Budapest, October 18th, 1969.
Victor Vasarely’s exhibition opens at the Műcsarnok in Budapest. For the first time, abstract art, suspiciously considered in the Communist bloc as a manifestation of Western cultural imperialism, is shown in a Hungarian public institution. The event and its repercussions are the point of departure of Andreas Fogarasi’s exhibition »La ciudad de color / Vasarely go home« at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. In this special project, Fogarasi questions the instrumentalisation of modernism and abstract art in the context of the Cold War, more particularly in socialist Hungary, and connects it with the persistent echoes of these cultural models in our actual environment.
The key piece in the exhibition is a video documentary that discloses recent interviews with Hungarian artists, art historians and representatives of State institutions at the time of the exhibition. The nine interviewees – Imre Bak, László Beke, Lóránd Bereczky, Ilona Keserü, Dóra Maurer, Krisztina Passuth, Gyula Pauer, Géza Perneczky and Tamás St.Auby – consider retrospectively the event of 1969. They expose their own perceptions of it and raise broader contextual issues related to the Hungarian official and unofficial artistic scene, the influence of the Minister of Culture György Aczél’s censorship, (he personified cultural orientations in Kádár’s regime for nearly three decades), the reception of artistic models from abroad and the internationalisation of Hungarian art. They also unveil the geopolitical and economic motives that determined the state’s reaction to specific cultural practices. The testimonials engage with the interesting figure of the artist János Major, remembered as an ambiguous and sarcastic character, brilliant and unpredictable; Major was also one of the few at that time in Hungary to affirm his Jewish origins, sometimes in such extreme ways that he was accused of anti–Semitism. On October 18th, 1969, he realized a small action which remained undocumented, except by the narratives of those who saw it or heard about it. Performed during the opening, the action consisted in roaming through the spaces of the Műcsarnok anddiscreetly showing to every acquaintance he met a small card with the script »Vasarely go home«. Between the friendly advice and the lapidary protest, the visibility of this gesture remained circumscribed to a sphere of friendship and intellectual complicity. Although unperceived by the main audience and the authorities, »Vasarely go home« disrupted the official celebration by recalling the existence of an underground culture excluded from the privileges granted to state supported artists.
In fact, while the Hungarian leadership promoted the image of an open, progressive State, local artists were not allowed to use the language of modern art, at least in a public context. Abstract art was considered illegal if it was produced in Hungary, and had, paradoxically, to be imported as a Western product to be tolerated. Despite this, the Hungarian authorities strategically emphasised Vasarely’s Hungarian origins in order to elevate modern art to the rank of a national product. This twist enabled them, at least symbolically, to compete with liberal Western states in the field of cultural production. As János Major wrote laconically in a later poem, » [...] No ism was born in Budapest. Victor Vasarely was born in Hungary. Op Art was not born in Hungary [...]«. In this case, the Hungarian state was precisely trying to re–appropriate some »isms« and incorporate them into its sphere of influence. The video’s testimonials accurately point to the discrepancy between the regime’s self representation abroad and the situation experienced by artists inside the country. Frustrated by the impossibility to publicly and freely exercise their practice, many artists perceived the »return« of Vasarely as an opportunity for the state to show better a disposition towards nonconventional culture. They also viewedaw Vasarely as a potential intermediary between the Hungarian local scene and important figures of the international art market (like, for instance, the galerist Denise Renée), present for this occasion in Budapest. Such hopes were quickly deceived, however, and Hungarian abstract art, as well as other experimental practices, remained in the spheres of illegality or invisibility.
In its entirety, »La ciudad de color / Vasarely Go Home« features documents in sober editions which recall historical or anthropological methods of inquiry, without the pretension of being didactic or moralistic. This apparently neutral, non–interpretative stance characterizes Fogarasi’s approach to recent history and cultural production. Yet, this tendency – which also refers to the aesthetics of conceptual and minimal art – becomes more sophisticated with the sculptural pieces displayed in the exhibition. They consist of diptychs, pairs of marble sheets standing vertically, a hybrid of sculptural and architectonic devices, polished on one side, raw on the other. In relation to the project »Vasarely Go Home«, the diptychs support reproductions of historical photographs that document the exhibition’s opening. These views of the audience absorbed in the contemplation of the art pieces reproduce the official side of the exhibition : a display of progressive art, freely enjoyed by a heterogeneous, wealthy crowd, at the opposite of the stereotypical vision of a Communist society. Associated with the recent interviews, these official photographs stress the ambiguity of the regime and the double game that aims at legitimizing its power.
To complement the historical inquiry formulated in »Vasarely go home«, the part titled »La ciudad de color« examines how abstract motives permeate our daily environment. In this section, the same marble diptychs disclose photographs of objects, urban furniture, contemporary architectures, some of them inspired or produced by Vasarely. Their formal properties confirm the persistence in public space of a visual and architectonic language inherited from modernism and abstraction. Another series of diptychs is perforated in shapes that reproduce the logos of different organisations or agencies in charge of the diffusion of national culture abroad. It seems that only a temporal gap separates the strategies of the department in charge of international cultural affairs in the Hungary of the sixties and today’s institutions in charge of the diffusion of culture from capitalist states: both defend their cultural model using art as the expression of a kind of »corporative« identity. What appears through this parallelism is the continuity in the use of abstract forms to export values and concepts associated with a national or ideological model.