Ah, the strong, clean lines of Social Realism! Memento Park, just outside Budapest, houses a collection of Socialist/ Communist statuary that formerly decorated the city in a solution to the problem of what to do with these markers of the Soviet past. Rather than destroy them or leave them where they were, some of the statues of Lenin (my personal favorite) and other heroes of the Soviet satellite state, were gathered here. Photos below, and my own ‘tribute’ to Lenin in video form here.
Attila Szucs‘ recent show of paintings at Erika Deak Gallery focused on planking, the recent social phenomena where people lay stiff as boards in incongruous places. The painter often starts from images from the media or photos and surrounds them with emptiness, here applied to people planking. I don’t think the works convincingly suggest an existentialist vacuum, if that was what Szucs meant to imply, and to me the figures remain ridiculous rather than some kind of metaphysical argument about the place of the individual in the universe. Perhaps the association of planking with humor is just too strong in my mind.
However, his paintings are wonderfully executed. The large canvas of the Hitchcockian blonde, my favorite work in the show, on all fours suggests as much. Her conventional femininity, anachronistic in its hairstyle and clothing, becomes vulnerable, the direct gaze impenetrable. Her shadow double mirrors the outline of the room she occupies.
“The situation is desperate, but not serious” is the final sentence of this excellent New Yorker article detailing responses to the growing neo-Facist political control of Hungarian culture; For example, Nobel laureate Imre Kertesz–whose most famous novel is a semi-autobiographical account of surviving Auchwitz– had decided to give his archives to Germany instead of the land of his birth, Hungary:
January 8, 2013THE FRIGHTENING HUNGARIAN CRACKDOWN
Posted by Hari KunzruIn November, 2012, the Nobel prize-winning novelist Imre Kertész announced his retirement. The writer, who as a fourteen year-old was transported to Auschwitz, has become one of Europe’s most eloquent and respected literary witnesses to the Holocaust. In books such as “Fateless” and “Kaddish for an Unborn Child,” he has made the paradoxical case that “the concentration camp is imaginable only and exclusively as literature, never as reality—not even—or rather least of all—when we have directly experienced it.” Since his working life has been devoted to this act of imagination, his decision to house his archive not in his native Hungary but, rather, in Germany appears to be a profound gesture of reconciliation. Yet, when I said so on Twitter, a Hungarian writer friend e-mailed to tell me that Kertész’s decision was also driven by more negative concerns:
I’m afraid there is something more to it: he has also good reasons to believe that in Hungary his legacy wouldn’t be treated with as much respect as in Germany, as he is regarded by the current political elite as an “unHungarian” and then I’ve been euphemistic. For example, currently his work is not part of the Hungarian national education programme, due to some changes in school material in which, at the same time, three famously antisemitic writers have been included.
My friend has asked to remain anonymous, as he fears that if he is publicly identified as a critic of the government it could cause problems for him and the company where he works. His fears appear to be well founded. Across Hungary, the cultural scene is in a state of crisis.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/01/the-hungarian-crackdown.html#ixzz2HTWj5ec7 .
Learn more about protests specific to the visual arts: http://nemma.noblogs.org/category/english .
