Stano Filko

1937, Veľká Hradná, Slovakia

Happsoc III: Altar of Contemporaneity, 1966

installation

In the 1960s Stano Filko carried out several actions entitled HAPPSOC (composed of the words “happening” and “social”). HAPPSOC III was an invitation extended to the public to take part in the global action Reality commencing in 1966 in Czechoslovakia. The invitation to HAPPSOC III included a map of Czechoslovakia and a pocket mirror, through which Filko invited the public to become acquainted with life. It differed from a happening by its appropriation of “found society” and the participation of ordinary people, without any intervention by the artist. The manifesto “What is HAPPSOC”? states that it is “an event inciting the perception of reality removed from the stereotype of its existence.” Defined as “universally valid and ‘living’ way of changing found reality into an artefact, in which not only the immediate surroundings of the participant, but also the aggregate of relations evoked by the things viewed become the ‘object’.”