Károly Halászk was a multimedia artist whose programmatic strategy developed inside the group known as the Pécsi Műhely that was active in Pécs, Hungary, during the 1960s and ’70s.
The works of Halasz, from the start, have opposed the official esthetic of social realism and were based on the rich legacy of the local constructivism and avant-garde, expressed in the local idiom of abstract geometry. Inspired by his own experience from the position of Hungarian artists and culture in the international context and by influences from the contemporary avant-garde practices of the world (mostly Fluxus), Halász turned to performance, installation, conceptual art, ready-made and TV as the most powerful medium of visual communication.
In the beginning, he combined the geometric painting and TV image/apparatus into a united visual composition in which geometrical elements, symbolizing the eternal Logos, were imposed over the rapidly changing electronic images, which dully emitted the contents of the quotidian reality. In time, Halasz deconstructed the TV apparatus. The series of performances of self and various banal, low-tech objects he started incorporating into the standard TV frame. By this gesture of adoption and literal physical occupation, he deconstructed TV as the medium of ideological manipulation and, at the same time, pointed out its inherent potential as the means for more democratic, interactive communication.