“Subordination to the logic of a chaotic world; in other words, the participants abandon their illusory right to have influence over chance events, and acknowledge their total vulnerability to the point of physical annihilation” (Anon. 1968, p. 103).2 This poetic quote – allegedly said by Allen Ginsberg – could appear in any literary or philosophical text, but no one would expect to read it in a Hungarian secret agent’s report dated May 11, 1968. The officer used this quote in an attempt to describe the origins of a “dangerous” American artistic genre – the happening – that, according to the report, was menacingly spreading and “threatening” the Hungarian culture. The officer in question asserts that
the philosophical background of the happening lies in nihilism, in spreading darkness and irrationalism and in denying healthy human activities. Its religion is violence and hysteria. Its practical outcome is baffling the citizens … In the final stadium of its American version it leads to a flood of violent acts, multitudinous drug abuse and open confrontation with the police.
(Anon. 1968, p. 104)
Reporting to the Ministry of Inner Affairs, this officer gathered quotes from different agents’ reports – agents who, for the most part, didn’t know that they were working for the same organization. These reports were weighed against each other, evaluated and resulted in these “summary reports,” which became the documents that legitimized the tracking and banning of happenings in all public and private spheres. The aim of these reports was to highlight the characteristics and specificities of the happening, a new genre that was difficult to define and therefore hard to identify.
The happening, as a new artistic form, demonstrated the permeability and porosity of the actions, interactions and reactions between the surveilling state and the surveilled artists. In this paper, I will trace this permeability by analysing reports of the first Hungarian happening, as well as the heavy surveillance of Tamás Szentjóby, in order to shed light on the artistic and state security strategies that ran parallel to each other, but on two completely different paths. Both operated in a fragmented, diverse public sphere and in secret, but for different reasons: the surveilled happening artists’ actions were forbidden from the outset and so they were forced to operate – for the most part – covertly. The state intervened by sending its agents into this secret, public sphere.
But what made a Secret Service officer quote Ginsberg? Understanding the nature of the happening and having a clear-cut definition with distinct, common characteristics was strikingly important to the Hungarian Secret Service in order to track these activities, which were taking part mostly in a grey area between legality and illegality. The State Security was operating on a legal basis, but used illegal methods of searching for evidence that the happenings were illegal. The happenings’ participants were operating legally, until the evidence gathered against them – some of which was made up – allowed the state to make happenings illegal and ban them from public spaces.
It is relevant to consider the historical context of this period, in which the opposition is not between “progressive” and “official” artists, but instead is a much more complex tension among the operational strategies of cultural activities taking place across multiple public spheres – both those under state-driven surveillance and those that were not being observed. This differentiation could provide a more distinctive and multifaceted view of artists’ interactions with the state, allowing for new interpretations that go beyond the established narrative of the post-Cold-War-era having the so-called neo-avant-garde, underground, progressive, avant-garde artists suppressed by state violence on the one hand, and the so-called official, traditional artists on the other, who are considered blind servants of state propaganda. In these multiple public spheres, the radius of surveilled areas clearly shows where the state suspected possible structural and operational dangers to the socialist society3 and to what extent the state’s paranoid fear of culture and the arts triggered repressive strategies against artists. To highlight the complexity of these multiple spheres, it is worth noting that the top-secret order 0022/1970 – which was issued by the Ministry of Inner Affairs and concerned the regulation and prevention of hostile activities in the cultural sphere4 – stated that the term “second public sphere” was integrated into the narratives of official state cultural politics.5 A further symptom of this complexity was the fact that despite the heavy surveillance used to gather information as a means to legally forbid these activities, happenings could still take place in public spaces such as universities, cultural houses or clubs6 – all public spheres regulated by the state.
As the happening was based on presence and ephemerality, with a seemingly improvised, chaotic dramaturgy, an uncertain outcome and an unforeseeable effect on the public, it soon became like a red cloth to a bull for the police and the Secret Service. As one of the officers heard from a person affiliated with the happening scene: “By simply hearing the word ‘happening’ the police get very angry, so in the future they should use op art, pop art or some other word instead. Since policemen are idiots who understand nothing about art, they wouldn’t even notice” (Balogh 1968, pp. 58–59). In this instance, the officer observes how the so-called “underground” scene reflects on the intellectual capacities of his “overground” administration, ultimately turning to “term-camouflage” to hide their activities and keep the officials busy. Thus, in order to forego the danger of an eventual direct confrontation and destabilization of the political system, it very quickly became clear to the Secret Service that they needed agents who had the intellectual ability to reflect, define and most importantly become part of these events in order to detect and identify these activities.
