Tag Archives: Socialism

Spaceships: Vehicles to the Future, to Escape, to Utopia

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Before I got sidetracked by humorous Russian news of strikingly different varieties, I wanted to continue to talk about spaceships. Méliès’s 1902 Trip to the Moon worked like a canon. The spaceship available at the New Museum right now are of a much more technically sophisticated variety. Report on the Construction of a Spaceship Module is a new exhibition on the fifth floor of the New Museum. The exhibition itself recreates the interior of the spaceship Ikarie XB-1, after the 1963 Czechoslovakian film of the same name.

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Above, stills from Ikarie XB 1, below interior of New Museum

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Between post-WWII and pre-1989, space could be an escape valve for countries of the Eastern Bloc, as they imagined Socialist utopias on Mars, reached through the inevitable progress of science and society. These fantasies were represented in science fiction films and novels, of course, but also reflected in the visual arts. The premise is fascinating. However, this thematic was only partially engaged in in the works on view, as the exhibition organizers, tranzit, also wanted to show their organization’s practice and growth in the Eastern European region. The show felt fractured because of that, and perhaps hard to grasp even if you didn’t know that was one of the aims of the show.

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But more unfortunately, information about the art was not well communicated. For example, detailed  information about individual artworks, usually handled via wall text, is not easily accessible. This would seem to be the natural result of the way the objects in one small room were piled on top of each other on shelves while the large room was given over to video. I  would have benefited from more than a laminated sheet identifying the title and artist of a work, which I could then match up to a newspaper containing the exhibition checklist to learn more about an artist. Certainly, the space is not large, but is this the best way to handle it?

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The largest room is given over to a single screen with five hours of mixed videos highlighting all the different efforts tranzit has made in the region. When new content appears the original title scene and opening credits are all you have to go on–not a lot of contextualization for what seems to be a broad base of material. Obviously, five hours is more than the average visitor will spend there, and there isn’t a way to view only segments of particular interest. Assuming this isn’t intentional mystification, then unfortunately this show does not unpack the treasure trove of materials, many never seen in the United States. More could have been done with much less. If you have the stamina to dig for information and/or wait, or perhaps just enjoy serendipity, then the exhibition certainly contains a lot of fascinating material. I just had more hope for the spaceship.

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János Major at tranzit

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János Major is not a well-known artist outside of Hungary, but within Hungary there is a resurgence of interest  in his work. Not much of his work has survived, so I was excited to have a chance to see Taboo Subject, an exhibition at tranzit featuring prints of Major’s related to Jewish identity. Major deals with himself, his body and Jewish identity, in ruthless caricature. Firstly it is remarkable to do so at all given the repressive post-Holocaust, Socialist context in which he began dealing with these themes, and secondly in the freely pornographic and self-loathing manner in which he channels anti-Semitic stereotypes through his own image.

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I first became aware of Major through two contemporary artists’s projects: Crew Expendable by Little Warsaw and Vasarely Go Home by Andreas Fogarasi. Both touch on his oeuvre, but little has been done in terms of art historical work. Interestingly there has been a lot of recent interest, with this show and another at the University of Fine Arts this past year. It’s representative of the lack of documentation and scholarship on the Hungarian neo-avant-garde (making up for Socialism again) that he hasn’t been dealt with much before. On the other hand, he is also a difficult figure to place; he was a graphic artists who made prints more similar to Hogarth or Goya than anything else and yet he was also a conceptual artist and key figure of the avant-garde.

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The two prints above, dating from the 1970s, have one key difference: in the lower print, the text is blurred out. The text in the higher version refers too overtly to conflict in the Middle East and Jewish politics to ever have been shown. The mystery to me is where either version could have been shown in Hungary in the 1970s.

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In conjunction with the exhibition, Marcell Eszterhazy created an installation using the double windows of the front room to create peepholes into transparent images of typically Jewish imagery. A layer of opaque white is in front of the images over glass looking out on the street behind. Certainly Major’s works make one aware of the covert nature of dealing with Jewish topics, and this installation in which Jewish signs and symbols are screened from direct gaze perhaps refers to this. The Budapest environment in the background is not so different than when Major first began working, and an intended question of the exhibition is whether 20 years after Hungary became a democracy real discourse is yet taking place about Jewish identity.

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Graveyard of Socialist Statuary: Memento Park

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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.

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