Balázs Eszter: Art in action. Lajos Kassák's Avant-Garde Journals from A Tett to Dokumentum, 1915-1927 - The avant-garde and its journals 3. (Budapest, 2017)

Gábor Dobó: Generation Change, Synthesis and a Programme for a New Society - Dokumentum in Budapest (1926-1927)

in the long term, to a new society. They saw housing conditions as influencing (regulating) the lives of individuals in every respect, from sleep, the structure of the family, and social and sexual life to sport, diet, hygiene and habits of cultural consumption.21 [Figs. 10-15]

Dokumentum's visions of the modern city were utopian in the special sense that avant-garde movements were also utopian, at once pragmatic and subversive. Since Thomas More wrote his book Utopia in 1516, many versions of the concept have been produced. The avant-garde notions of utopia differ from the original early-modern theories. While the latter are really thought experiments or philosophical reflections pursued without any intention to implement them, avant-garde movements approached utopia not so much as a mental construct as an artistic and political praxis capable of creating new structures and relating critically and subversively to various forms of hegemony. Although the early modern version of utopia may also be regarded as a critique of current conditions, the avant-garde took it to greater extremes and set it against the persistence of the past in the present.22

Dokumentum offered, in the characteristic way of avant-garde utopias, practical ways of superseding existing patterns of thought and society. Its articles on cities went beyond generalities about modern urban visions and went into the technical details of how they could be realized.23 It also strongly criticized contemporary phenomena in town planning, lifestyles and economics, such as certain architectural complexes in Budapest and the way of life of the Budapest lower middle class. The chronotope (spatial and temporal structure) of its ideas for the city was the “future that can be planned here and now”. It claimed that everything needed to plan a city to symbolize and generate our future and bethe birthplace ofthe new society was already available. Planning meant rational work, aiming to eliminate the accidental. As one article put it, “every possible material, structural and technical innovation” must be used to design the new city, but “without assuming technical utopias and non-existent material and structural inventions”.24 Like many other contemporary journals,

21 N.n. [Farkas Molnár], Város [City], Ibid., 17-20. In greater depth, see András Ferkai, Molnár Farkas, Tere, Budapest, 2011.

Roland Schaer, Utopia and Twentieth-Century Avant-Gardes, in Roland Schaer-Gregory Claeys-Lyman Tower Sargent (eds.), Utopia, The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World, The New York Public Library, New York-Oxford, 2000, 279.

23 On the interrelationships among the avant-garde, utopia and the city, see David Pinder, Visions ofthe City, Utopianism and Politics in Twentieth-Century Urbanism, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2005. Christina Lodder, Searching for Utopia, in Christopher Wilk (ed.), Modernism, Designing a New World, 7974-7939, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 2006,23-69.

24 [Molnár Farkas], Város, op. cit., 17.

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