The Lunch (In memoriam Batu Khan) (Az ebéd [In memoriam Batu Kán], June 25, 1966) was the first happening in Hungary. The initiators, Gábor Altorjay and Tamás Szentjóby, declared their concept as a “taking over of power” (Altorjay 1998, p. 14). Szentjóby also stated that “an event (as such) takes place through anyone, anywhere and anytime,” (2011, p. 45)7 and that “the happening (as such) takes place through the participants in an environment until complete exhaustion sets in” (ibid.). Therefore, the happening created a scenario that the state viewed as threatening because it involved the public and destabilized the public sphere.
The resulting field of artistic practices could not be controlled by State Security because it had no roots in the nation’s art history nor could it be identified as a historical development. This detachment from known forms of art, as well as claims that the happening was not an art form at all, made it even more complicated to categorize and rendered it almost unrecognizable. As Szentjóby described in 1966, the happening was “non-art art” (ibid., p. 46) that “does not represent anything” (ibid.). He asserts that the “happening doesn’t look Cubist or Surrealist because there is nothing artistic about it” (ibid., p. 47).
The aforementioned summary report attempts to trace the historical origins of the genre, with the officer describing how happenings – in his interpretation – grew primarily out of literary movements of the 1920s and 1930s, such as Dada and Futurism. He identified “the Italian Marinetti, the French Salvador Dalí and the German Schwitters” (Anon. 1968, p. 103) as the protagonists of happenings and illustrated his arguments by explaining how, for Schwitters, “every object, from tram-tickets to postcards, from bent nails … to any rubbish on the streets had a documentary value. He even saw someone’s garbage as a useable, expressive object, as a symbol” (ibid.).
The Secret Service consciously chose the code name “Schwitters” to refer to Szentjóby, who was originally a poet and wrote his last poem at the age of 21. By the time he was 31, Szentjóby was arrested and banned from Hungary. His dossier in the State Security archive documents State Security strategies extensively. Surveilling Szentjóby and his radius of activity meant that the activity of similarly minded artists was concomitantly observed and that the range of surveillance of this group continuously widened, after the domino principle. Popular bars and cafés were the incubators of numerous ideas, theories and strategies, as these were the places where new tendencies and concepts in art were widely discussed and analysed. But these were also the places where State Security undertook secret operations in the public sphere in order to feed this system of oppression with information.
The Secret Service opened their “Schwitters” file on Szentjóby after the first happening, which was surveilled even though it was organised and carried out in secret. The main motivation for Szentjóby and the catalyst of this first happening8 came from the media: a magazine article by Mária Ember entitled “Happening and Anti-Happening” (1966, p. 18). As Szentjóby recalled: “a stupid and deprecating article appeared in the May 1966 issue of Film, Theatre and Music that mentioned some US and West European happenings. Despite the author’s ill-will, the happening’s extreme importance as such was apparent … Energized, we carried on” (2011, p. 52).
There was one major obstacle to carrying out a happening: finding a venue. One of the sources of the summary report, the agent “Hajdú,” reports on August 4, 1966 (1966, p. 19) – although he did not attend the happening itself – on the complications of finding a venue. According to Hajdú, the organisers sought to host it in the home of the chief editor of the Catholic magazine Vigilia, Károly Dorombay, who was at first enthusiastic; however, after his daughter went to the police to obtain information he refused to cooperate further. László Gyémánt, who filmed the event, also refused to host it. It was apparent by then that even the hosting of such an event carried serious risks. Thus, Miklós Erdély9 refused to allow it to happen in his garden and instead recommended his brother-in-law, István Szenes, who owned a cellar and a garden, which he placed at their disposal. Erdély also did not attend the event personally. He was warned that as he was a father he should not take such a high risk. And he did not. As Szentjóby wrote in the reviewing process of this article, none of the information in these reports can be correct. He claims that the circumstances of how this information was gathered and documented make it ab ovo impossible, that they can provide reliable facts. This opinion is also reflected in the thesis of Tibor Takács, one of the historians of the State Security Archive in Budapest who also claims that most historians are not reflecting on the fact that these documents are infiltrated with the written and oral “State-Security” diction (2014, p. 110). If historians use these documents today, they shouldn’t fall into the trap of reproducing these State Security notions and lines of thought, which would provide a strange continuity. But in the mentioned case of the emphasis on the difficulties of finding a venue, the interrelation of the fragmented public and private spheres is used as an argument for the legality/illegality of events. And as such, from this report we know that the issue of the venue – the use of the public sphere – was of great importance to the Secret Service, as it might serve as a clue regarding how to track and ban happenings as illegal events. These reporting documents, in an archive of an archive, can only be read today as historical artefacts of an oppressive system, the operating strategy of the State Security against artists.
