Artistic Sabotage In The Baloney Republic

Artistic Sabotage In The Baloney Republic

By Anna Balint

Absurd, is a good description of Hungary over the last two years. Hungary, is the same small country where communism collapsed in 1989, and where a transition to a new post-communist era began. But something failed along the way. Since FIDESZ, Viktor Orban’s hard right party came to power in 2010, the mainstream discourse has been dominated by nationalism, populism, and demagogy, while political and economic life has become centralized. Censorship is now normal and civil society is under threat.

Hungarian visual arts have hardly been a roaring international success over the last twenty years, especially when we consider the truly remarkable theater, music, and cinema produced here. Still, Hungarian visual artists such as the Little Warsaw group, Róza El-Hassan, and Hajnal Németh participated in major European and international exhibitions; some artists attained a modicum of visibility and the scene slowly reformed; galleries, museums, and educational institutions began to meet international standards.

Over the last two years a nightmare scenario has taken great strides toward the realization of total political control over media content and public life. It started with the harassment of critical intellectuals like Ágnes Heller, Mihály Vajda, Gábor György, György Geréby, and Sándor Radnóti and spread to the cancellation of art projects by artists as diverse as András Gál, Zsófia Farkas, Tamás Jovánovincs because they were regarded as “too abstract” to fulfill their public function. Instead of debate and discussion, the government launched a propaganda campaign and started investigations, accusing those involved of irregularities in the use of public funds. Criminalization of intellectuals is still going on, accompanied by counter suits filed by the accused, charging the media with defamation.

Meanwhile, directors, curators and artistic mediators continue to lose their positions in unfair competitions, or the government simply nominates new directors to obscure positions, such as happened recently at the Trafó Gallery and Theater. At the Gödör Klub the whole organizing team was replaced. Both places were known for organizing the international exhibitions and events crucial to alternative culture. The government even went so far as to nominate a new director for the Kunsthalle, one of most important contemporary cultural institutions in Hungary. And so it goes in the theaters and at the opera house as well. The biggest scandal so far was perhaps the appointment of a far-right director to the New Theater in Budapest. That action has sparked international outcry. (See the response at: www.aznemlehet.net) Petitions, court cases, protest campaigns, demonstrations, hunger strikes are all being used as a way to oppose our diminishing cultural life. In Hungary, demonstrations for cultural and political causes have become quotidian phenomena. Massive gatherings with 50,000 participants, too. And, going further, artists employ oppositional strategies to engage people, influence public opinion, pressure the baloney government and make an impact.

A major problem with the artistic scene in Hungary is the heavy dependence on state funds and the general lack of independent structures. At first, people try to defend the public spaces and institutions when the government steps in and a new cultural program or content is installed. Or an institution simply closes its doors. Defense means, in this case, to share information through alternative channels such as Facebook, or atlatszo.hu, a webpage dedicated to transparency in the ongoing social, economic, and cultural phenomena that has become the Hungarian equivalent of Wikileaks. Together with the spread of information people organize protests through petitions, in an artistic program, flashmob or demonstration. September 2010’s flashmob was organized when the general public was barred from a private opening event at the Kunsthalle, an institution financed with public money. A two-day long artistic program in solidarity with the departing Gödör Klub team was organized at the end of January, 2012.

The event that likely received the most coverage took place in November of last year. Artists protested for three days against the redesign of Kossuth Square, where Parliament is located. The president of Parliament’s Cultural Committee had announced the reconstruction of the square along its 1944 dimensions. That attempted erasure of the cultural memory of the last sixty years caused people to revolt, to take control of one, highly symbolic section of the square—where the poet Attila József’s statue is located—and to recite his poems non-stop for three days. Protests like that are funneled directly to cyberspace through documentation on Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud, and Facebook, all of which have links on oppositional web pages.

Another means of opposition is the appropriation of visual or conceptual elements of official propaganda, the production of a counter-content or even over-identification with it. Several artist and groups are already well-known for their activist attitude. Unlike the critical attitude involving physical presence that resembles traditional protests in Hungary, these activities follow another informational model: they are generated by a single person or small group and go straight on-line. At the same time these art works are low budget, independent productions and cannot be co-opted financially. One of the most popular agents working on informational conflicts is the Hungarian Party of the Dog with Two Tails, with a blog and a Facebook page, who also transgresses the physical, public space with posters, graffiti and sometimes performances as well. The Hungarian Party of the Dog has counterfeit official websites, such as a site which parodies the news program on Hungarian Public Television, where images and words from mainstream media are parodied and manipulated.

Another important incident was the Back-hand! group exhibition in November, 2011 that opposed the government’s manipulation of mythology and national identity by artistic means. The government defined 15 themes and ordered paintings for exhibition in the National Gallery, later to be included as illustrations in the recently enacted Hungarian counterfeit constitution. The Back-hand! elaborated the same themes, but used them to criticize the regime’s attempt to create a phony national identity.

Exaggeration is an informational tactic in public space as well: 4K! is a political group that makes Camp by overreacting to government directives. One morning recently by-passers found Moscow Square had been renamed Beijing Square, in line with the government’s policy of changing the names of streets and squares, with an eye on strengthening its ties to the Chinese, both economically and culturally. And then posters appeared, supposedly supplied by remorseful voting booth operators, explaining to the people that they disagree with the revolution—an allusion to official rhetoric suggesting that a revolution took place at polling places.

Anonymity is characteristic of most current confrontational, artistic activity. That is the strategy of the Anonymous Operation Hungary group as well, a collective activity following a circular communication scheme, from one anonymous person to another, later spreading to the public. The most common and traditional way of the artistic opposition is the abstraction and contextualization of social phenomena through artistic means. In Hungary this means the revelation of different aspects of the social, economic and political crisis, the disclosure of its dimensions and causes, ways of resolution, all within an artistic framework. An individual activity which hopes to induce a chain reaction. One of the most outstanding of these projects is László Rajk’s Missing… series: the Missing Paragraph and the Missing Hero. Rajk, an architect, graphic artist and well-known member of the dissident movement in Hungary before 1989, points to something invisible, a content subverted into absence by the frottage technique: the missing paragraphs from the new Hungarian constitution that should guarantee freedom, and the portraits of dissident thinkers, artists, and politicians that are missing from contemporary society. Quotations from the “Missing Paragraph” exhibition were used in street demonstrations in Budapest.

It is by these strategies that the artistic opposition hope to shift contemporary Hungarian society from the absurd to a more reasonable course. Can they help subvert a system of control? At this point no one knows.