Miklós Peternák

Postvideo
Footnotes to the Transformation of Hungarian Videomaking

1
One of the decisive new developments of the last two decades has been the ending of the first stage in the history
of video. The analog form of video we had known since the 1960s saw its final days: the tapes were destroyed, and
computer servers filled up by the terabyte as the genre migrated to the digital sphere. At the same time, there has
been a hitherto unparalleled increase in the creation and dissemination of visual information -- one unforeseen even
two decades ago in 1989, a decisive year for sea changes in information, and a time of revolutionary change in
Eastern Europe: the year that saw the dawn of this new epoch. Even the age of traditional television-viewing was
then transformed. Today anyone can connect to a myriad of live webcams through a browser, or make films on a
telephone, then send it off as a packaged message or put it directly on the Net, perhaps as part of a broadcast of
current interest. The World Wide Web made good the promises of television: offering a view through barriers and
into the distance. The present-as-barrier has faded into the timeless present. More than just a variety of devices and
methods for recording motion pictures became widely available at the end of the 1990s; most people – anyone not
isolated from the world of information, that is – now carry live images in their pockets, a situation that goes well
beyond the demand for the “Internet in every kitchen.” With the press of a few well-chosen buttons, a person
localizes herself through a string of numbers and begins broadcasting. Both of these stories – the political
transformation and the information revolution – were probably observable from any point on the planet (allowing
for differences of time zone and emphasis), but it is perhaps worth emphasizing that here, in Eastern Europe, the
issue involved two different views of the same story.

Images of this period of change are presented in Gusztáv Hámos' video essay “The Real Power of TV,” which spans
the brutal military and police suppression of the Chinese students' movement, the great migrations from then East
Germany through Hungary to the West, the Prague Spring, the reburial in Budapest of Imre Nagy and the martyrs
of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, and the televised revolution in Romania.
Amid enigmatic images of violence and the masses, of human passions and the crumbling structures of power, the
camera is given a special place – or more precisely the one holding it, whether reporter, cinematographer, activist, or
artist, making multiple copies of a one-time event for the greater public. We see her in action, and we see her
obstructed: a uniformed hand covering the lens, or the video signal that breaks up, then goes black – these become
the messages, charged with special meaning, conveyed by a montage constructed like a classical drama, awakening in
the viewer a sense of sympathy and fear. And yet (or perhaps for this very reason) the protagonists in the work are
not the aforementioned iconic scenes but a well-chosen individual, one of the countless possible viewers: the
author's grandmother. And a professional television news staffer: someone on the other side of it all, one of the
people who runs the operation, becoming at that moment a leading character in the news broadcast of Hungarian
Television, now that the validity of the end-of-history theory has been called into question by historical events in a
way that is clear even to everyday people. The grandmother, Golda Weinberger, comes to be a kind of allegorical
figure in history, peeling vegetables, going shopping, watching TV while lying in bed: all popular forms of spending
'free time,' as the euphemism so indicative of our day puts it; her apartment, her actions, the private space where the
flashing television screen illuminates one after another the photographic relics that mark a personal fate congruent
with the 20th century--all these are elements of the new allegory. She is representative of history, living it, observing
it, and falling asleep to it. We see the images, and all the while she says not a word. Her 'story,' as we experience it, is
narrated by her grandson, the director. He steps in to explain, interpret, and tell anecdotes, lending a special rhythm
and a golden touch to what he considers worth knowing and presenting to the public. The result is described above.

The other protagonist is the professional television journalist Endre Aczél who, along with a few other television
commentators, reports on something that is rarely -- and on television virtually never -- discussed, things that happen
offscreen: instructions, directives, and personal opinions about the work in question. Aczél was almost fated to do
this, given that he was a main player in the broadcast of the televised revolution in Romania of December 19, 1989
broadcast by Hungarian Television. His role then went beyond the usual job of summarizing the news: he was an
active participant in events since these broadcasts reached not only Hungary itself, but also certain areas of Romania
where often Romanian news broadcasts were not available in acceptable quality; and even where they were, the
Hungarian version offered a confirming alternative.
A central scene in this video essay, particularly for the relationships between private and public (that is, history), and
also for possible interpretations we offer here, is the micro-story of the Christmas fish: that often-unavoidably banal,
didactic sequence of parallel shots showing the store-bought fish, wrapped in paper, that is brought home and put
in the bathtub. Slowly it begins to wriggle around and grab a few mouthfuls of water. In a while, it comes fully to
life. The parallel: the revolutionary masses' intoxicated taste of freedom. Next, following the usual template, the fish
gets dressed in kitchen clothes and makes its way to become the holiday dinner, ending up under the knife. The
parallel now: The capture and execution (or rather brutal murder) of the Ceausescus. It is rare that someone so
unforcedly takes such a seemingly cliche-ridden association from mere allegory into a true symbolic realm. Although
the result is easily understood and requires no explanation, it still manages to transform itself before our eyes into a
polyvalent dramatic symbol. Here we must absolutely sense the presence of true art.