Beyond the problem of finding a venue, the reports also provide an insight into how agents were trying to describe and understand what they saw. According to the 1968 summary report (Anon. 1968, pp. 104–105), the audience had to cross a garden where Szentjóby was sitting, half-buried in the earth, using a typewriter to write on a newspaper. Next to him was a spade, wired to a construction on which a living rooster was sitting in a pot. On the other side, a wheelchair with some puppets in it was burning. The audience had to cross this scenery and descend “underground” into a cellar in complete darkness – and, after fifteen minutes of inconvenient silence, a mixed and cut version of Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima by Krzysztof Penderecki10 and the Ode to Joy by Beethoven suddenly filled the room at full volume. Then a rose was set on fire, after which Szentjóby and Altorjay – impeccably dressed in white shirts and black suits – started to eat. The rooster in the pot was next to their dining table. Szentjóby tried to feed it, but of course the bird resisted, bursting into an incredibly painful shriek.11 Further systematic reconstruction of the events is blurred, as the happening became more intense, loaded with several actions that ran on parallel lanes. Altorjay could only randomly recall some details of the cacophonic events: offering the audience a woman’s handbag filled with mice, vomiting the food (amplified), fixing a helmet on Jankovics’ face, greasing him with toothpaste and soap, slitting a pillow open and throwing the feathers on Jankovics and everywhere in the room, bashing the rooster on the head, spreading red paint, filling a condom with plaster, wrecking the whole room and finishing the whole chaotic scene by destroying the light source with a thermos flask. The audience was so deeply under the influence of the events that for many long minutes nobody could say a word. The attendees simply left quietly after the end – as the agent had also written.
Shortly after, in 1966, the illegal happening appeared in an extended article by László Kamondy, with three photographs by Gyula Zaránd, published in the magazine Tükör (1966, pp. 10–12).12 This was only possible because the reporting agents’ information was not assimilated fast enough for the Secret Service to devise a decisive strategy against the initiators and participants of the happenings. In 1968, Altorjay himself published an article in which he described the event in detail – without asking for the obligatory publication permission from the Hungarian authorities – in a Yugoslav, Hungarian-language magazine (2011, pp. 42–44).
Two weeks after the first happening, on July 1, 1966, the agent “Mészáros” typed his report about the event. According to Mészáros, the first Hungarian happening was organised for a strictly private audience. Before going into detail, he claims the need to elaborate on the event’s historical roots, which he detects in the avant-garde movements of the 1930s – naming Salvador Dalí explicitly as someone organizing these out of “financial interest” (“Mészáros” 1966, p. 15) and for propaganda purposes; this is the part that was included in the compiled summary report quoted above. He claims that the happening “became institutionalised in the US, Los Angeles, Greenwich Village and other beatnik and hipster centres” (ibid.) – and then the Ginsberg quote follows. He identifies – as did Hajdú – the venue as the property of István Szenes, and then he describes the whole event from his perspective. Mészáros reports that during the happening Dr. László Végh appeared with a few others and tried to get involved in the course of the events, burning sparklers and paper rubbish, “but because they could not gain enough attention they left. Végh declared before leaving that he is going to organise an anti-happening, as he does not like if somebody wants to get order into anarchy” (ibid., p. 17).
