[spectre] Remembering Art Lover ... Balint Szombathy 1950 - 2024

[Stephen Kovats]

Dear Spectrites,

it's with great shock and sadness that I, and likely many of you heard / 
read about yesterday's passing of a great artist ... we should say 
Artist with a capital A, Balint Szombathy aka Art Lover aka Karin Eliot 
... and likely numerous other akas in the realms of Neoist 
post-revolutionary art, literature and life spectacle circles. While I 
can't speak for the whole breadth of life and work of this electrically 
soft spoken cultural thinker, originally from Novi Sad (well, Sremska 
Kamenica as he often corrected me) and later settling in Budapest. I 
remember Balint for his truly Art Lover character ... both as a critical 
reflector (writer) and a participant (performer par excellence) of the 
reasons we need art ... to provoke, to question, to revel in the ecstasy 
of communication that the post-war, post-wall, post-(dis)unification 
Europe had to offer.

I got to know Balint via the ostranenie festivals that were held at the 
Bauhaus Dessau through the nineties. He was one of the few artists that 
participated in each edition ... succinctly echoing the turbulence of 
that extraordinary time - in particular the drama of Yugoslavia. In the 
somewhat dysfunctional calm of the East German province, Yugoslavia and 
Balint's art was both lens and mirror for all of us to reflect upon our 
own actions and environments.

Yet beyond all the drama, beyond all the great discussions, art works 
and actions that took place at the festival, one of the most 'special' 
moments that made the whole festival adventure worthwhile (for me 
personally), was the (unexpected?) meeting in the Bauhaus corridor 
between Balint and Dalibor Martinis, an equally great artist who by then 
was 'known' as being an artist from Croatia. Two tall, elegant men in 
trench coats, breaking into smiles upon seeing each other, and cheering 
their reunion after a number of chaotic years of dissolution of the 
former Yugoslav state. That's what festivals are in large part about - 
bringing people together, creating new friendships but also enabling 
re-connections. For Balint, i think in retrospect, ostranenie was a sort 
of connection machine, where all these re-kindlings, old and new could 
be made.

It was a great honour to have Balint 'close' the festival on November 
9th, 1999 - 10 years to the date of the fall of the Berlin Wall, with a 
secret, little documented performance, on the roof of the Bauhaus. It is 
on this roof, aka the Prellerhaus studio - that Walter Gropius intended 
as the architectonic meeting point between the building (the 
architecture) and the heavens, a space that can only be occupied by the 
Modernist mind and soul - that Art Lover became a proverbial lightning 
rod writhing in an electro-spasmic burst of sticky, suffocating light 
that slammed all the festival energies of the past decade of artistic 
struggle into a spectacular climax. A nano-second between the last gasp 
of air and asphyxiation, a Duchampian infrathin, embodied by a master 
performer.

We, who had the distinct pleasure of experiencing and traveling with 
Balint, before then and after through the decades know where he is now 
... as a unique arsonist of incalculable poetic heights, lighting the 
fires of conscience, forever immortal.

Thank you Balint, you're great, it was truly an honour.

Greetings to all,

Stephen

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