Those few days toward the end of December 1989, broadcast by the new, free Romanian television and its
Hungarian counterpart -- we may rightly call this a special moment in the history of television, of the medium itself;
not merely because of what the news anchor says in Gusztáv Hámos' video (“nothing in the history of Hungarian
Television was ever presented in such detail”) but our perspective today allows us to see that those few days were
simultaneously the high point and the end of television. What we had formerly been accustomed to call 'television'
largely ended with the 1990s themselves, and disappeared completely, everywhere, with the new century. Vilém
Flusser, one of the speakers at the April 1990 conference in Budapest entitled “The Media are with Us,” says one of
the decisive new features of that episode of Romanian Television is this: “There is no reality behind the image. All
reality is in the image.”1

Jolán Árvai and Judit Kopper, the Hungarian producers of The Power of the News (a coproduction of two now-
defunct production studios in Hungary and Germanys ZDF) engaged in an unusual undertaking: for a few years they
exclusively funded works that were closer to independent video, or video art, than to any mainstream television.
Works produced by the FMS (Young Artists' Studio) and the Fríz Producers' Group that garnered international
success include András Wahorn's Living Creatures of Eastern Europe (FMS), a Sydney Video Festival prizewinner, and
Péter Forgács' Private Hungary, a series one of whose installments won the main prize at the Hague Worldwide Video
Festival in 1990.

As mentioned more than once in Hámos' video, the Communist leadership had no head for the new technological
media, and indeed no interest in them; after the political changes, though, the new leaders found television and mass
media to be a crucial issue of power. The result was occasionally quite extreme: one thinks of Fred Forest's
campaign media for the presidency of Bulgarian Television. Independent production studios were the victims of
campaigns for political office, at least in Hungary, where their frequencies were suspended; this, and the launch of
commercial television (1997 in Hungary) sealed their fate once and for all.

(2)

The period from 1988 to1993, seen through East Central European eyes, was a time of the disintegration and
ultimate end of “existing forms of socialism” (as the régime referred to itself), in both the private and the public,
historical sense -- irrevocably, one hopes. The death of dictatorships was an achievement in any case, and naturally
inspired a sense of the miraculous; only a few years previously, there had hardly been anyone who would even have
imagined that so many Bolshevik-type soviet systems would disappear with such rapidity. András Sólyom's 1992
video “Funeral” may be seen as a memento of this disappearance: a montage from material in the historical archives
set to the sound-verse of poet and aesthete Ákos Szilágyi -- a “lyric clip,” to use Gábor Bódy's half-forgotten genre
designation.

In retrospect, the quick string of deaths of Soviet Party Secretaries Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko -- leaders
of the “gerontocracy,” as some termed it at the time -- together with the succession of idealized funerals in their

1 The Media Were With Us: The Role of Television in the Romanian Revolution. Balázs Béla Stúdió, MII video, 141
m.; Von der Bürokratie zur Telekratie. Rumänien im Fernsehen. Ein Symposion aus Budapest. Hrsg. Keiko Sei – Peter Weibel.
Berlin, Merve Verlag 1990
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wake, can be taken as a set of unmistakeable signs. These ceremonies, echoing in the historical consciousness the
filmed images of the funerals of Lenin and Stalin, were carried on television in most Communist countries at the
time; their absurdity was obvious not only because the central setting in every case was the square in front of the
Mausoleum that held Lenin's mummified body, or because the podium from which speeches were made, and on
which the successors stood, was a grave, but because the similarity of the ceremonies through the dramaturgy of
ritual inevitably made the whole thing smack of an assembly line. Even Józef Robakawski's film incorporating the
broadcasts of Brezhnev's funeral contains similar associations, while the relevant section of Hungarian Television's
series Videovilág (Video World, with 51 installments between 1988 and 1993), András Sólyom's Rendszeres temetések oda-
vissza (Regular Funerals Back and Forth) makes unmistakeable use of this formal allusion.

