
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What am I thinking about? I've already done several things, but there may be others that haven't yet been written or that are in my head. I'd like to send you a few of them, in book form only.
- Excerpt from a letter dated 19.1.1974 to publisher Thomas Howeg
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nothing
Budapest, self-publishing (samizdat), 1971.In-folio, 4 pages, cardboard: 1-color silkscreen (light gray); 297mm x 210 mm.
The number of copies published is unknown (Endre Tót thinks a few dozen).
Signed on the back by Endre Tót in blue pen.
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The layout is vertical. The front cover is titled "nothing" in lower-case letters. Under the title, a black dot. On the verso of the first and second flaps, on their outer margins: 2 silk-screened bands of text (50 mm wide and 297 mm long), the word "nothing" repeated from top to bottom.
The text on the fourth page is printed horizontally. It reads "Budapest, May, 1971". then further down, "Endre Tót .* Born in 1937. Sümeg Hungary"
*formally,this black dot resembles the one under the title; it could indicate the author's name. We find a similar use of signs as a reference to a word or a name in the work Semmi Semmi: Endre Tót uses the cross (x) three times to replace the word "born"
"Basically, two things: Endre has always been very productive, there are certainly dozens of these "prints" sleeping somewhere. Print run figures may be very different from those indicated. Endre may remember that "private editions" "personal editions" in Communist times (clearly, the dictatorship) were in fact samizdat editions (whether or not they had a political message). This means that the author certainly remembers well the illegal ways in which he produced, or in Endre's case, had produced, a printed work. (He had - if I remember correctly - a printer friend who did this and that for him in black at the print shop...)".PETER FARKAS 21.05.2023 (EMAIL)
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STAMPED BY ENDRE TÓT
Budapest, self-publishing (samizdat), 1971.
In folio, 18 unnumbered pages, hard cover, glued square-back binding; offset printing, original prints from the same stamp.
90 x 270 mmEdition of 30 numbered copies signed by the artist.
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Pages 6 and 7 are blank
On our copy: the back cover, signed and numbered 27/30 in black pen; a label glued at the bottom with the typed words "Endre Tóth" the final h has been covered in felt-tip pen; the label covers the following inscription (visible only against the light): "ENDRE TÓT ÁLTAL PECSÉTELVE" (SEALED BY ENDRE TÓT).The stamp used in this plate is the very first stamp that the artist had made, probably in Zürich, with the help of her friend Ilma Rakusa. It was later acquired by Jean Brown, whose archive is at the Getty Museum in California. It's a circular stamp with Endre Tót's smiling face in the center, surrounded by the words "I AM GLAD IF I CAN STAMP" and the artist's signature underneath.
(...) Indeed, Endre Tót, with his 1970 rubber stamp entitled I'm glad if I can Stamp - in the middle of which his face laughs at the viewer - was perhaps the first on the international scene to discover the true nature of mail art stamps (...)
in: Geza Pernezcky
Long livecultural pusillanimity!
The Mail Art Movement in Hungary
This excerpt from Geza Pernezcky's text was translated by us from German.
Heading southwest along Lake Balaton, a huge medieval castle rises to the top of a large hill: Sümeg. At the foot of the castle hill lies a town with two churches, a bishop's palace, a secondary school and a museum at its center. However, there are no multi-storey buildings in Sümeg, only modest ground-floor houses. On the main street, not far from Franz Anton Maulbertsch's marvellous frescoes and Sándor Kisfaludy's childhood home (now the Sándor Kisfaludy Museum), in an upstairs bedroom of a two-storey house, Endre Tót cooed and cooed like a baby over eighty years ago.*
*Extract from the text by Noémi Forián-Szabó, published in the catalog "Endre Tot TOTalZEROS & TOTalJOYS 1971 - 2006" House of Arts Vesprém. László Vass Collection,
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Semmi Sem Semmi
Budapest, self-publishing (samizdat), 1971.
In-folio, 16 pages, semi-rigid cover, stapled binding, one double leaf cut-out (in the middle of the book); black-and-white offset printing.
Edition of 50 copies signed and numbered by the artist.
