Seminar lecture at the course Understanding 1989 in East-Central European Art
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Thank you for inviting me, because this closed seminar gives me the opportunity to talk about things related to the project that I should be more careful about in a public presentation or publication. My aim with the project was to explore the relationship between the instrumentalised female body, politics and art, because I disagreed with those who thought it was a familiar and boring story. I think it is more than actual.
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Let me summarize what I'm going to talk about today. The problematic example of artwork I use here is this sculpture of Gyula Pauer, called The Beauty of Hungary. It was brought to my attention by a documentary from 1987, called Pretty Girls, which I re-watched as an adult in 2014. However, my motives that led me to the project date back to 2013, so first I will talk about the antecedents of the research-project.
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Than I will introduce the three layers of my project: the performance in 2018, in which I was addressing the past; than the exhibition in 2019, where I showed the research documentation and a corrective monument; and finally the book, published in 2021, which shows the broader context of the case. Finally, if we have some more time, I will show you some of my other work.
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Let's look at the factors first that motivated me to start my research project. I have been teaching at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts for ten years, that was my first job ever. Almost every day I encountered cases that, as a freelancer, I had never experienced before. Cases that, for me, prove the existence of male chauvinism around the field of fine-art. So, in 2013, I started a blog for myself to collect cases, to see if any structure comes out. It included personal and student cases, as well as examples from the media and culture. I became sensitive to details of artworks where the artwork itself could be interpreted as exploitation of women.
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There was an exhibition at the Capa Center in Budapest in 2014, entitled Second Skin - Visual Codes of Social Constructions, curated by Kata Oltai, where the curator presented the documentary Pretty Girls, together with pages from the January 1986 issue of Lui magazine.
Lui was a western soft porn magazine, this issue shows images taken in the artist's studio over 10 pages. The women in the photos are the three prizewinners, plus a lifelike sculpture to replace the frontrunner's body. Although high art has always been used for erotic purposes, there had always been an attempt to carefully separate high art from the visual culture of mass media and pornography. The magazine's photos show the relationship between pornography and high culture in an unprecedented way. What is extraordinary in this case is the explicit use of Pauer’s studio, the environment of his art, in an erotic magazine. The use of a lifelike sculpture of a famous young woman as a substitute for her living body in a men's magazine, and the use of the very same work for high art purposes, for the National Gallery, and the fact that the artist himself volunteered to do both, makes the case unprecedented.
I participated in this exhibition, so I spent a lot of time among the works, and subsequently watched there the film again for several times. First I saw the documentary in a movie-house in 1987 when the film came out. To be honest, I can recall the strongly ambivalent feelings I had: both consternation and erotic sensation I felt as a voyeur watching the scene how the artist Gyula Pauer and his male assistants were taking the plaster cast in the artist's studio. However, watching the film again in 2014, I had different feelings. Rather, I felt the shame I experienced as a young woman not just in life but in the name of "art" with a capital "A", which I had previously overlooked. This means that the film gave me an understanding of the problems of paternalistic behavior that I experienced so much as an art student and audience. And in 2014 I was shocked by the magazine pictures as well, which I have never seen before, I knew about them only from the film. So, I started some reading about Pauer’s statue, his work in general and the Hungarian Beauty Pagent in 1985, so to speak I started researching, but not consciously at the time, more out of curiosity.
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This exhibition at Capa Center was the second curatorial work that hinted at the hidden link between Pauer's piece and pornography, exploitation, and abuse. In 2009 at the MUMOK in Vienna, in the exhibition Gender Check, the bronze sculpture was presented for the first time by Edit András together with the documentary in the framework of an art-exhibition. However, the bronze sculpture and the 90-minute documentary were not linked for viewers, at least I did not notice the critical curatorial link between the two, though I attended and spent some time at this exhibition as well.
So in 2014 at Capa Center the clearest and most accurate illustration of John Berger's thesis became obvious to me: the nude systematically objectified women in Western art, and this tradition of fine art has continued much more broadly in popular visual culture. As visual cultural aspects have always been left out of media approaches, it was clear that the artistic response is the only way to explore the subject.
However, at that time I wasn't sure if this topic was worth reflecting publicly. I felt that I had too much new emotion and I thought I didn't have enough knowledge on the subject. I didn't like the idea of focusing on one particular bad work by one famous artist, instead I wanted to explain a much broader context. So I decided to build up a multi-layered project that would require research, and for which a book as a medium seemed the most appropriate end.