The micro-history of the last 150 years in Hungary, including the end of socialism in the 20th century, can be
symbolically construed from the funerals and reburials that run through this period. Several hundred thousand
attended the public reburial, on June 16, 1989, of Prime Minister Imre Nagy, a martyr of the 1956 Revolution,2
carried live on television, which made the event an indicator to all of the inevitability of change. Sólyom's video,
which opens with archival funeral scenes from Dziga Vertov's Three Songs about Lenin; later, scenes from Hungary --
the reburials of Lajos Kossuth and László Rajk, along with the latter's lying in state before Budapest's Exhibition
Hall -- appear interspersed with Soviet documentary and feature films. Here a powerful tension, punctuated by the
words of Ákos Szilágyi's recitation, was created by the contrast between the similarities in the rituals, and the
difference in their underlying meaning. András Sólyom later (in 2005) made another documentary, a longer one that
deals more directly with our topic, providing an overview of the changes in society and in (media) art. In this film,
János Kádár's Last Speech, another writer, Mihály Kornis, analyses the last, April 12, 1989 speech of János Kádár
(recorded but never in fact delivered publicly) who had been in power from the putting down of the 1956
Revolution to the mid-1980s. The final scene of the drama (to quote the narration from this film) describes how “on
the very day, at the very hour the Supreme Court reconsidered Imre Nagy's trial and exonerated him -- 9 o'clock in
the morning on July 6, 1989 -- János Kádár died.” Personal history lined up against historical fact, as if reinforcing
Gusztáv Hámos' interpretation of the grandmother's thoughts in The Power of the News that linked the man's
biological changes as he aged with the corresponding historical phases of the regime that bore his name.

Gusztáv Hámos lives in Berlin. He had an important role in forming the world's first international magazine in
videocassette form, Infermental, started by Gábor Bódy. Since 1990 he has been active in many capacities in Hungary,
whether teaching in the Intermedia Department of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, or being shown in
numerous installations, exhibitions of his early photographic work, showings of videos and photofilms, and
performances, including a review of his oeuvre in 2008 at the Pixel Galéria. In his 1996 video Berlin Retour, a young
Danish tourist guides us through the history of twentieth-century Germany in seven minutes -- in a nutshell, you
might say. Naturally Walther Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Great City plays the leading role3; a surprising element
of these echoes and explorations of the past is a translucent image object that in a sense allows for the passage
between present and past. This object, a moving stereoscopic hologram comprising 125 frames, was on display at
Beyond Art, a show curated by Peter Weibel in the exhibition space at the C3 Cultural and Communication Center.4

János Sugár's Typewriter of the Illiterate of 2001 -- clearly already a product of the digital age -- uses collected archival
materials in an unusual way. The Kalashnikov machine gun, a Soviet Russian product well known worldwide, serves
as a quasi-icon; it is the sole constant, stable element in this series of images; around it morph its various users.
While Berlin Retour confronts us with the still-perceptible traces of the Second World War, Sugár's animation presents
us with the wars raging all over the world -- an echo of the tableaux of Le Clézio's 'There's a war on; anything can
happen.'5 In an interview with Geert Lovink,6 Sugár notes that at least 100 million of these simple, deadly weapons
were manufactured in the last half century, becoming the symbol of freedom fighters and terrorists alike. János
Sugár's work gives a special place to the moving image and the installation; while these two media are radically

2 For a detailed treatment of events, see the homepage of the 1956 Institute: “Anatomy of One Day” http://www.rev.hu/89/
3 Walther Ruttmann: Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, 1927
4 Jenseits der Kunst. (Hrsg. Peter Weibel) Passagen Vrlg. 1996; published in English as Beyond Art: A Third Culture.
Wien, New York, Springer 2005.
5 J. M. G. Le Clézio: La Guerre. Gallimard, Paris 1970.
6 The Typewriter of the Illiterate. Interview with János Sugár by Geert Lovink. May 29, 2003. www.nettime.org

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different formally and technically, nonetheless they both acquire an unmistakeably individual voice in the hands of
the artist. Perhaps one of the most unusual works is the video opera Immortal Culprits (with music by Gábor Litván)
whose libretto is modeled on a video machine's user manual. Besides Sugár, only the Vakuum TV Group in
Hungary7 attempted to associate widely disparate genres in its “live television show” and its cabaret, in “scientific
theater” and parodies -- until its role was ultimately taken over by DJ and party culture, by the VJ and live coding.

