And here begins the preface, which is already part of the 2004 article.

I could only hope that Hungarian-born American illustrator István Bányai would not refuse my request, adding to the struggles of Manifeszt. I originally planned to make a ‘proper’ interview with him, looking for clear answers to simple questions. However, the initially designed structure unraveled and turned into something beyond a Q&A session. The result was a piece of writing conveying deeply experienced thoughts about illustration, our human world, New York, showing appropriate distance and adequate crumbs of irony at the same time. I would like to rave about Ist-One, but I won’t do it, as I’m afraid he would just shoo me away and refuse the article, and then our readers would miss out on the opportunity to get an insight into his thoughts, as he is quite reluctant to share them publicly anyway. Given the unfortunate fact that only few know him in Hungary, I’ll start with a short biography.

István Bányai was born in Hungary in 1949. He graduated from the Hungarian College of Applied Arts in 1972, after which he designed posters, book and musical record covers, and also worked at the Pannonia Film Studio. His 1976 animated short titled Hamm paints a grotesque image of greedy humanity running into its doom. He defected from Hungary in 1980. First he fled to Paris, and then went on to the United States of America in 1981. His illustrations, caricatures were published in numerous American papers, including the Atlantic Monthly, Time, The New Yorker, Playboy and Rolling Stone magazines, several times on the cover. His drawings combine cartoon style with American pop art, and often stories ‘brought’ from his Central Eastern European past. The ‘criticism’ he offers is always fresh and sharp, the work of an artist critically observing the history, the struggles and joys of humanity. His book titled ZOOM, published in 35 countries, was praised by several American papers and received the National Children’s Choice Award for the best children’s book. Besides illustrations and drawings, Ist-One Bányai also makes animated films: for instance, he created the music video for Jean-Michel Jarre’s Oxygene 8.

And now, instead of the interview never realized, let’s move on to István Bányai’s essential essay, his ars poetica.

Listen, Tamás.

It seems to me that be it art or law, science or technology—believe it or not, these are all man-made things, human creations. All this nonsense we tell each other is just a common, joint attempt by the human animal aimed at the illusion of ‘comfort’, because it makes it easier to cope with emptiness, to endure ‘nothingness’. What lies deep below that—in a far, far away fairyland—is another world. A world we know nothing about, we have never known anything about, and which we don’t actually need to know anything about. After all, what would make our hearts beat then?

This ‘other world’ is in good hands still, it does not depend on anyone, and it does not cost anything. Perhaps one day it will become a service too, and not everyone will be able to afford it. If we ever reach the point when it is in our control, then we can say that progress has caught up with itself, and we can proudly claim that we are God, there is no need for sacrifice, awe, reverence and fear—we can erase these now meaningless words from the dictionaries.

For now, only one thing is certain: currently the world doesn’t depend on us to go on, it is not bothered by our little simulation experiments. Sure, learning the great secret is quite a feat, but it will not magically turn a thief into a ‘master’. What is vaguely revealed from existence are the state of consciousness and the ‘extra’… people don’t need to figure out eating and reproducing, those are included in the basic pack. By the way, the clock also keeps ticking unaffected by us.

Everything is quite crude in daily life, but softens into nostalgic romanticism if we look back about ten years later.

I was truly passionate about drawing, and I could admire almost with fanatic devotion the work of others if they managed to surprise me. I also wanted to be an original—any kind, any size, just not a reproduction. Here’s the best recipe for that: step into nothingness and fight for existence on all fronts. In light of this and as a result, you sort things out, realize your views, and if you have a bit of momentum (and maybe a few screws loose), you can even save yourself by making a mocking face, this time on paper. And that will help you pay your bills, avoid prison, and it even has some psychological benefits.

The world today revolves around money, especially since the worker–peasant alliance has failed (as an experiment). No wonder though, as you can’t make a proper living from working in the land of work, just as you cannot make a proper living from money in the land of money, because you spend your time making money instead of experiencing and living life. And money can’t buy the things that are worth anything.

There are collective decisions everywhere, and taking inspiration from such decisions is not the same as creating something by yourself. Today everything is created collectively for the collective; true, one experiences and makes sense of the world as an individual, but their impressions gained during that are not marketable, because they are too unique, too unusual, and beyond that, one does not know what to do with these on the market. On the market that has no place for originality anymore. All that’s left is psychologizing.

You do not converse with society; you always have the dialogue by and with yourself. The group is either silent, or if everyone talks at the same time, that’s anarchy. The best conversation is a series of personal considerations, and it happens secretly in your mind. What is outwardly visible is behaviour. On the exterior, you have to behave, not converse.

Art is not about redeeming the masses, even if that would sound better. Art is about the artist redeeming themself. Art is not some bad religion like the melters of socialism. Good art is transgression: it trespasses, violates, shocks, astonishes. Good art evokes emotions and teaches playfully, it presents what is forbidden or what doesn’t exist, and thus suddenly brings it into existence. It manifests what is not necessarily accepted or allowed.

If crime wouldn’t be illegal, it could even count as art. Crime can surpass any art if it is executed well.

The aesthetic of order is but a living paradox. Entropy tries to arrange itself amidst its own chaos, as order can only be created from disorder.