Dr. Végh was a doctor and an expert in concrete and electronic music. The gatherings at his home were meeting points for artists, during which Dr. Végh acquainted them with works by John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and other composers. Szentjóby said that he considered “Dr. Végh as [his] godfather” (2006, p. 4) and thought him to be the starting point of the neo-avant-garde activities in Hungary.13 At that time, Szentjóby could not possibly know that even Dr. Végh himself worked for the State Security as an agent under the codename “Orvos [doctor].”14 Although the activities of Dr. Végh as an agent ended in 1962, the gatherings in his flat attracted the attention of the State Security and turned the space into a surveilled sphere as well. After this report, the officer wrote an evaluation: “the report is valuable from an operative standpoint as it gives us a new hint, namely that this [the happening] is spreading among the youth in Hungary due to Western influence” (“Mészáros” 1966, p. 17).
Altorjay himself sarcastically recalls that this was a cooperative project between them (the artists) and the Secret Service, without which they would never have been desperate, eager and radical enough to organise such an event – particularly if they had not been under such strong surveillance and control. He himself says that the reports are the best – and most objective – descriptions of what happened. But this is exactly what these reports cannot be used to do: objectively reconstruct what happened. What they can offer, instead, is the opportunity to explore the strategic operations that were considered necessary to get rid of the happenings. These operations resulted in a two-way relationship between the artists and the State Security. The artists, knowing that the happening was a red flag that stood for counter-culture against official artistic tendencies, camouflaged the notion of the happening, tricked the authorities and always tried to be one step ahead concerning, for example, venues and media coverage. The State Security, looking for clear markers that would make it possible to make the happening illegal and ban it, eagerly sought to recruit “expert-agents,” historicize the form, define it and try to detect its philosophical background.
This interrelation between the state and artists on the issue of the happening is all the more controversial because, on the one hand, the genre was a supposedly massive threat for the State Security (enough to motivate the state to employ at least six agents to report on the happening events, independently from each other, over several years). On the other hand, a summary report from 1967 points out the effects of the state’s destabilizing strategies, which were intended to deconstruct the happening scene. It asserts that the aim of these interrogations and the surveillance was to detect the ambitions of the happening. It was therefore already on record in 1967 that the State Security was aware that the happening posed no political threat: “the happening had no explicit political message whatsoever” (Anon. 1967a, p. 37). And yet, the state continued to monitor the happening with increasing intensity, even though “we could reassuringly convince ourselves that the happening had no political message or hostile indications whatsoever” (ibid., p. 37).
This means that although the State Security noted that the happening posed no real political threat to the established system of state socialism, they still maintained the intensity of their activities and even amplified them in the following years. One of the possible explanations why they kept this phenomenon under surveillance could be because it was intervening with the public sphere in an uncontrollable and ephemeral way – by virtue of its spontaneous actions and unforeseeable reactions from the public. It is also possible that it continued because the agents had to gather more and more information to legitimize their own sphere of action.
During this time, the artists also tried to protect themselves and their actions by supplying arguments for why their actions were legal. In a record of his interrogation on February 14, 1967, Szentjóby recalls that the officials asked him why he did not consider organising these happenings legally in official public spaces. Szentjóby answered that he was trying to do so, but the directors of such institutions told him that the genre – which was already three years old at that point – was nothing new and not progressive anymore, and so they declined (Anon. 1967b, p. 28). In the course of another interrogation three years later, on June 4, 1970, Szentjóby was still insisting on and stressing the fact that – except for the first happening – he organised all five following happenings upon request or at least with the knowledge of the programme directors and representatives of the hosting institutions, and thus, did so legally (Szentjóby and Anon. 1970, p. 138).
The confrontation between the artists and the State Security was mainly a series of hidden, illegal operations, such as the surveillance or phone tapping done by the agents. How these strategies were used for further actions can be traced in the operational plan of the aforementioned summary report on the happenings of 1968. In the second part of this report, concrete suggestions are made on how Szentjóby and this whole happening issue could be stopped, controlled and disintegrated, as it is “contrary to the political and moral development of the youth, against progress [emphasis added] and helps the imperialistic circles destabilise the communist system” (Anon. 1968, p. 108).
The instructions include two methods: external and internal approaches. The external would be, for example, “dialogue” with the directors of youth organisations in the frame of which these events took place, denial of authorisation by the Ministry of Culture and alerting the passport department. More dangerous were the internal approaches, which included intensification of the supposed conflict between Szentjóby and Tibor Hajas, another major protagonist of what was later called the performance art scene, and the synchronisation of six agents, many of them Szentjóby’s close friends. Furthermore, the dramatic possibility of committing Szentjóby to a psychiatric hospital was strongly recommended, as it was a widely practiced method against dissidents in the Soviet Union.
