All that I said just two days ago has changed…
Yesterday morning the protesters left the Ludwig Museum stairwell, and yesterday afternoon the government announced the new director of the museum to be Fabényi Júlia. I don’t know why I am surprised after all that’s happened, but what can I say?–it’s such a shame.
I haven’t shared information on Hungarian cultural politics in over amonth, but unfortunately not a result of an improved situation or stasis; I’ve just had a lot of deadlines. Since May 9, protestors have occupied the Ludwig Museum-Budapest’s stairwell, something The Art Newspaper published a story on a few days ago. It’s great to see international media pick up on this local activism directed at the lack of transparency in the government’s cultural decision-making, and specifically against the current most critical issue: the replacement of the current director of the museum, Barnabas Bencsik.
Bencsik and Júlia Fabényi applied for the position, and an advisory committee recommended Fabényi to the government. Certainly to my mind, Bencsik is the much more qualified candidate. The protesters are also reacting to a series of political decisions that they feel have threatened the autonomy and professionalism of cultural institutions, and the group has stayed (and slept) in the museum for the past 11 days, and intends to stay until their demands for more information about the election of the new director of the Ludwig is met. From their press release:
9th May 2013
Unite for Contemporary Art
We demand complete transparency in the running and adjudication of professional competitions in the art world!
The lack of transparency and culture of secrecy surrounding the current competition for the post of director of the Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art Budapest is unacceptable!
The anti-democratic practices afflicting education and society in the last two years have now reached the art world, including: the merger of the Hungarian National Gallery and the Museum of Fine Arts without proper consultation with art professionals, the appointment of the director of the Műcsarnok / Kunsthalle without a competition, the unjustified elevation of the Hungarian Academy of Arts (MMA) to a position of institutional dominance holding sway over public funds, and most recently, the lack of transparency in the Ludwig Museum competition.
The protesters have held many discussions and other events in the stairwell over the past week. Thursday evening, I attended a lecture by curator Kate Fowle on generative curating. Originally, she was going to speak at the tranzit office about ICI (Independent Curators International)’s ongoing DO IT project with Hans Ulrich Obrist; however, given the situation the lecture was moved to the Ludwig stairwell and she spoke about reaction and revolution, and the changed role of the curator over the past 20 years with the rise, promise, and disillusionment offered by politically engaged biennials and institutional critique. Occupy as a movement and internationalism were discussed as problematic issues rather than easy solutions. I don’t know what the role of a curator is, or how an institutional critique could best be presented in Hungary today. But the Ludwig was considered the last autonomous art museum. And the protesters-mainly artists and art professionals- are offering a critique of their own.
In terms of this particular story, however, there is perhaps good news. The government put off its final decision about the directorship for another month, suggesting that it is considering keeping Bencsik in the role. It announced this delay the day after Occupy moved into the stairwell, and a few days after the Ludwig Stiftung (the museum’s collection was founded by a donation from Peter and Irene Ludwig’s Foundation) insisted on a meeting to discuss the directorship before the final decision was announced.
This a positive sign, although I have no faith that the government will use the additional time to actually reconsider rather than prevaricate. And, in the interim, this major institution will continue to flounder without any leadership–no one can be hired (and staff have begun to leave because of the changed circumstances) and no financial commitments can be made. Exhibition planning has ground to a halt as everyone waits. Bencsik’s contract expired at the end of February; now, the earliest possible date for a director is mid-June. It is a shocking waste of time, money, energy for everyone involved–in a truly non-partisan sense–for the government to continue to drag out this stupidity. At this rate I can foresee an empty museum, with no staff and no exhibitions in its galleries. If anything represents the loss and waste to the community, or more clearly exemplifies the damage to the credibility and professionalism of the institution, I think that image does.
A reverse-chronological series of posts about the cultural political situation in Hungary:
This Spring I saw The Nude Man at the Leopold Museum in Vienna, The Naked Man at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest, and also an exhibition, Orange Human, featuring male nudes by Slovakian artist Svätopluk Mikyta at Deàk Erika gallery in Budapest. At least for me this Spring, the preponderance of female nudes traditionally shown in art has been fully counterbalanced.
Paul Cezanne, Seated Male Nude (Self-portrait), 1910
The Nude Man dealt with the history of the male nude in art since 1800. The Naked Man concerns itself with contemporary representations of the male body, explored thematically in ways that overlapped with and expanded on The Nude Man exhibition. Some works and artists made appearances in both shows; for example, Katarzyna Kozyra’s video installation The Men’s Bathhouse, filmed surreptitiously here in Budapest, was shown in both places. It was not intentional to have two such similar shows at the same time, so perhaps the coincidence suggests a growing interest in themes and dialectics around the male body.
Still from The Men’s Bathhouse, Katarzyna Kozyra, 1997
The male gaze has been much discussed in terms of the female nude, and these shows present an opportunity to consider how the male gaze treats itself and also how the female gaze looks at the male body. Questioning how female versus male nudes are presented, both exhibitions also featured photographs from Croatian artist Tomislav Gotovac’s 2002 ‘Foxy Mister’ series and works by Gilbert and George.
Installation view of Tomislav Gotovac’s 2002 Foxy Mister photographs at the Leopold Museum
The exhibition at the Ludwig in Budapest, however, perhaps because it was freed from a linear art historical narrative, could deal more interestingly in a thematic approach with the more complicated relations to the body. Anxiety around the aesthetic of the body–whether in conformity or rebellion, and the freedom and vulnerability of the naked body as well as it’s relation to pain is considered. I found some of the body art difficult to watch. Problematizing the relationship to the male body was American artist Paul McCarthy’s Rocky, a 1976 video where the artist in boxing gloves is hitting himself in the head, which is not far from the Image Whipping photograph of Hungarian artist Tibor Hajas, documenting extreme bound and hung postures, just a room over from a video of one of Stelarc’s body suspension performances, in which his body is hung at different points from multiple meat hooks.
Both these museum exhibitions featured early photography documenting the male nude in an artistic or athletic context: think Eadweard Muybridge‘s explorations of motion in the shot-by-shot documentation of a man ascending a staircase, for example, or two men boxing. These photos often hearken back to an athletic Greco-Roman ideal of the male form that was, in the region, reinforced later as the ideal of strength and beauty in Social Realist style. Svätopluk Mikyta, in the ‘over-drawings’ on view at Deàk Erika Gallery, begins with these innocent, athletic depictions of male nudes taken from antique books. Starting from found images, the artist overdraws, commenting on these naked idyllic male images. This latest series, Orange Human, on one hand puts the perfect man on a pedestal by displaying them and on the other tints their skin from the original black-and-white image to create a new, superhuman race.
From Greco-Roman ideal, to tortured anxiety, to this new Futurist race of male beings, the male body has recently been presented in such varied ways, altogether offering a surprisingly rich counterpoint from the relatively unexplored gender.