Today you have to please everyone, which is not the easiest thing to do. The result is often quite incoherent. Collective decision making and producing profit as an agenda do not support the creation of aesthetics. It lacks challenge, daring, extravagance, and of course mastery. The point is to be able to live with this contradiction as long as we can bear it. Being in living conflict is the source of all that is surprising, of all that enters when nobody expects it, because the turbulence it causes engages the ridges and furrows of the comfort-loving brain.

The discharge happens sooner or later, and a drawing is born, which mitigates the problem for a while. Peace gets temporarily restored. Like every successful orgasm, it is followed by a short period of serenity.

As the great poet said, ‘My heart perching on nothingness’.

I hate television, but I still watch it, because sitting in front of it, you don’t have to do anything. Enter Zen. You sleep with your eyes open, your mind is soothed, because it makes it empty, and it is happiest when nothing disturbs it.

‘Artist’ is not the right expression. Artisan would be better, but it would be misunderstood since handicraft is extinct, and we have ‘readymade’ Duchamp. For lack of a better word, I’m left with not caring about categorisation.

I make a living selling my drawings. A gun for hire!—as they say in the US. Artisanship would be nice, but there is hardly any demand for it, my teacher didn’t even teach it to me in 1968–72. In our fast-paced world, where nobody is a master of anything, there is simply no need for it, although one might still dream of it… the measure of effectiveness is not quality but the gag! It’s a matter of what chance creates.

While I’m drawing and my eyes and hands cooperate with each other, time stops, or stops being sensed, so I am unable to give an account of a significant portion of my life, because I have not been present in it consciously, so to speak. Good drawings always hopped out of nothing, mostly in an unexpected moment. So, despite all my intentional efforts, my reflections were rooted in nothingness. The execution worked similarly, as I also cannot account for the time I spent with the activity, because when I lifted my face from the paper and observed the result, it was already too late to make any corrections.

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Every drawing is a phantom, a hole on nothingness. I don’t care if people (including me) see me as an artist or not. Art is the art of art historians, and as such, it is also just a fabrication. I’m sticking with the things that shock, fascinate, captivate, surprise, perhaps disturb, but in any case, what don’t bore. We look and marvel. We commemorate a moment in this ever changing world, transience stops us for a moment of astonishment.

My mother died in childbirth, it’s needless to say who the child was. I grew up without brothers or sisters. I became a loner who simply observes; I had reservations about the older generation.

It was only later that my affinity for visuality was revealed to be a value, or as something that is perhaps something worthy of note. For me, it meant everything to me since I can remember—it felt natural, like air.

I have good memory, I also learn languages easily, and although I find the world of imagination more entertaining than dry science, I possess an analytical approach. I gave biology a go, and I was interested in architecture too before I ‘officially’ became a graphic artist, just to avoid being conscripted into the army. And so I draw, or rather, illustrate. Of course, there’s still the question, what is illustration? Especially nowadays.

I was also interested in animation—I found it bothersome, but intriguing how my drawings would start to move, and of course, the passing of time… In the end, due to a lack of contracts, my books became animations, between covers.

I only engaged with advertisements for a short time, because they didn’t exist in communism, but after living in the West for 25 years, I came to hate them. I consider them the worst kind of hustle… even art is better than that, albeit nobody wants it, while at least advertising is performed for millions of people, as a form of fashionable humbug.

According to art historians, illustration is not art. Moreover, full intellectual property rights don’t apply to it under copyright law in the United States, because a ‘thing’ created based on commission or a given text, even if it appears to be original, is not art for its own sake, like painting, sculpting or photography are. Of course, it is all just some ridiculous self-important fuss, like a fence in the woods.

So, illustration is not classified as art, but as a piece of free association on the interpretation of text written in the columns of magazines and newspapers. ‘Illuminare’, i.e. it illuminates, sheds light on something, makes something visible; what might not be clear even after reading several pages of a story thus becomes instantly transparent and comprehensible in the form of a good picture. In better cases it is an opinion in a picture, in other cases a delusion risen from nonsensical writing. The language in which the article is written, and to which the drawing is attached as an additive, possesses a strange power in today’s practice.

Visuality broke forth, but the message is still laid down in the power of words. It is hard to find an editor who dares to see and say something in pictures, perhaps in a different way, or maybe based on what cannot be conveyed, or only with great difficulty, in words.

No wonder! The power of images is manifold greater than that of written words, and that daunts bureaucracy. The world was created in words, it changes hands in words, and it will be sold with contracts. The eye freely and stealthily hangs near it, like a fresh wound, and it cannot be deceived. If there is no better way, it has to be covered or gouged out with a red-hot iron. The eye always turns to where it shouldn’t look, or where it is not proper to look, not allowed to look, or what one practically can’t bear to look at.

The eye is TABOO.

In the world of today’s publications, where everything is hysterical, hypocritical and contradictory, cash is king, which is sweet like honey, but the power it comes with allows things to be seen and moods to be evoked only in a controlled way. Media is censored and it is not independent. If you want to make a living from illustration, you are forced to see and make things seen through the glasses of the written word. You can try pushing the boundaries, but there is no escape from clichés. You might be able to give new robes to stereotypes, but it is impossible to completely cast them off. The spectrum has a wide range, but it is not a full one. And language is still part of the curriculum, while visuals are not.