The agent “László,” who was identified as the writer Gyula Lugossy in the 1990s, was later sent to Poland and Czechoslovakia to detect further centres of the happening scene and reported extensively on it, writing a report on “The Effects of the Happening on Society” in 1969 (“László” 1969, pp. 85–95), which marked the peak intensity of the happening scene’s surveillance.15 After 1969, happenings were still part of the controlled operational strategies of the state, but one of its key figures, Szentjóby, was forced to emigrate and left for Switzerland in 1975. Thereafter, the state’s paranoid fear began to calm down.
The decreasing intensity of surveillance of the public sphere regarding performances and happenings was marked by a striking fact from the history of the art academy in Budapest. On October 5, 1979, a course with the title Contemporary European and US American Art after World War II, proposed by Hedvig Dvorszky, was accepted by the university council. The course programme included four lectures spread out over two semesters. The topic of the second semester was “The Image of Man in the New World (abstract expressionism, pop art, happening).”16 This means that the official art academy accepted the happening’s inclusion in the official art historical canon of the time – although we don’t know whether the happening was used as a “negative” example or as a neutral historical phenomenon. The questions that were extensively discussed and analysed in the secret agents’ reports – namely, what the happening was and what its identifying characteristics were, so it could be recognized in the public sphere – were moved partly into a field of official discourse when they entered the academic sphere of artist education.
State Security surveillance played a controversial role in the happening scene; on the one hand, it repressed the happening as a genre, while on the other, it amplified its radicalism and its mode of communication and expression. Identifying what the state defined as “the public sphere,” in surveilled and non-surveilled areas of cultural activities, serves as a tool for shedding new light on interactions between the happening scene and the state. The summary reports from the archive are historical documents for tracking the strategies and methods of state-driven control. The importance of agent reports lies not in the precise reconstruction of events (as the descriptions are often mutually misleading, manipulated or distorted), but in the valuable information they provide on the interrelation of State Security and artistic actions. Later, when the archives of the Secret Service got partially publicly accessible (in Hungary after 1996), the records also became invaluable to the historical position of the archive as well.
With regard to the history of the happening in Hungary and Eastern Europe in the late 1960s and 1970s, these reports offer valuable information for the reconstruction of how, by whom, under what circumstances and with what methods the State Security Service tried to hinder the dissemination of the happening, which was transformed in the socialist states into an act of unhindered freedom of behaviour and speech in public. Not only were the borders between the private and the public spheres reshaped by these surveillance networks, but the link between art and life became a core issue of artistic genres – not only in Eastern Europe. Dissipating the border between art and life also meant dissipating the border between the public and private spheres, which continues to be a core issue of individual human rights today, in the face of surveillance by the state or by private companies.
1This essay is a completely revised and rewritten version of a lecture presented at the SocialEast Forum on the Art and Visual Culture of Eastern Europe, Seminar No. 7: Art and Espionage, on February 27, 2009 at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. I am grateful to Tamás Szentjóby for his invaluable help and comments, and for providing documents and photographs for the lecture and this article. I would like to thank Gábor Altorjay for giving me insight into the files and dossiers in his archives, as well as for our discussion of his perspective of them. This essay, in its revised form, is part of the research project Performance Art in Eastern Europe 1950–1990: History and Theory at the University of Zurich. I am grateful to my colleagues for inspiring debates and discussions concerning the reframing of performance history in Eastern Europe. I would like to thank Tamás Szőnyei for his deep and precise insights and for his invaluable help in the jungle of the Historical Archive of the State Security in Budapest, as well as for providing me with one of the last issues of his seminal publication on the role of agents around Hungarian rock music. I would like to extend my gratitude to Edit Sasvári, who gave me hints and ideas on how these facts could gain proper interpretation and on how many traps one can fall into during the course of this research.
