Endre Tót blurs the boundaries between artistic practice and everyday life through such subtle actions that, if not for the photographic documentation of them, might well pass completely unnoticed like evanescent gestures, extra-artistic situations or events. In a series made up of an immense variety of this type of events that he gathers under the repeated title “I am glad…”, Tót carries out simple actions which in many cases can be interpreted as absurd on account of their self-referential nature: he turns his back to us while staring at a brick wall, takes a step with his right foot ready to land on the ground, stamps his ever-smiling self-portrait on a bare bottom, takes a photograph of his own shadow cast on the grass, draws a straight line on the façade of a building… all of them are minimal, barely noticeable gestures.

Nonetheless, as mentioned above, they are also aesthetic experiences delimited by its photographic documentation, which provides them with both a physicality, as a communicative medium, and a duration in time that extends beyond the temporality of the action itself. Delimitation is also a key concept in understanding Tót’s work, representative of an artistic practice that constantly deals with limits, whether they are geographical or disciplinary. In any case, and whatever their nature, they are pushed to make room for freedom and experimentation.

In this sense, the concept of borderline art, coined by George Brecht in the 1960s to delimit a set of practices that Lucy Lippard also called dematerialised and Lawrence Alloway non-compact, is revealing. Brecht was an artist with whom Endre Tót corresponded during this period, as he did with many other artists who formed part of the flexible, experimental and playful group that was Fluxus. His definition did not emphasise either the material or formal aspect in order to map this type of conceptual practices that appeared during the sixties and which had more to do with presence than with representation, but rather it focused on the experience of the limit itself. In Brecht’s words, it would be “an art at the point of imperceptibility. Sounds barely heard, sights barely distingushed (…) it should be possible to miss it completely.”2

Borderline art is therefore a type of practice that could become indistinguishable, though not totally indiscernible, from everyday life itself. The exhibition “I am glad if I am happy” brings together a series of minimal gestures and actions that have no hierarchical order. Making a geometric drawing with chalk, reading Lenin’s political theories and wagging one’s toe have the same experiential value here: the one given to them by an aesthetic perspective that has always tended towards creative experimentation and sense of humour and, harder still, has managed to remain unchanged over the decades.