The Brooklyn Rail

The art of being subversive is, as Daphne A. Brooks reveals in her 2021 book Liner Notes for the Revolution “unfolding on other frequencies while the world adores them and yet mishears them.”But when artists have complete freedom and access, can they express their highest form of creativity, or are those inhibitions that demonstrate true creativity manifest despite the circumstances?

It’s no secret that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is rolling back arts and culture funding for a host of institutions through drastic workforce reductions at the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the National Endowment for the Humanities; notices to rescind previously awarded National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grants were sent, and government bureaucrats are flagging certain words to guide what initiatives not to support financially. All of this is occurring in a country that, historically, has not had much government patronage compared to places in Europe, in which ministries of culture are the primary agents of funding. How would we have reacted to the news that the governments of Romania and Hungary, before the Eastern European revolutions of 1989, were halting support for artists who make radical and socially engaged art instead of work that fosters propagandist social realism?

Visiting Experimentum at Kunsthalle Budapest was the first time I saw an exhibition of twenty-seven artists orbiting an impactful art educator, Pál Nagy, who influenced the artists in the seventies and eighties during Nicolae Ceauşescu’s totalitarian regime in Romania. Some of the artists even fled Romania and sought refuge in Hungary. Experimentum unearths the hidden role of arts education as a driver of radical thinking and making that is process-based and sometimes evident in the artwork itself, revealing that oftentimes what takes place in the classroom is the most transcendent work.

Nagy’s work set the tone of the show in the first room. His Drought (1972) and Ringed Nest (1977) brought an Expressionist approach to viewing nature. The former shows a figure, defined by negative space, face down in a pool of water, but swallowed by a canvas larger in scale than the figure. The dry land emerges through palimpsest: scratches into canvas, creating irregular lines and chipping paint. Oil paint’s inherent moisture makes this process happen over time, but Nagy achieved this effect by deliberately drying the paint or using a mixture with the paint to make it crackle, making its material process emulate the theme it conveys. It grows darker at the bottom of the canvas surrounding the figure and because of its pronounced fissures, ever widening. Ringed Nest showcases a dead tree with smoking embers, presumably in place of branches. In the center of the tree, there is a clearing with a nest of eggs, emblematic of new life and hope. A few lines of sky blue peak through, but the remainder of the palette is gray and bleak. Nagy’s subtle, striking, narrative-rich subject matter is echoed in the works of his students.

For example, Adaptation to the Matrix by Sarolta Puskai displays solid-color collared shirts with string wrapping them around a core that looks like egg cartons. Perhaps this is a nod to the prior regime’s decision to deprioritize agricultural labor, which caused degraded living conditions and inflation. Clothing, often a signifier of culture and individual style, is an anonymous tapestry. What’s typically soft in this new context holds rigidity.

In R-EVOLUTION (1980), Károly Ferenczi re-appropriates Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830), a painting of the second French Revolution depicting when the monarchy was reinstated after it was dismantled in 1792. This image was put onto a life-size matchbox filled with matches, bearing the text, “FABRICA DE CHIBRITURI TIMISOARA STAS: 1789 / 1848 / 1956 / 1980 /1989,” refers to a company in Timisoara, Romania, that began producing matches in 1883 until its closure in 1963. During Romania’s socialist period, the State took control of the company and began producing chemicals and folding chairs there controlled the sale of the remaining matches, at a markup. Ferenczi’s work shows that reclaiming and re-appropriating was an important part of efforts to resist the socialist regime, for objects had to speak when people could not.

Design of Mezöség (Câmpia Transilvainei) (2007) by Károly Elekes is an assortment of pocket knives lodged into a wooden mantle. Next to the installation is sheet music. When the viewer looks at the music and back at the knives, it is evident that they are configured to echo the musical score of a nationalist song. The Mezöség refers to a farmland region in Romania that is ethnically Hungarian, Romanian, and Romani, and is a place where folk music and dancing thrive.

Another politically engaged work is a print by Ferenczi called The Ultra-Leftist Turns Right (action) (1983), a quadtych of monochromatic photographs can be read sequentially. The first shows two intersecting lines (one white, one red) that merge at a set point. The second work in the quadtych, depicts the artist walking on the lines as a tightrope. Ferenczi is directly located at the impasse or crossroads of the two tightropes showing near-perfect symmetry. The third and fourth photographs show the artist choosing to walk down the white line, and the farther he walks down that path, it looks like the lines never touched in the first place.

From my travels in Central Europe to the Baltics and through the US, I notice multiple exhibitions on the topic of protest art, mail art, and similar concepts. Because of this trend, I take note of the writing on the wall: this theme keeps cropping up. No matter how many times you try to cut down the revolution, it grows back strong and goes underground. All in all, experimental protest art is here to stay!