Tót and the TÓTal JOY of Nothing
Tót and the TÓTal JOY of Nothing

Summary/Abstract: With a sardonic and tenacious declaration of gladness, the Hungarian artist Endre Tót conveyed the psychic wounds of his time in two ways: he used the sign –“0”—for the number zero, and he announced “TÓTalJOYS.” Lamenting the “censorship, isolation, [and] suppression” that he “sensed in every field of life,” Tót countered with what he calls an “absurd euphoria of Joys.” No artist has ever been as persistently, stubbornly “glad” as Endre Tót, who ceased being a painter in 1970 to immerse himself in works flooded with zeros or simply marked with the phrase, “I am glad if I…” In what follows, I think through how his decision to repeat zeros must be acknowledged as a conceptual strategy to lay bare and work through the negativity and power of institutionalized socialism in Eastern Europe. Tót conceived works of art that exhibited excessive, scornful happiness, that pointed directly to its very absence, and that identified an aesthetic act founded on the failure to realize precisely what the political ideology proclaimed: welfare for all the people. Announcing his “joy,” Tót undermined authority with the irony of gratitude. In part, his repetition of zeros signify dissociation, the psychological means to withstand repressive social conditions, and they signal his conscious, tactical, pre-emptive determination to express the totalitarian reduction and degradation of a citizen’s life to zero. I view Tót’s choice to deploy the 0, and to emphasize being “glad,” as his decisive effort to live in art in order to live through political circumstance. In this regard, Michel Foucault’s comment in “Is it Useless to Revolt?,” is worth remembering. Revolt “is how subjectivity…is brought into history, breathing life into it,” he observed, but while being “a simple choice,” it is “a difficult work.” Tót’s grim work was to assume the forced smile of gladness in the face of nothing.

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