Istv%C3%A1n Cs. Bartos

Istvn Cs. Bartos is a Hungarian performance artist and spoken word performer mostly known for his acts in which he eats dirt, garbage, raw meat, animal cadavers, excrement and drinks his own urine representing the decay of human condition. He lives voluntarily homeless and as a constantly travelling vagabond. His artistic viewpoint can be referenced to the ones of Antonin Artaud, Alejandro Jodorowsky, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Beuys or Hermann Nitsch. Considered himself as a philosophical cannibal and a tramp poet. His lifestyle is a regional form of freeganism. Bartos has some devoted cult following in Hungary. Often credited by his fans as the peasant Marquis de Sade or the Charles Manson of Hungary. Bartos is a strong supporter of such contemporary ideas as degrowth and psychical nomadism.

Bartos was born in a Bolshevist family tradition , he was influenced by the lifestyle of his working class predecessors dominated by the Stalinist agriculture and industry. This world was destroyed by the turn of the regime in 1989. Most of Bartos early work such as The IBM Factory Moves Out of Town or The Closing Down of the Coal Mine in Balinka try to track down the downfall of the traditional Hungarian working class. He was brought up in Csikria, but later moved to Szkesfehrvr with his family. In his spokenword autobiography he depicts the farm of his grandfather as a survivalist camp. He learnt the survival techniques of a vagabond or an urban guerrilla from his early age. His father dies when he was a child. He rejected the socalled bourgeois etiquette and the conventional way of feeding, insisting upon the customs of his peasant ancestors. Bartos became a local medical curiosity as a child, an extreme example of Pica disorder. Later he studied the subject extensively and found

Source: Wikipedia