Artists & Agents. Performance Art and the Secret Services, ed. with Sylvia Sasse, published by Spector Books, 2023
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Artists & Agents marks the beginning of a research that culminates in my forthcoming book Who is Afraid of Artists? Operative Knowledge between Art and Power. Several concepts first developed in this volume—including operational knowledge, the performativity of intelligence archives and the production of aesthetic knowledge by state security institutions—have since evolved into a broader theory of cultural control.
While Artists & Agents was conceived as a collaborative volume edited with Sylvia Sasse and bringing together more than thirty artists, historians and researchers from across Europe, our contributions with Sylvia Sasse established the theoretical framework that runs through the entire publication.
Artists & Agents opened up a previously unexplored field at the intersection of contemporary art, political history and state surveillance. Bringing together artists, historians, curators and researchers from across Europe, the volume examines how secret services shaped artistic production, infiltrated cultural networks and influenced the reception of contemporary art throughout the twentieth century.
Moving beyond Cold War narratives, the book approaches intelligence agencies not only as political actors but also as producers of cultural knowledge. Through archival research, newly accessible state security files and artistic interventions, it reveals the often invisible relationships between artistic freedom, censorship, surveillance and state power.
As co-editors and authors, we developed the central research questions of the project and introduced a new approach to reading secret police archives—not merely as historical sources, but as systems of knowledge production that actively shaped artistic realities.
The introductory essay by Sylvia Sasse and Kata Krasznahorkai develops the central argument of the volume: that secret services did not merely observe artistic production but intervened in it through strategies of surveillance, disinformation, infiltration and what the East German Ministry for State Security called Zersetzung (“decomposition”). It situates these practices within broader contemporary debates on cultural control, authoritarianism and political manipulation.
“Operational Knowledge. Secret Police Archives as Art Archives?”
This essay introduces one of the key concepts that continues to shape my current research: operational knowledge.
Rather than treating secret police files as passive historical records, I argue that they should be understood as active technologies of knowledge production. Intelligence archives did not simply document artistic practice—they classified, interpreted and ultimately helped construct the realities they claimed merely to observe.
The chapter proposes a fundamentally different reading of surveillance archives: not as repositories of facts but as performative systems through which political power produced cultural knowledge.
“‘Decomposing’ Theory. The Hungarian State Security and the Theory of Happening”
Based on extensive archival research in Hungary, this essay reconstructs how state security officers developed sophisticated theoretical models in order to understand, classify and neutralise performance art.
The chapter demonstrates that intelligence agencies did not merely collect information about artists—they generated their own theories of contemporary art as operational instruments for surveillance and repression. This insight forms one of the conceptual starting points for my current book Who is Afraid of Artists?
dr. katalin krasznahorkai 