People who lack the inherent sensitivity for it cannot understand what pain it brings to those who have the eye to see the heaps of distasteful things piled up by the economy and communities in this deteriorated, babbling world.

It doesn’t matter where my drawing desk is currently.

It used to matter. I emigrated from Hungary 25 years ago. I lived in Los Angeles, then moved to New York about 12 years ago to be closer to the centre of publishing. I started representing myself, and took to the city. Regardless of technological advances, humanity is still a primitive community in terms of consciousness.

If you are fortunate, you might be able to enjoy the benefits of technology, because then this primitive community will try to catch up with you and not the other way around, but that needs time, persistent hard work and some luck. At least, that is how it was in my case. Some people get their big break in no time, because they have nice breasts and happened to sit next to Medici on a flight… Unfortunately, that is not my story—if my calculations are right, it took at least ten years for me. Well, if the expression ‘big break’ means anything at all. The point is that I climbed all the mountains, some of them multiple times. I wanted to be an illustrator who gets credit for his work, even if not much, but who has his name and signature appear under his works! A person who doesn’t use his hands to realize someone else’s work, but draws what he thinks! 

Whether I am successful or not—does that matter? If all I did was survive a crisis and provide schooling for a child, I am already successful in this alien world with its language, customs, culture, and daily routines completely different from what I was raised in. If I have been able to keep living and growing while preserving my past, and it didn’t break me, then I might call myself successful. What will be my legacy? Perhaps my son… a bag of doodles… and a skeleton. The world has moved on, while my world remained what it is. Living expenses are four times what they were when I came here, but the salaries are still the same.

I preferred doing illustration to animation on a commercial level, although I could have made a living from that too, and the climate was great in California. Animation can also involve some original tasks every once in a while, but it is an overly complicated kind of work, and I am impatiently stubborn.

Illustration is the thing for me, taking on a new subject every time: politics, sex, religion, lifestyle, fashion… digesting the conflicts of an era and spitting an opinion onto paper brings a lot of possibilities. It has then become a lifestyle; sometime around the second half of the ‘80s, I became a chronicler among the many.

The head offices of magazines, newspapers and book publishers are all located in New York, with a few exceptions to prove the rule, such as Playboy in Chicago or Tokyo, Atlantic in Boston or Esquire in London. If I had not come here, I wouldn’t have known about New York Magazine being ‘redesigned’. They re-launched the issues with a light, critical editorial based on the most interesting events of the previous week, spiced with some humour, and they thought my wry wit would go perfectly with it. Lucky! In hindsight, doing it week after week with a smile on my face seems like some extraordinary performance, some killer effort. This famous paper is the very same as the New York Magazine originally thought up by Milton Glaser in the early ‘70s—an early Time Out, poking at the life of this 17-million-strong city week after week, presenting every new restaurant, gallery and museum, cinema schedules and more, with gossip, luridly whipping up hysteria, so that everyone would subscribe to it.

They wanted to feature me at the front of the magazine with the articles titled Gotham, which is a Scottish nickname for Manhattan, a free translation of ‘City of Goats’, full of bleating, bearded, complacent goats. Thank Heaven, it meant that for three years, every New York resident had a copy of my weekly drawings next to their toilet. In the meantime, I completed my book titled Zoom, and even found a publisher for it, getting it printed after some struggles in managing the many clashing publisher opinions… and the ice broke.

I do about 120 commissions every year, and thanks to that, put together with the non-stop improvisation going on for over a decade, I became fairly ‘popular’. The phone keeps ringing, I get more offers than I can handle, so sometimes I even have the opportunity to pick and choose from the jobs. By time, the economy-class New York magazine established a flight connection to the New Yorker, which provides ‘first class’ travel. Seeing my work, they offered me a section almost every week, launching my lucky star, which the tax office also found rather pleasing.

My picture book Zoom has been published in 35 countries; Hungary is not one of them. Zoom has a message that is felt by everyone: that everything is connected, the world is limitless, it has no end, no centre—it is a process; that permanence is but an illusion, and whatever there is, is just a transition. The new is just like the old, only in a different way.

Beyond all that, I was invited to teach in a college in New York, and I was featured on the cover of American Illustration (No 18). I concocted animation for the children’s channel Nickelodeon, made a Jean-Michel Jarre music video for MTV Europe, and created Absolut Istvan for Absolut Vodka. Abrams Books published a 200-page selection of my works in 2001, and another book will be launched this autumn with the title The Other Side. Next spring, 3x3 Magazine will issue an article about me and put me on the cover.

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As the only Hungarian-born American illustrator in the American league, I’ve had a stable track record in the past 20 years. I am appreciated, there is demand for my work, students steal from me, imitate me. The bottle deposit is refunded.

I don’t owe anyone anything anymore!

Name on the bottle: 
IST-ONE Banyai 1949-
Not yet expired!
New York, 2004.

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Alright then, thanks, bye.

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Translated by Panna Kakuszi

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