On the international art scene, Eastern Europe, once regionally represented, has been divided into sub-regions, and even the once common name (thought to have negative connotations) has been left behind. Labels are rapidly changing. Ex-Yugoslavia, renamed »the Balkans« at the beginning of the third millennium, became the »South« in the title “South-East Europe” at the ViennAfair 2005. The art market is lagging behind the theoretical discourse, as it is still using the old way of naming of the region. However, to appeal to buyers and avoid the unpleasant term »Balkans«, it has tacked on the euphemistic »South«. In the recent past, Balkan art was a medium for rival Western (male) curator heroes to serve fresh food to the eternally hungry art scene.

While one can be aware that the guilt of Western political powers regarding the war and massacres has a share in the Balkan hype, the art made in the shadow of the Balkan war is nonetheless strong, relevant, and, last but not least, connected with the art and theoretical discourse outside of its own realm as well.

The other sub-regions of ex-Eastern Europe can not boast exhibitions of such an international range, let alone in such rapid succession. Even Russian art, which always had a special attraction for the West, can no longer hold its interest. All the others are trying to break out of the pack, with varying success.

It seems that Hungary, for example, has not been able to recover from the shock of the changes or to work through its psychological impact. This syndrome could be called »gray-zone anxiety« or the anxiety of being trapped in-between: of not being fully involved in the mainstream. but not sharply distinctive either. Most of the art that is shown lacks substance. It is neither fish nor fowl. There is a certain void in current art and theoretical discourse that is politically and socially very sensitive, and focuses on the issues of trauma, memory and history. The socio-political reflections and even general reflections on everyday reality, social anomalies, and problems of the transition are as rare as a blue diamond. The local art scene is busy canonizing the former oppositional artists, members of the »great generation«, who basically follow the same strategy that once established their moral values, regardless of the oppositional attitude that has gone with the fall of the Wall. The dominant voice in theory, in exhibition policy, in education and in book publishing, still strongly informed by Greenbergian modernism, supports the »compensational process«. The lost counter-cultural attitude is transformed into marketable value, since the cross-current of the local scene is »art market fever«, a kind of boom which was felt at ViennAfair, as Budapest was second only to Vienna with regard to the number of galleries. The situation could be well characterized by the newly established Hungarian venue, Kogart, which lacks professional guidelines. It considers itself a private institution, but relies on state support. It is fitting, then, that the refurbished building once hosted the rebellious Club of Young Artists, and that at its recent exhibition, »Those Eighties«, the former counter-cultural conceptual artists together celebrated their success on the market. The attitude emanating from the new institute is one of euphoria at being part of Europe, supported by the auto-suggested notion that we have surely always been part of Europe and that we should forget about the minor accident of being part of the ex-Eastern Bloc as soon as possible. This euphoria goes hand in hand with amnesia, which buries the past using the slogan »we should look forward and not back«. One cannot repress the history and the trauma with impunity, because they hit back, as is known quite well from psychoanalysis. In this post-traumatic disorder that the art scene is suffering from, conjuring up the past could be healing. Or, as József Mélyi put it, only a radical, strong, brutal act or gesture could rouse the scene from its »Sleeping Beauty« slumber. This is exactly what Little Warsaw did with its latest project in Amsterdam and with the consequent response in Budapest.

In the opening exhibition, Time and Again (2004) , their original project was supposed to be about Moscow’s recent reconstruction of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, and its turbulent history of representing different power structures at different times. This project, which they called »Instauratio« and documented in the catalogue of the exhibition, could in the end not be realized. Little Warsaw, a duo of artists (Bálint Havas and András Gálik), shifted the concept by picking a Hungarian public statue, the context of which was totally changed by their intervention. They took József Somogyi’s statue of János Szántó Kovács, made in 1965, from Hódmez_vásárhely, a south-eastern Hungarian town, to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. As it turned out, this gesture touched a very sensitive spot in the Hungarian art community. It raised a harsh debate that actually overshadowed anomalies and problems of the scene, such as the state-sponsored private institutions that wish to dictate and manipulate the art scene, and the moving of the Ludwig Museum to a new building. The consequences of the latter event will put the cultural budget into debt for more than a decade, thus preventing alternative artists and art circles from getting any financial support. These debates hardly went beyond the art community, as opposed to the attack on Little Warsaw, which got huge publicity.

The Széchényi Art Academy published a petition and collected signatures against Little Warsaw’s action, just as it had in the good old days against the official cultural policy. Imre Makovecz, one of the leaders of the cultural right wing, and György Jovánovics, a liberal, left-wing representative of artists, signed it side by side with other prominent representatives of the scene, as well as nameless »art soldiers«. Under socialism, dissidents were grouped together as one counter-cultural entity. After the fall of the Wall, it was obvious that this »one« group was in fact very diverse, and it split apart accordingly. However, with the presentation of Little Warsaw’s innocent conceptual project, which simply re-used and re-contextualized an art object, these groups were suddenly reunited against a common enemy.