2The original Hungarian quote is as follows: “a zavaros világ logikájának való alávetettség, vagyis a résztvevők lemondanak arról az illuzórikus jogukról, hogy a véletlen felett befolyást gyakoroljanak, és beismerik tökéletes kiszolgáltatottságuk tényét egészen a fizikai megsemmisülésig.” This quote, which the reporting officer attributed to Allen Ginsberg, is imprecise and even in its Hungarian version is grammatically and semantically incorrect and unclear. The original of the Ginsberg quote could not be identified, but the translation appears in the anonymized 1968 document, Summary Report and Operation Plan (Schwitters dossier), Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security (Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára, ÁBTL), (V-156455, p. 103). The dossier “Schwitters” is not available for research, but excerpts from it are accessible online through the Center for Culture and Communication’s website at www.c3.hu/collection/tilos/docs.html (Accessed June 29, 2017). All translations in this text – if not indicated otherwise – are by the author.
3Concerning the supposedly serious threat coming from the happening scene, see also Kürti 2015, n.p.
4A Magyar Népköztársaság belügyminiszterének 0022. számú parancsa (dossier), ÁBTL, reproduced in Szőnyei 2005, p. 111. About the consequences of the order 0022, see also Sasvári 2003, pp. 11–13 and Szőnyei 2005, pp. 89–115.
5In the course of multifaceted evaluations of the effectiveness of the order 0022/1970 on cultural politics in a third evaluation in 1986, the cultural protagonists of different wings of the opposition attested that their aim was to try to develop their lines and to unite in order to “become a political factor, a power which has a defining role in society. Until today they have not decided for good whether they would like to realise this integration into society or to opt for ‘staying outside.’” They announced the need for a “new culture,” a “counter-culture,” and they organised the framework of the so-called “second public” with this aim in mind and attempted to establish a “second structure” Szőnyei 2005, p. 107. It is also notable in this context that these spheres of the second public and that of the second structure were extended in this evaluation beyond samizdat activities and magazines to foundations supporting the poor, independent peace organizations and economical activists.
6The GANZ-MÁVAG Cultural House, the University Stage and the Young Artists’ Club in Budapest were also venues for happenings – all of which were official institutions run by the Hungarian state.
7The first happening in Hungary took place on June 25, 1966 in Budapest at Hegyalja Street 20/b. It was conducted by Gábor Altorjay and Tamás Szentjóby, with the cooperation of Miklós Jankovics and István Varannai, with the help of Enikő Balla, Miklós Erdély and Csaba Koncz.
8For further sources and information about the origins of the first Hungarian happening, see Kürti 2015; Müllner 2004.
9Miklós Erdély (1928–1986) was an architect, artist, filmmaker and writer, and was a reference point for the Hungarian neo-avant-garde. For Erdély’s connection to Szentjóby, see also Kőhalmi 2012.
10“Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” is an 8-minute piece composed in 1960 by the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, originally entitled “8’37’’” as a reference to John Cage. About the importance of experimental music in the first happening, see also Kürti 2013.
11The following sources were used for reconstructing what took place in this grey zone of surveilled spheres: an 8-minute film shot by László Gyémánt (the only film material taken during the event, unfortunately without sound) and photographs stored by Szentjóby and Altorjay, taken by Gyula Zaránd.
12This article was covered in a report entitled “Hepaj vagy happening?” by László Bernáth in the files of the State Security, ÁBTL V-156455, p. 7.
13Regarding the role of Dr. Végh in the Hungarian neo-avante-garde, see also Kürti 2015; Tábor 2004; Iványi-Bitter 2008.
14Regarding the role of Dr. Végh in the State Security, see also Bódi 2011.
15On the effects of the happening on society, see also “László” 1969, pp. 84–95. Two pages of the report are online on the website of the Center for Culture and Communication: www.c3.hu/collection/tilos/docs.html (Accessed June 29, 2017).
16I am grateful to Noémi Flórián Szabó for this invaluable information. Szabó is doing extensive research in the archives of the Hungarian Art Academy and drew my attention to this fact.
Altorjay, G. (1998). Az ebéd (In memoriam Batu Kán). In: Á. Reczetár, ed., A magyar neoavantgárd elsõ generációja 1965–1972. 1st ed. Szombathely: Szombathelyi Képtár, p. 14.
Altorjay, G. (2011). The Lunch (In Memoriam Batu Khan). In: T. St.Turba and Zs. László, eds., Happening Budapest H 1966. The Lunch (In memoriam Batu Khan). 1st ed. Budapest: tranzit.hu, pp. 42–44.