Szabolcs KissPál's Rever series contains a piece, “Anthem,” created for the opening of the show Rosszban, jóban
[Through Thin and Thick].8 Here five young girls sing the text of the Hungarian national anthem (lyrics composed by
Ferenc Kölcsey), to the music of the Romanian national anthem Deşteaptă-te, române [Awake, Romanian!] composed by
Anton Pann. The result is an immediately provocative treatment of the anthem that might seem sacrilegious in
highly nationalistic circles, but it has its antecedents: Sándor Kardos' 1985 work, an editing of archival footage (a
conception of Mihály Kornis') is a collage film in which each word of the Hungarian anthem is spoken by a different
person, each removed from the original context; in Gusztáv Hámos' video Le dernier jour: 1984 [The Last Day:1984]
the lines of the song are set amid a foreign-language context, familiar only from the ritual templates of New Year's
Eve celebrations; the explanatory narration in French proves an alienating force, transforming private scenes almost
into museum objects. The authenticity of Szabolcs KissPál's version -- like that of Hámos -- derives from its
personal stories of migration and emigration, while the possibility (or impossibility) of crossing borders real and
virtual conceals myriad real conflicts that someone born into the European Union might no longer experience as
physical limitations, but at most as mediated, intellectual ones. Here we might be allowed a brief description of
another well-known KissPál work (an installation at the NCAA in Moscow in the Active Image show, and also shown
in Dortmund as a candidate for the Nam June Paik Prize): a shot of the blue sky filled with flying birds -- but here
there is a hint of a confrontation between the freedom of the boundless sky and the boundless possibilities for
digital manipulation: during editing, clips of the birds' random flittings are arranged to create the effect that they
bounce off the edge of the projected image, off of its frame. This, too, is a sort of collection like János Sugár's
analogies, where digital technology opens the door to arrangement into a meaningful sequence: while the method for
Sugár is the series of Kalashnikovs morphed onto one another in the same spot, for Szabolcs KissPál it consists of a
coordinated ring of entry and exit points of the birds' trajectories in the frame. As a result of this simple, well-
chosen, and consistently-applied formal boundary, a broad semantic field opens up -- as is usually the case with
successful works.

Hajnal Németh's video Striptease or not? uses very different means (but a similarly puritanical form) to achieve its
effect. Consisting of basically one single take, the work presents a young woman removing her brassiere in an
outdoor location: the Lágymányos Bridge in Budapest. She is also wearing a sleeveless top; the 'striptease' goes on
under this. Beyond the obvious (and perfectly valid) gender-centric or voyeur-themed interpretations, including the
implied connections between the material of this video and the prostitution that flourishes on the local highway
roadsides, Hajnal Németh's work is exciting and provocative in a minimalist vein because it presents a little reality
show staged in the public space, offering the unusual documentation of a public art action using the tools of private
videomaking. Hajnal Németh is a product of the Intermedia Department at the University of Fine Arts in Budapest;
she has lived in Berlin for several years, where she is one of the founders of the Lada Projekt, an artist-run gallery.
There she works with artists such as Tamás Komorócky (who has produced a substantial body of video) and the
Little Warsaw Group (exhibitors in the Hungarian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2001 and 2003). Németh has
also been a member since its inception in 1999 of the Videospace project created by Eike Berg,9 which began on the
Internet and now, after producing many video actions and exhibitions, operates as a gallery in Budapest among its
activities, defining itself as a location for presenting media art. Besides Videospace, such works are regularly to be
seen in Budapest at the Pixel Galéria and from the Crosstalk initiative, as well as at the Mediawave Festival in Győr;
previously also on this list was the Retina in Szigetvár, which operated until 2003.10

3.
There is university-level instruction in video art at two institutions in Hungary: the recently renamed Moholy-Nagy

7 http://vakuumtv.c3.hu/
8 Rosszban, jóban…” An exhibition of the MAMŰ in the Kecskemét Museum, 2001.
9 http://videospace.c3.hu/
10 http://mwave.irq.hu/ , http://www.crosstalk.hu/

