Tot participated in the Fluxus[1] movement and is well known for his Mail art projects, the use of xerox copies and usage of rubber stamps with clear conceptual text declarations.
In 1968 and 1969 he joined his young Neo-Avant-Garde colleagues named collectively the Iparterv Group of Artists at two scandalous exhibitions heavily criticised by officialdom.
The new media he employed in his art include telegrams, picture postcards, T-shirts, Xerox copies, typewriters, films, music, posters, graffiti, banners, actions, artist's books, street newsreels.
His fellow mail art correspondents included his later friend Ben Vautier, John Armleder, George Brecht, Daniel Spoerri, Cosey Fanny Tutti, Genesis P-Orridge, Dieter Roth, Marina Abramovich, Ken Friedmann and his dog.
Art magazines in Germany, Italy, and France took note of the exhibition with the Jerusalem Post commenting: "This is not to say that Endre Tot is the same race with Giacometti, but he is a totally new and rewarding experience."
At the invitation of John Armleder, his later friend who became world-famous for his Neo Geo movement, he spent half a year with the Ecart Gallery of Geneva, an institution also functioning as a mail art centre.
It was during his stay in Geneva that he accomplished his first street action (TOTalJoys 1976) which was filmed and later issued on DVD by the Paris Bureau des Videos in 2005.
Due to his international actions and mail art activities he counted in the West as one of the most notable Eastern-European artists, an appraisal hardly acknowledged in his native country.
He twice exhibited his works with Galerie René Block, an institution previously hosting such notables as Joseph Beuys, Richard Hamilton, Allan Kaprow, Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell.
(Museum für Moderne Kunst, 2010) his large triptych "Fluxus Triptichon" (2002, 3 x 200 x 125 cm) was on view alongside works by Beuys, Kaprow, Ben Vautier, G. Brecht, Al Hausen, Nam June Paik etc.
"I am glad that I have stood here" – this was inscribed in Hungarian on his bronze plaque placed in the pavement in 1998 in front of Artpool's art space in Budapest (60, Paulay Ede St.).
street actions as satellite events to international exhibitions have embarrassed or enraged passers-by in many cities over the decades, not infrequently causing even the police to intervene.
International critics usually evaluate those anti-demonstrations by Tót to be responses to the mandatory political demonstrations that he had lived through as a young man in totalitarian Hungary.
A photo documentation of Tót's earliest street action was exhibited at the international show "Protest & Survive" put on by the famous London Whitechapel Gallery.
The catalogue said this about his actions: "Tót's response to the censorship, isolation and suppression inherent in a totalitarian state was to produce his series of joy".
The New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) had acquired several works of his created during his Budapest isolation and exhibited them in 2006 at its show "Eye on Europe – 1960 to Now".
A critic wrote this about the book: "This is half-way between a logbook and an autonomous work of art since the primacy of the text is questioned throughout by its unusual layout and illustrations...
The account Tót gives of his youthful love-affair is deeply moving, the way he recalls the relationship of the regime towards its artists in the 60s and 70s, convincing, and the list of his fleeting affairs with girls is very funny."
Simultaneously, the Institut Hongrois, the Hungarian Cultural Center in Paris staged a show of the Iparterv Group of Artists (Le Progrés de l'Illusion), where Tót's early (1966/67) informal paintings and paperworks were also on view.
After his retrospective exhibition 2012 in MODEM, Endre Tót almost completely terminated working in the studio and has been mainly focusing on street actions and "demos".
Taking on the concept of his Gladness-demos in Bonn, Paris and Amsterdam during the 1970s and 1980s, in autumn of 2017 Endre Tót realized the first Gladness Demonstration in Budapest within the framework of the OFF Biennale, also on Andrássy út.
Participants carried their own laughing portraits laminated on a large board as protest signs, while at the beginning of the parade there was a huge banner: ÖRÜLÜNK HOGY DEMONSTRÁLHATUNK (We are glad if we can demonstrate).