Istvan Kantor

Better known as Monty Cantsin–founder of Neoism–Kantor/Cantsin immigrated from Hungary to Canada in 1976. In collaboration with correspondence artist David Zack, Kantor launched the Monty Cantsin open-pop-star project in 1978 in Portland, Oregon. He initiated both the international operations of Neoism and his major lifelong performance “Blood Campaign” in 1979 in Montreal. In 1986 Kantor/Cantsin relocated his headquarters to New York City to re-emerge as “self-appointed leader of the people of the Lower East Side.” He has been arrested and imprisoned several times for his spontaneous interventions in museums, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), the Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal, and the Ludwig Museum (Cologne). Kantor has created a body of work remarkable for its demonic energy, its subversive vision, and its encompassing range. He has explored mail art, music, kinetic sculpture, multi-media installation and, most prominently, performance art and video. He founded an indefinable and conspiratorial movement he called neoism. The intent of Kantor’s work has always been to disrupt closed systems of power, political and aesthetic, to lay bare the ways in which technology transforms human bodies and minds into elements of a vast robotic machine, and to confront today’s deadening systems of technological control.