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University of Art (formerly the Hungarian University of Arts and Design), where there was a separate Department
of Video Art even prior to its reconstitution, offering instructors in the field such as Erika Katalina Pásztor and
Anita Sárosi. The other such place was the Intermedia Department at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, where
the setup was more particular: the focus here lies not on the teaching of specific techniques, but on the proposed
project itself. Naturally, technical knowledge is a prerequisite for the proper realization of a plan, idea, or conception,
so that students in the course of the five-year program are exposed to almost every form of expression in (to take an
example) motion pictures, including 16mm and 35mm film editing, analog and digital video techniques, non-linear
editing, interactive multimedia, and methods of 3D computer work, or work specifically intended for the World
Wide Web. From simple editing tasks and blue-box exercises to preparing collective remakes and recording events,
and extending even to criticism, the spectrum offered is broad enough to transcend mere familiarity with the limits
of universally-accessible technology to focus on the innovative use and creative elaboration of given resources,
whatever they be. (If I were to name all of the graduates who went on to work in video after university, the resulting
list would be long. Let me just name a few of them, in no particular order: Ferenc Gróf, Szilvia Seres, Ádám Lendvai,
Éva Kozma, Léna Kútvölgyi, Júlia Vécsei, Miklós Mécs, and Katarina Sevic.) Over the last two decades, the
Intermedia Department has been the location for numerous Hungarian and international projects, including the
1991 (pre-Internet) Toronto-Budapest Video Bridge, the three Metaforum conferences11, four stagings of the collective
action of all-day television viewing entitled Medium Analysis12, and the Videology festival organized jointly with the
Institut Français of Budapest13, which was an experimental attempt at a second (and to date the latest) retrospective
of video art in Hungary since the 1991 Sub Voce show.14 It may be worth adding that the context for Videology was an
overview of French video art assembled from then-current works (curated by Robert Cahen and Jean-Paul Fargier,
with installations by Jean-François Guiton and Gusztáv Hámos); the first video-installation exhibition of Hungarian
work Sub Voce was curated by Suzanne Mészöly, and presented together with the Dutch video-installation show
Imago: Fin de Siècle in Contemporary Dutch Art.15

When Olia Liliana, at the 1997 Budapest Internet Galaxis,16 screened her first Netfilm from the previous year My
Boyfriend Came Back from the War17 or when, not long thereafter, Hungarian artists made films for the Zsebtévé [Pocket
TV] project at the behest of Balázs Beöthy, the change had become clear. (A description of Pocket TV reads: “Ten
short stories, employing all the advantages and disadvantages of real video, oscillating between the personal and
impersonal, public and private, old and new, little and big: the video becomes broadcast -- and the screen palm-sized
-- through a focus not on the new but on the personal; not on the complex but on the accessible. It is a true pocket
TV that follows its own rhythm instead of the beat of technological innovation.”18) Each new year has brought
important change to digital communication. As Zoltán Szegedy-Maszák writes, while in the early days “students'
works for the Web typically exhibited a critical approach influenced by primary experiences with digital media's
hypertext structures,”19 once we get to the new millennium, a situation arose that might be described as ideal:
Everyone can put together her own film on her own laptop, and one and the same medium allows the creation,
publication, distribution of motion-picture materials, as well as their viewing and access to them. This had never
been the case before: everything can be done right at your desk, with no need to leave the room. It is no mere
technical change, but in fact a new paradigm, that the film frame has been replaced by the pixel, and the old formats
(8, 16, and 35mm; PAL, SECAM, NTSC, U-matic, VHS, Beta, V8, and the rest) have been supplanted by the primacy
of compression, coding, and resolution: a film is now one single file -- a single image, stored as key frames and the
coding of their modifications and changes; the physical, material form is no longer necessary. Naturally this is all
quite fragile, susceptible of being destroyed at the touch of a button. As a result, the issue of preservation acquired
immediate urgency with the new media, as it had with the older forms.20

11 http://www.c3.hu/intermedia/kronologia/metaforum.html
12 http://www.c3.hu/intermedia/kronologia/manalizis3.html
13Vidéologie. Les comédies françaises – Sciences / Fiction. Institut Français in Hungary, Budapest, 1997.
14 Sub voce. SCCA, Exhibition Hall, Budapest 1991
15 'Imago: Fin de Siècle in Dutch Contemporary Art' Montevideo, 1990-1993,
http://catalogue.montevideo.nl/event.php?id=595
16 http://www.c3.hu/events/98/igalax98/index1.html
17 www.teleportacia.org/war
18 http://www.c3.hu/collection/zsebtv/indexhu.html
19 http://www.intermedia.c3.hu/kut/intermed.html
20 The C3 Foundation , a nonprofit NGO, handles the collection and preservation of video and media-art works in