Anon. (1967a). Summary Report [Report]. In: Schwitters Dossier, V-156455, March 7, 1967. Budapest: Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára, pp. 36–39.
Anon. (1967b). Report on the interrogation of Tamás Szentjóby [Report]. In: Schwitters Dossier, V-156455, February 14, 1967: Budapest: Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára, pp. 17/28 or 13–14. (double pagination).
Anon. (1968). Summary Report and Operation Plan [Report]. In: Schwitters Dossier, V-156455, May 11, 1968. Budapest: Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára, pp. 103–111. Appendix: pp. 112–113.
Balogh, M. (1968). Remark of Officer Mihály Balogh After a Report Given by the Agent with the Codename “Fung György” [Report], O-15636, May 6, 1968. Budapest: Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára, pp. 58–59.
Bódi, L. (2011). Művészeti és közösségi élet Petrigalla Pál szalonjában. Új Forrás, 43(6), pp. 49–65.
Ember, M. (1966). Happening és antihappening. Film, Színház, Muzsika, (5), p. 18.
“Hajdú”. (1966). Report. In: Schwitters Dossier, V-156455, August 4, 1966. Budapest: Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára, pp. 19–20.
Iványi-Bitter, B. (2008). Végh Doktor Archívuma. Mozgó Világ, (8), p. 23.
Kamondy, L. (1966). Ebéd in memoriam Batu kán. (Meditáció az első hazai happeningről). Tükör, 13(9), pp. 10–12.
Kőhalmi, P. (2012). Szelíd, de nem súlytalan. Pop art, konceptuális művészet, politikum: Erdély Miklós és Szentjóby Tamás progresszív munkái a ’60-as évek második felében. Különbség, 12(1), pp. 151–191.
Kürti, E. (2013). Generations in Experiment: The Cage Effect in the Early Sixties of Hungary. In: K. Székely, ed., The Freedom of Sound. John Cage behind the Iron Curtain. 1st ed. Budapest: Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, pp. 134–152.
Kürti, E. (2015). A szabadság anti-esztétikája. Exindex [online]. Available at: http://exindex.hu/index.php?l=hu&page=3&id=967 (Accessed October 10, 2015).
“László”. (1969). Report. In: Schwitters Dossier, V-156455, April 11, 1969. Budapest: Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára, pp. 85–95.
“Mészáros”. (1966). Report. In: Schwitters Dossier, V-156455, July 1, 1966. Budapest: Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára, pp. 15–18.
Müllner, A. (2004). Az első happening. A magyarországi neoavantgárd akcionizmus vázlatos története. In: P. Deréky and A. Müllner, eds., Né/ma? Tanulmányok a magyar neoavantgárd köréből. 1st ed. Budapest: Ráció, pp. 182–204.
Sasvári, E. (2003). A balatonboglári kápolnatárlatok kultúrpolitikai háttere. In: J. Klaniczay and E. Sasvári, eds., Törvénytelen avantgárd. Galántai György balatonboglári kápolnaműterme 1970-1973. 1st ed. Budapest: Artpool and Balassi, pp. 9–38.
Szentjóby, T. (2006). Bogey. (The Young Artists’ Club) – An Interview with Tamás St. Auby. 1st ed. Budapest: Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art Budapest.
Szentjóby, T. (2011). On the Happening. In: T. St.Turba and Zs. László, eds., Happening Budapest H 1966. The Lunch (In memoriam Batu Khan). 1st ed. Budapest: tranzit.hu, pp. 45–50.
Szentjóby, T. and Anon. (1970). Record on the Hearing [Record]. In: Schwitters Dossier, V-156455, June 4, 1970: Budapest: Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára, pp. 138/4 (pagination not consequent).
Szőnyei, T. (2005). Nyilván tartottak. Titkos szolgák a rock körül 1960–1990. 1st ed. Budapest: Magyar Narancs.
Tábor, Á. (2004). A Kezdet: Dr. Végh Avagy a Magyar Neoavantgárd Születése a Zene Szelleméből. Élet És Irodalom, 48(37), n.p.
Takács, T. (2014). Az ügynökhálózat társadalomtörténeti kutatása. In: S. Horváth, ed., Az ügynök arcai. Mindennapi kollaboráció és ügynökkérdés. 1st ed. Budapest: Libri. pp. 107–128.