Category Archives: Hungarian art

Hungary: A cultural scene in a state of crisis

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“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, 2013

THE FRIGHTENING HUNGARIAN CRACKDOWN

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In 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.

 

Sewing with Plywood: Istvan Csakany’s Ghostkeeping

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This realistic model of a sewing factory workroom could almost be frozen in time, if you disregard the material. The shot above shows Istvan Csakany‘s Ghost Keeping (2012) installed in the Ludwig Museum, who recently acquired the piece after it was commissioned and shown at dOCUMENTA in Kassel this summer.

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The work consists of a slightly larger than life-size wooden model of a sewing workshop, aligned in two rows. Csakany, together with two carpenters, spent almost a year making this. Ever piece from dangling electrical cord to sewing machine bobbin was made by hand with meticulous care and with an eye to historical accuracy.  The typically raw, simple, and cheap materials, here unfinished plywood, contrasts with the care taken in fashioning it. The “do-it-yourself” workshop aesthetic present here can be connected to the identity of the Central and Eastern European region.

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Similarly, there is a contrast in the figures who face the sewing room. The suits are made of delicate, expensive material, but the style is that of a worker’s uniform. Notably the suits are empty. Csakany arranged the positions after monumental Social Realist figures of the Soviet period, thus the active poses draw a parallel with the workers of the past, now gone.

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Between the empty suits and the empty sewing room, the most notable feature of the atmosphere is absence. Csakany examines the value of work and the position of laborers in society, and through his own care in creating such a non-functional wooden replica of dated machinery he also conflates  physical and artistic work. The historical past, like this dated representation of labor, now serve an aesthetic purpose as they are recreated and re-remembered, perhaps an example of how culturally we perform an act of ghost keeping.

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Peter Puklus’s Handbook to the Stars

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Peter Puklus, Handbook to the Stars

Peter Puklus, Handbook to the Stars

Home for the holidays, and finally going through some of the images from the past few months, I came across these installation shots of Hungarian photographer Peter Puklus’s book Handbook to the Stars. I love the way the Hungarian National Gallery presented his work, as part of  its World Models – Studio Experiments and Documents from Kondor to the Present Day exhibition, with the pages and images of multiple books overlapping to create a whole. In front, there was also a bound book that you could flip through, experiencing the placement of images next to each other or partial image in sequence.

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This installation mirrors the structure of the work, and how Puklus presents it on his website as well: eschewing a linear narrative despite the book format, his collection of images were created in the studio and focus on objects in a deceptively simple way. These photographic experiments exploring objectness and light are simple, perhaps poetic, perhaps prosaic, but seemingly concrete representations on an inner world. Rather than creating an artful, artificial arrangement with studio props, Puklus shows the studio world they inhabit. Check out the images themselves on his website.

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