Istvan Kantor

Who is Istvan Kantor?

Istvan Kantor is a Hungarian born Canadian performance and video artist, industrial music and electropop singer, and one of the early members of Neoism.

In the 1970s, he studied medicine, but also participated in the underground arts scene of communist Budapest around Laszlo Beke as a folk singer. In 1976, he met the American prankster and Mail Artist David Zack at Art Club Budapest who then toured through Europe with his mail art collection. Zack encouraged Kantor to join him in America; Kantor emigrated via Paris to Montreal and, in 1978, lived one year with Zack and Blaster Al Ackerman in Portland, Oregon, encountering and working with artists from Mail Art and the industrial music scene. He was one of a couple of persons to whom Zack suggested to adopt the multiple identity Monty Cantsin, but only Kantor took this proposal seriously and adopted the Cantsin identity to the extent that it became chiefly associated with him. Returning to Montreal, he organized a Mail Art show "The Brain in the Mail" and gathered a group of people, many of them teenagers or in their early 20s, under the moniker of Neoism. Soon afterwards, Neoism expanded into an international subcultural network that collectively used the Monty Cantsin identity.