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Some important social issues also helped me to shape the material. I'm thinking of the sexual harassment cases that made a big splash in the Hungarian media in 2015-16. I also refer to a graphic design student, Anna Gizella Varga, who asked me to be her thesis supervisor in 2016. All the media coverage has given her inspiration and courage for her work. She wanted to address the sexual harassments that she and her mates had experienced at the Graphic Design Department at the hands of their teachers, so she needed a supervisor from another department. I took up on her request and helped her find a safe format for her thesis. Finally, she made general anti-harassment posters and the specific sexual harassment cases from more art universities put separately and of course without names to avoid accusations of being personal. Her work has also appeared in the media. After she left university with her degree, I felt the air around me had changed.
The real catalyst was the #Metoo movement, which focused mainly on the theatre and film industries in the media, while the visual arts remained untouched. The high level of artistic abstraction seemed to be a guarantee that everything was and is fine around the art scene.
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Together with curator Kata Oltai, I submitted a plan to the Hungarian National Gallery, centered around Pauer’s bronze statue The Beauty of Hungary 1985, which was part of the museum's public collection. Our proposal submitted to the Gallery stated:
"We would like to cover the sculpture of the beauty queen. Not with clothes, but in a robe made out of the fabric of the red-carpet runway. The red carpet is an important symbol of both the beauty, advertising, and fashion industries, and of political and power representation. […] We will cover the naked body in a way that will also make it the support of the carpet: it is the body that upholds and sustains the symbol of stardom. The long red drape evokes the festive mantle or train befitting a queen, yet it is also a constraining, paralysing burden."
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We knew that Pauer’s sculpture for some years stands in a semi-public place, a corridor connecting two wings of the building, so we were curious about the reaction of the Gallery. Seemingly they agreed to a pop-up exhibition, which ultimately failed, nothing came of it.
One day, the curator of the Gallery gave me a call that the next day, on 11 October 2018, for one night only, the sculpture would be placed in a public space in the Cupola Hall as part of a museum programme. I took his call as an offer to adapt the exhibition plan to this new situation, and so I did.
The sculpture was presented as part of a guided tour. The sculpture was accompanied by the official description, which was - at least for me - typical over-explained art historical babble about the critical power of the sculpture and the sublime effect of the model's death. The critical strength of the sculpture is supposed to be caused by the gaps between the two parts, I don't know if you can see this gap at all, or not. To me this interpretation is not convincing at all. Moreover, if we consider that the model committed suicide, such interpretations are simply unacceptable. In brackets I inform you that the Hungarian National Gallery recently posted this text together with a photo of the sculpture on their facebook page, without any reason or context. At first, they had to moderate the angry comments and delete the indignant ones, but finally they deleted the whole post.
PERFORMANCE
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I used a thinner and therefore more easily manageable fabric on its shoulders than originally planned. During the guide’s presentation, I cut out the letters YOU SHOULD FEEL HONOURED from a bright textile, and after most of the guests had moved on with the guided tour, I pinned the letters of the text on the red fabric one by one.
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At the end of the day I attached the approximately 15-meter-long fabric to the wall of the Cupola Hall.
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At this point the latest it is important to talk a few words about Pauer’s art, because he was a prominent member of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde art scene. One of his most notable works, Demonstration-Sign Forest (1978) consisted of 131 signs with slogans placed on a meadow and was destroyed by the authorities soon after its completion. Many of his works were informed by his concept of 'Pseudo' sculptures, where plasticity is camouflaged by way of illusionistic painting. Besides using objects, he applied the concept of Pseudo to the female body. He seems not to have been aware of the difference between human beings and objects, but he and his male helpers liked the possibility to use naked female bodies. More interesting is, that art historians have written of his nude sculptures as very progressive art with high principles and values. I found only in Sándor Hornyik's online review of Pauer's exhibition at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA) in 2011, a few sentences of criticism, saying that Pauer's Pseudo program becomes schizophrenic when it involves human subjects. Until my project, this was the only written publication that expressed a mildly critical attitude towards his work.
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The performance was not visible to many, only a few people saw it in the museum. One of the few was the curator of the Fészek Gallery, who came to me during the performance and invited me to do an exhibition at her place.
EXHIBITION
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The exhibition "You Should Feel Honoured" took place in 2019 in Fészek Art Club, which has two exhibition spaces, separated by two floors. I could use both. I presented the documentation of the performance in the lower space, accompanied by the research results: publications and documents from that time; the museum index card of Pauer’s bronze sculpture and other artworks of mine related to Pauer's sculpture and its story, like the Catwalk series and the photographic work called Tobacco Store Pictures, which reflects the contradictory situation of visual representation and its re-traumatizing potential.