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The Internet, not video, has become the alternative to television. The scheduled broadcast slot is now nothing but a
myth, and the dimensions of “live broadcasting” have expanded to become essentially constant, unending. A new
kind of television viewer has emerged: the guard behind the security camera; Augustine's gloss on Paul's Biblical
phrase “through a glass darkly” has taken a new turn: he notes that the Latin speculum means 'mirror,' and is not to be
confused with specula -- a 'watch station.' But today a million guard-eyes, modulations of a single Argus (or Michael
Klier's Giant21) try to see clearly a slice of the world (whether a subway, a department store, a bank, or a traffic
intersection) made accessible to paid attention. An understanding of the society of simulacrum and spectacle is
offered by Tibor Hajas' sentence from The Beauty of Cathode Radiation, penned in 1978: “There is but one single
message, one sole news item.” Nonpaid, voluntary guard-eyes and the multitude of television viewers are a guarantee
that the order of the status quo will stand as long as people are sitting before their sets.

When the luxury of off-air time still existed, one of Hungary's television stations would broadcast a fire flickering in
a fireplace in place of the usual test pattern. Today, this is a self-sufficient broadcast: a multitude of web cameras
create a new era of specialization in 'television' with their animal, news, sports, tourism, cooking, fashion, music,
classic-film, nostalgia, porno, and even 'reality' channels. Supplanting 'mixed broadcasts' are what we might term
'specialized' independent channels, delivered to the home in parallel image streams to which the the viewer responds
with remote-control visuality, using as a model for her personal mixes the so-called 'public-service' and 'commercial'
stations (the difference between the two being that, in the former, not every broadcast is an advertisement).

Soap Opera, a 2004 exhibition held in Budapest's Exhibition Hall, allowed Hungarian artists to respond to the new lay
of the land. The show's curator Attila Nemes (currently of Kitchen Budapest)22 formulated its conception like this:
“This exhibition consists primarily of recent works that confront issues of everyday media consumption, and offer a
critique of electronic media. Media studies these days often use the term 'soap opera' to describe the structure of
current television culture. Every television show -- not just soap operas per se -- can be understood as such (a news
broadcast, for example, can be taken as a serially-staged reality).”23

'No one watches' television, goes a frequently-heard declaration, though somehow everyone complains about it in
highly informed fashion. An extreme form of television criticism was the 2006 political demonstration turned brutal,
in which crowds besieged the headquarters of Hungarian Television in Budapest, then vandalized and set fire to it --
all shown on television. These events proved a shocking overture to a series of demonstrations that furnished the
basis for Csaba Nemes' Remake of 2007. Csaba Nemes is a visual artist and prizewinner at the aforementioned Sub
voce exhibition. He created a number of installations in the early 1990s, which included an active collaboration with
Zsolt Veres (for a while they even traded names, in their project Közös név [Shared Name], where each signed his work
with the other's name). Nemes' current production was originally conceived as a plan for the Hungarian Pavilion at
the 2007 Venice Biennale (an analysis of the reasons for its rejection would be beyond the scope of the present
summary; its current realization was perhaps aided by that scandal). Sponsored by transit.hu as part of its
competition Unrealized Works: Better to Be an Artwork than an Artist, the completed film series was shown at the 40th
Hungarian Film Festival and has been supplemented by its own website.

To return to the events: Budapest, September 18, 2006. We stand in front of Television headquarters. All those
present (or certainly their fathers and mothers) once learned that, in a revolution, the means of communication
should be the first target. This was taught as part of Bolshevik ideology, and is precisely what happened with
Hungarian Radio during the 1956 Revolution. (Csaba Nemes writes that Hungarian Television “had already increased
its popularity in May of 2006... with a billboard bearing the slogan If you were a revolutionary, which TV station would you
occupy?”) Those involved in the 2006 incident wanted to gain entry to the Television building -- symbolic to them of
television in general -- to read their petition out loud. Meanwhile, outside the building, the staff from another
television station was covering all these events, including the petitioners, in real time. Long before they entered “the
TV,” as they called the building, they had been on television. Supplementary motifs included the taking of digital

