The Hungarian Avant-Garde and Socialism by Katalin Cseh-Varga

Author:Katalin Cseh-Varga
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Figure 4.6 The White Room at the exhibition Hungary can be yours! International Hungary, Young Artists’ Club, Budapest, 1984, curator: György Galántai. Photograph by György Galántai. Courtesy of the Artpool Art Research Center – Museum of Fine Arts.

Most of the artists, authors and musicians who featured on the montage tape were actors in the second public sphere, whose ‘voices’ were distinct from those of the authorities. The recording of Miklós Erdély’s ironic lecture performance, for example, used humour to criticize the humiliations and absurdities caused by the all-embracing bureaucratism. Erdély described scenes from everyday Kádárian life, in the form of an ordinary person’s visit to the district council with all of the associated frustrations and apathies.100 The musical excerpts of the work of the punk-rock-jazz band URH (Ultra Rock News Agency/Ultra Rock Hírügynökség) were much more radical because their vocals promoted a punkish, anarchic lifestyle.101 Songs such as ‘Take me away’ (Vigyetek el) and ‘Is there life on Earth’ (Van-e élet a földön) openly criticized the Kádár regime’s stifling atmosphere. The voice of subversion in Erdély’s piece was just as irritating to the organs and leadership behind Kádárian culture politics, as was the radical criticism that the underground sound attack of URH represented.

Because the black room of Hungary can be yours! was devoted to international artists’ interpretations of Hungary, Galántai’s decision to play a Finnish radio broadcast providing general information on Hungary in the Finnish language had an obvious curatorial logic, since Finnish is assumed to be the linguistically closest language to Hungarian among the major European languages.102 Galántai’s choice of Finnish was therefore likely to have been made to demonstrate the international connections of Hungarian culture. Even more interesting than Galántai’s use of the black room, however, was his filling of the white room with works about Hungary made by Hungarians, decorated with a pro-Socialist soundscape backdrop.103 A secret agent who was instructed to observe the exhibition opening, and whose insights are highly likely to have contributed to the premature closure of Hungary can be yours!, sent the following report to the Ministry of the Interior:

The material played in the small room on the mezzanine . . . was made up of movement and mass songs. Galántai did not select the best known [sic] mass songs of the 1950s and 60s but the newer compositions of the 1970s, among them songs of the KISZ and the of the workers’ militia. (In most recordings there were choirs, soloists and the orchestra). The total of the recordings was longer than the montage in the main room, movement songs coming one after the other for over one hour and a half. Galántai’s selection of the newest musical pieces was presumably a conscious choice. Older ones would strike this audience as outmoded, which had been mocked, disparaged by earlier performances, and sharply criticized even by official publications. The newest movement songs, however, contain a good many elements of pop music and seem to be closer to the taste of the young. For viewers

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