State of Affairs

State of Affairs
spaces through ideological appropriation

In the opening scene of the film drama The Belly of an Architect (1987, written and directed by Peter Greenaway), a group of diners, having a nighttime snack on the terrace of a restaurant in Rome, take a walk down to the Pantheon and burst into lengthy and solemn applause. The applause is spontaneous, it’s not called forth by an event or inauguration, but only by the building itself.
This gesture of appreciation and applause invokes a stage act represented by the Pantheon itself. However, on this imagined stage the act of the Pantheon consists of much more than showcasing the architectural mastery of its builders and the mere grace of a structure in space; it also serves as a reminder of bygone eras and societies that planned, executed and renovated the Pantheon, creating imprints of the then prevailing social and ideological structures in the process.

The exhibition demonstrates possible applications of such a cognitive and observational attitude of the audience and wishes to initiate a discussion about the different levels of expression that architectural or sculptural structures can be used to convey social ideologies on. Is it feasible at all to be completely rid of such influences? What kind of knowledge can we gain about certain social systems from the imprints they leave on buildings and sculptures, or even highway pillars? These are just some of the questions that the exhibited works are seeking an answer to, trying to uncover the network of correlations between space and ideology, from barely perceptible influences on shapes and structures to purposeful appropriation of artistic forms, in such different environments as the American Capitalism of the 1930’s, the miscarried utopia of Communism, the reshaping of a Cubist work of art or recent events on the Hungarian political scene.

The constructed environment itself is the main protagonist in the video realized by the French-Hungarian artist collective, Société Réaliste. The video is based on the 1949 movie Fountainhead that tells the story of a Modernist architect who went on to gain recognition for his revolutionary ideas and his absolute refusal to compromise with a society that resists innovation. Appropriating the footage, Société Réaliste digitally removed all traces of human presence from the movie, spiriting away the architect, a hero of Capitalism and modern free markets, as well as all the other characters of the movie, together with all elements of the plot and the soundtrack, leaving behind nothing but the empty spaces. Thus the narrative of the 111 minutes long video is reduced to the story of idealized locations of the budding New York Capitalism, engineering offices opening on painted skylines and mock skyscrapers.
The movie of Andreas Fogarasi also presents a kind of set of stage scenery, but it has gained real existence: the open-air Norks Folkemuseum near Oslo. This park hosts a thematic collection of buildings from different regions of Norway, representing different architectural styles, ages and social functions. The fictionalized, parallel presentation of several different historical ages and geographical locations raises the issues of authenticity and reinvention, or to put it differently, whether a building can preserve its original meaning, with all its ideological, social and historical connotations, after it has been taken out of its natural context. To continue the above stage analogy, these buildings, stripped of their original functions, resemble stages without actors and plays. Borsos Lőrinc’s paintings depict buildings that seem to stand completely alone, but – due to recent events in Hungarian politics – cannot shake off discomforting connotations which have transformed them into symbols of political events, corruption and misappropriation.
Such meanings clinging to buildings and other elements of city space will continue to live on in the cultural memory of the region and urban legends. An example to the former is the readymade of János Fodor that reminds us the boots of Stalin, a symbol of the Post-Communist frenzy of pulling down statues, while the photographs shot by Miklós Surányi in Žilina may serve as an example of the latter. On these photos, barren and functionless pillars of unfinished highway turnpikes stand witness to the larger-than-life realizations and failures of Socialism.
The movie by Zbyněk Baladrán, entitled socio-fiction, confronts the utopian visions of the Functionalist architect Karel Honzík and the Communist Manifesto. In the perfect Communist society imagined by Honzík, the pre-fabricated homes ensure all conditions necessary for a right life. However, after the failure of Communism both Honzík’s ideas and the philosophy of the Communist Manifesto offers an other reading; to proceed after the past – and it’s buildings – we need destruction and oblivion as means of progress.
In his photo series entitled Space, Abstraction, Jiří Thýn analyzes and reshapes the sculptures of the Czech Cubist sculptor Otto Gutfreund, one of the founding fathers of the Czech modern art and regarded by some art historians as the creator of the first Cubist sculpture. In the process, Thýn applies Gutfreund’s own methods (presented in his theoretical writings) on his sculptures, using the medium of photography to refute the critics of Gutfreund, who used to hold against him the alleged lack of 3 dimensionality in his works, as well as to further emphasize Gutfreund’s ambitions to comprise the versatility of the “whole” in every single point of view.

Although the works of art in the exhibition have different historical connotations, the accentuation and staging of space and architectural/sculptural structures places the inherent narrative nature of these structures and the possibilities of ideological appropriation into the center of attention while showcasing the sublime imprints of past social systems as a means of ensuring the continuation of their most prevailing utopias.

Borbála Szalai