Around the time of the original unveiling of the statue of János Szántó Kovács, who was an agrarian-proletarian leader at the beginning of the twentieth century, the nature of Socialist Realism was at stake, because in 1965 it had started to take on looser contours. Somogyi`s statue was accused of not being heroic enough, not elevated enough in comparison with the schematic mass production of the officially approved style. The explosive debate was forgotten, and in some superficial textbooks the statue represents a loose definition of Socialist Realism, now lacking the once so important subtleties and distinctions. For Western audiences, including professional ones who are observing not only further away in time, but also further away in space, the definition is even looser.

Little Warsaw was accused by the press of mistakes actually made by the curators of the prestigious Western European institution, who felt brave enough to interpret the statue using old stereotypes and clichés about the ex-region behind the Iron Curtain. From this perspective, the peasant leader was defined as a communist worker and the place it used to be located, a small Hungarian village, gave a dramatic overtone to the installation. If Little Warsaw was accused of neglecting to explain the original context, they clearly showed – even if unintentionally - the encounter of a work of the New Europe with the dominant voice of the art discourse dictated by the old division. While the topic of exhibition was an up-to-date one focusing on issues of memory and history, the rhetoric was not updated, and remained embedded in the old, controlling structure.

Another shift of borders or redrawing of demarcation lines, which is the core of Little Warsaw’s activity, is a shift of ideology on to a personal, human scale. The artists were criticized for the presentation of the statue, which stood on its feet in the museum rather than high on a pedestal. So it was pulled down to the Earth from the realm of ideology, high above us, and became a fragile, vulnerable human being contradicting the eternal life of the public monument as it was conceived.

In keeping with the change of rhetoric after the long period of socialism, the main problem cited by the press and the artists signing the petition was that the action was an offense against human rights, or at least this was how it was masked. First of all, they accused the artists of not asking for permission from the heir of the artist, his daughter, who happens to be an art historian, and then of bringing about the humiliation of the statue and indirectly of Somogyi, the sculptor, himself. The statue was not destroyed and it was returned to its place fully intact, so the gesture was not against the art object either. On the contrary, it lifted the veil of ignorance covering the statue, whose story had sunk into oblivion. Little Warsaw dug it up from the past and, along with it, the wounds and scars of the past were uncovered. The issue at stake is gate-keeping. Who has the right to dig up the past, break apart the preserved ideas of socialism and Socialist Realism? And, perhaps most importantly, to process and re-contextualize objects and ideas of the past into the present.

The generation of sculptors dominating the current scene grew out of the context of the officially shaped tradition of public sculpture and Realism. Conservative figurative monuments were again flooding the public spaces of Hungarian towns and villages in the middle of the nineties. The ideological overtone did shift quite a bit to the right in that several statues of Saint Stephan, the first Hungarian king, were set up with a notion of nationalist representation. However, these constructions did not stir a public debate comparable to that about Little Warsaw. Where was the art community’s concern about the issue of sculpture at that time?

Many artists would tolerate or even support some statues being on the edge of the Realist tradition, while other statues were put into cemetery-like statue parks without any outcry. Meanwhile, Little Warsaw raises subtle questions (subtle distinctions hardly seen from the outside) dealing with the basic dilemma of how to go on, how to continue the art-making practice with our distinctive heritage.

It is quite bizarre, and shows the very complex nature of the post-socialist discourse, that in Népszabadság (the once official newspaper of state socialism), the same critic who accused Little Warsaw of barbarism (for changing the original context of the statue) was one of the official guards of the socialist cultural policy for some twenty years. Thus, the ex-opposition of the official socialist culture and the ex-beneficiary found a common cause against Little Warsaw’s deconstructive project.

Little Warsaw was accused of an uncivilized action, as if the notion of civilization had not already been deconstructed in critical theory. These days, one cannot just stand up in the name of a civilization that is identified with the perspective of Western museums and Western canons. It is clearly elaborated in post-colonial discourse that the process of labeling »the other« invests Western powers with full authority to subjugate different cultures. These labels justified the actions of grave robbery, and display of these items in museums confirmed Western nations as the upholders of cultural standards.

The other slogan used against the re-contextualization of an existing statue was the anti-sculptural attitude of Little Warsaw, as identified by József Mélyi. In my opinion, their attitude is just the opposite, since the activity of the artists goes back to the very heart of sculpture: the basic intention of sculpture is to animate, giving life to dead matter. The classic story of Prometheus is continually repeated: in the stories of Pygmalion or the Golem, in the creation of Frankenstein by means of science, in My Fair Lady, the modern version of the Pygmalion story, in folk stories likes Pinocchio, or The Gingerbread Man. Even in the imitation of moving statues by street entertainers. The idea of animation was also embodied in the Nefertiti Project in the Hungarian Pavilion at the Venice Biennial in 2003.

One would suspect that there is another kind of fear behind the collective attack: namely, the anti-establishment attitude of Little Warsaw as seen by the bearers of the canon. One cannot help noticing the presence of territorial anxiety behind this vehement attack aimed at protecting the status quo. The message conveyed is not to dwell on the past but to leave it as it is. The only crime Little Warsaw has committed is to have touched upon taboo issues by giving a warning that facing the past and raising questions is essential for recovery.

I would like to give a special thanks to May Reid-Marr for assisting in the English version of this text.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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