Hungary. C3 has lately been a partner of the EU's GAMA Project: http://www.gama-gateway.eu/
21 Michael Klier: Der Riese (The Giant), 1983, video, 82 min
22 http://kitchenbudapest.hu/person/7
23 http://exindex.hu/index.php?l=hu&page=14&id=50292

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images with cameras and phones before rows of burning cars, with participants and observers alike: unanticipated
disaster tourism. These are unselfconscious reflexes of presence: Let's not be left out of history -- of the images, that is.
Hardly one month later, we could witness a more indirect and enigmatic version of that scene: October 23, 2006 --
fiftieth anniversary of the 1956 Revolution, Budapest. At that solemn moment of celebration, like vampires in the
crypt, the relics of history come to life. One classic quotable here would be Karl Marx's 18th Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte, where he writes that history, repeated, becomes comedy -- but we may just as well leave that, as the subject
is not really all that amusing. Still, historical stage props are undeniably making their way down the Inner Boulevard
in Budapest: a tank has left its exhibition pedestal to roll a few hundred yards and make world news.

Csaba Nemes and his colleagues decided on flash video as their technology of choice; also notable is a background
of forms reminiscent of comics, animé, and manga -- of only limited popularity in Hungary -- that bears the imprint
of music videos. Csaba Nemes writes “I chose animation as being the least documentary genre, not marked by the
ruthless naturalism of technical images. Drawings offer a the opportunity for a more general approach. This genre
offers the chance for an artistic examination enhanced by its isolation from concrete events; it can condense events
documented in moving pictures and analyze them from other perspectives. This approach opens the door for an
ironical remake of the annual fall political 'reality show.'”24

This work competed at the same Venice Biennale where Andreas Fogarasi was the exhibiting artist. Curated by
Katalin Timár, the Hungarian Pavilion won, for its first time in the history of the Biennale, the Golden Lion Prize
for the best national pavilion. (An excerpt from the evaluation: “...using architecture and cultural history, provocative
and poetic parallels have here been drawn between between content, the language of images, and the architecture of
the exhibit itself. The jury also finds praiseworthy the artist's approach, which examines modernity -- in all its
utopian and failed forms -- in the context of our shared history.”) The exhibited work was a series of installations
under the rubric Kultur und Freizeit that became the basis for a film series on Budapest's Cultural Centers as well as a
manifestation in their own right (in an interview, Fogarasi notes that he is most interested in the exhibition as
medium.)25 The first film in the series is A Machine for, filmed in 2006, which examines the Óbuda Educational
Center; this 1975 building, designed by the architect György Kévés, offers some unusual extra features: its slide-roof,
moveable walls, and moveable rows of theater seating. Fogarasi's film presents the building as an exceptional work
of art, and an exceptional historical relic. It is as if the essence of the cultural center -- the Party decree made real --
fills the screen with its glow, with a hitherto unseen clarity and sadness. Even on the digital editing desk of our day
(despite all efforts) there is still nothing surreal in encountering an exciting modernist building, a designer with an
outstanding eye -- and a functionality that has undeservedly lost all social context. Culture and Leisure Time: the title is
perfectly precise, since these Cultural Centers were the setting for independent film festivals, film clubs, and
alternative performances. This is still partly true today: we can regard these institutions as Free-Time Centers against
the now-dominance of mass media striving to keep the private citizen at home. Fogarasi's film (and its success), in
any case seems to prove that Eastern Europe might be comprehensible more than just those who live here.

In support of this last statement, one can adduce works from the oeuvre of perhaps the most internationally
respected artist working in Hungary, Erasmus prizewinner Péter Forgács; his installation is on display in 2009 at the
Hungarian pavilion in Venice. Among his works, one might give pride of place to the series Private Hungary and to
Danubian Exodus -- the latter being perhaps the most complex archive around, simultaneously a film, an exhibition,
and an interactive presence on the World Wide Web (first shown in Hungary at the Ludwig Museum of
Contemporary Art).26 These films outline the parallels between the Jewish and German exoduses: filmed on Captain
Andrásovits' boat on the Danube, they offer a subtle and complex look at the published diaries of individuals, of
interest for anyone curious about (Eastern) European history of the last twenty years -- indeed of the entire past
century -- and the way artists think in the Eastern Europe of our day.

Budapest, August 2009

-translated from the Hungarian by Jim Tucker

24 http://www.remake.hu/
25 http://vernissage.tv/blog/2007/06/29/hungarian-pavilion-la-biennale-di-venezia/
26 http://www.danube-exodus.hu/,