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Our copy is numbered 41 and signed in pencil on page 12, which serves as the Impressum with the Hungarian text "50 számozott nyomat a müvész aláirásával"(50 prints numbered and signed by the artist)
All pages are squared by Endre Tót. The grid lines are blue-gray except for the first and last pages, which are gridded in black, and a double page measuring 200 x 100 mm, folded in half in the center of the book, forming 2 squares, held by the top staple.At top right on the first page, behind a sheet of tracing paper is reproduced a fragment of a poem by Kisfaludy Sándor entitled "Kesergő szerelem" (A bitter love?)
rendered below :Amott látom domborodni
Nagy-Somlónak kalapjat,
Amott, jobbról, nyálasodni
A Marczalnak iszapjät;
A felhöben merön ott áll
A sümeghi vár foka;
A Bakonyból ott kandikál
Tátikanak homloka;
S a tündérnek lakóhelye,
Kinaimnak a mühelye,
A kél gözben ott borong -
Kebelem, hajh! mint szorongSÜMEG
In the center of the page, a small (35 x 35 mm) black-and-white photo of a house next to a shop, with 2 figures posing in front of it. The roof is marked by the artist with a cross(X) and underneath it the words "itt/here".SÜMEG SEMMI SEM SEMMI
Below the photo, a biography of the artist in Hungarian and English. On the word "született" and on the word "born" the same cross as on the photo has been drawn. Endre Tót confirmed that this is the house in which he grew up in Sümeg. The 2 figures are probably his parents.
On the last page, a photo - of which a small fragment is also visible on the first page - of two hands manipulating an architect's instrument. These are the artist's hands squaring the leaves. (Endre Tót confirmed this during our visit on September 25, 2023).
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MY UNPAINTED CANVASES 1971
Budapest, self-publishing (samizdat), 1971.
8 unnumbered pages, semi-rigid cover, stapled binding, 205 x 145 mm; black-and-white offset printing.
Edition of 100 copies.
Limited to 100 copies of which this is no.
Our copy is numbered 12 in pencil and signed on the first page.
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THE STATES OF ZERO
Budapest: self-publishing (samizdat), 1971.
12 unnumbered pages, semi-rigid cover, stapled binding, 205 x 146 mm; gray-scale offset printing.
Edition of 100 numbered copies.
Our copy is number 17, inscribed in blue ballpoint pen on the back cover.
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"BOOKWORKS REVISITED"
by Ulises Carrión, p.8 § 27, in:
"The Print Collector's Newsletter", Vol. 11, No. 1 (March-April 1980), pp. 6-9 (4 pages)"Other artists avoid any resemblance to ordinary books, however specific certain book genres may be. They exploit the sequential nature of the book to describe a process, or analyze a process, or embody a process.
These include the following titles: Franco Vaccari, Per un trattamento completo (Italy); Heinz Breloh, Uns zu Grau (Germany); Jaroslow Kozlowski, Lesson (Poland); Helen Chadwick and David Mayor, Door to Door (UK); Carel Balth, Perception of the Line (Holland); Pawel Petasz, Pages of Contemplation (Poland); Jochen Gerz, Recto Verso (Germany); Sanja Ivekovic, Double-Life (Yugoslavia); Endré Tót, The States of Zero (Hungary); J. H. Kócman, Capillarity Book (Czechoslovakia); François Morellet, 90° Deux trames (France); Bruno Munari, An Unreadable Quadrat-Print (Italy); Jiri Kolar, Poem R. (Czechoslovakia); Ulises Carrión, Untitled (Holland); Robin Crozier, Portrait of Robin Crozier (United Kingdom); Maurizio Nannucci, M40/1967 (Italy); Michael Peel, Alphabet (United Kingdom); Tony Rickaby, Cast (United Kingdom); John Murphy, Selected Works (United Kingdom); Géza Perneczky, Stamping with Little Objects (Hungary); Dick Jewell, Found Photos (United Kingdom); José Luis Castillejo, The Book of 18 Latters (Spain); Alison Bielski, Twenty Monogrampoens (United Kingdom); Silvie Defraoui, Perquisition, El Tango (Switzerland); Dieter Hagenbach, A House/Une maison/Una casa/Ein Haus (Germany); Knud Pedersen, The New Phantasy (Denmark).