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We had to walk up two flights of stairs to get to the upper room. The staircase leading up to it is lined with portraits of men. The upper space is circular, reminiscent of the Gallery's Cupola hall. I placed here a new corrective monument that stood alone. This sculpture is entitled Pathos and Critique, inspired by Sándor Hornyik’s writing I mentioned before, called “Pathos and Illusion”. A replica of the head of Csilla Molnár’s bronze statue was modelled in 3D using photographs without touching the original statue and printed out in red PLA filament. The bust rests on an airy metal scaffolding that does not represent the body in any way, but merely evokes the movement originally set in contrapposto through the asymmetry of the shoulders.
BOOK
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The book, the third part of my project was published in 2021 with contributions from almost a dozen art historians and social scientists. As the concluding piece of the project, it is intended to be a source of insight and contextualisation. The book focuses on the vulnerability of the female body from an artistic perspective, in which the traditional artistic representations of women play a major role.
I show you some medium-conscious solutions of the book. The whole project works with the old metaphor of covering and unfolding. The book starts with an image-essay, collecting lesser-known documents about the beauty contest and its era, and some contemporary Hungarian examples of using naked bodies in artworks. These images are covered with the double tab of the book cover, with the image of the performance-shroud running around on both sides of the cover. Thus, when you open the book in the bookstore, you see the contents first, and only then encounter the images after we know more about the context. Throughout book, I always try to avoid showing naked women unless necessary, and I consciously use the images of the characters, for example, I covered Judit Kruppa's face everywhere, as she was the protagonist of the embarrassing, abusive erotic scene in the film, and she doesn't want to be traumatised again. She went abroad in the late 1980s and has lived there ever since. She is never comfortable with any media coverage of the film. She was very grateful that I took this aspect into account.
The story presented in the book begins at the local level and expands into a global issue, revealing the complexity of the period of regime change in Hungary. The critical approach is part of a wider process of rethinking women and the female body in art and society. The book is proposing a critical engagement not only with the past, but also with the present. Ágnes Berecz's essay refers to some current political issues both in Hungary and worldwide.
OTHER WORKS
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I show some of my recent protest-works, referring to some of these current political issues in Hungary mentioned in Ágnes Berecz’s essay.
I met the statements of Marina Abramovich concerning her abortions, or the saying: “There are good artists that have children. They are called men.” in 2010, and I dedicated the work called Father to these kinds of voices. The text on the pictures say: . A man who fathers a child is a FATHER. The sentence also refers to an artwork by the Hungarian artist Pál Gerber, namely, “Women who give birth to children are mothers”. I wanted to turn it the other way around and I cut my sentence into a metal shelf and stuffed pink fabric into the gaps of the word FATHER. I also wanted to subvert the techniques and materials assigned stereotypically to men (metal sheet, steel cutter) and woman (soft, pink fabric, handwriting). The verb ‘father’ has an additional meaning of inseminate and evokes the meanings of God the Father. The main inspiration for this work was the patriarchal thinking and machoism that defines today’s Hungarian political rhetoric and especially the amendment of the country’s constitution in 2020, which now states: “Family is based on marriage and the parent-child relation. The mother is a woman, the father a man”.
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In another work I wanted to express my solidarity with Polish women, I used the red lightning bolt symbol of the pro-choice movement. I envisioned a participative work, which I conceptualized during an art residency in a metal factory in Hungary, where I participated as the only female artist. I talked to all my male colleagues about the protests in Poland, and they absolutely agreed, but eventually cancelled their participation in my work. So, the final action took place under a surveillance camera, only with two protagonists holding the lightning. In addition, they asked me not to show their faces; that is why I chose the title . Closely Watched Metalworkers
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In September 2022, the Hungarian government tightened the abortion rules, which makes the process of pursuing a termination more bureaucratic. The regulation has not come out of the blue, and it can be predicted that the tightening will continue, if government can influence attitudes in society deeply enough. At least the government’s aim is clear, and this tendency has been strongly present in their statements to the media since 2010. According to statistics, restrictive laws lead to unsafe abortions and increase the number of illegal procedures. I wanted to emphasize this aspect of the so called ‘fetal heartbeat rule’. For the demonstration which happened within the context of the annual International Safe Abortion Day, I made a protest board with no text on it, but a hanger forming a wing of an angel or bird. Angyalcsináló The title “Angelmaker” is an archaic and euphemistic expression in Hungarian, in contrast with the English term “infanticidal”, which is more direct. People seemed to like and understand the meaning of the board. I gave this work to the organizer of the demonstration, the Patent Association (Society Against Patriarchy) and made another one for myself.