János Baksa Soós was one of the most well-known figures in subcultural circles at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s in Budapest. He utilized his hilarious social humour, which is based on situation comedy, as the singer of the Kex group. The band had a large fan club which consisted mostly of intellectuals. The secret service picked up on their activities, and the frontman soon became a person of interest.
His stage actions were based on improvisation, which resonated well in his milieu: in the documentary shot about the Kex group (A ship flown away in the wind, 1998) many people quote his stage improvisations word for word some thirty years later. He was not only entertaining during his performances. According to people’s recollections, he constantly transformed everyday situations into actions, creating contacts with those present under any circumstances.
He was a leader in his circles. His attitude as a medium gave an impression of liberty, and as one of his old friends put it, this was “an ethical freedom, an aspiration towards good”. However, the authorities interpreted his manifestations as audacity and seditious behaviour, so they monitored him and even chastised him on several occasions.
He left Hungary for West Germany in 1971. He studied art in Essen and in Düsseldorf, and he then settled in Berlin. In Berlin, he founded a school based on his understanding of Native American values (“come to know the environment, get in touch with it, be in a good relationship with”). He then got involved in samurai training (“verbal and physical life-defence”). Since then, he has published under the penname Prince January.
Interpreting art as a cosmic technology, he propagated a creative program based on his worldview, which he developed in the Native American school. He considers our time as the space-age, the art of which combines all knowledge and teaches mankind to be in harmony with all existing elements of the cosmos. He created an array of paintings, drawings, sculptures, jewels, poems, texts and musical compositions, specifying his social status as an artist-parson.
“We live in a changing era, the age of the homo sapien is over. I am not interested anymore in his disputes, they have gone to the Museum of Military History. The new worldview is a coherent system, its equal agents are the stars, our plant and beetle colleagues, our fellow-man… We have to notice that we operate the universe together, the basic tone of which is exhilaration.”
A significant part of his oeuvre (paintings and sculptures) was purchased by the King St. Stephen Museum in 2012. Works made with the use of non-traditional technologies (manuscripts, music, slides) were made part of the Tamás Cseh Archive in 2016, a move initiated by András Cseh in cooperation with the family of János Baksa Soós. Processing, digitalization and publication of the materials has begun.
