“I had the conception of an El Kazovsky image and I tried to demonstrate that…”

The El Kazovsky exhibition was preceded by greater expectations than those generated by the presentation of more recent oeuvres. The mythology of the artist is the mythology of a generation, full of unanswered aesthetic, socio-historical, cultural-historical and psychological questions. The following generations, however, have waited to see whether there is something valid today in the oeuvre which had become exclusive, canonised, turned into a cult and mystified, and how this oeuvre comprising multi-arts theatre, agglomerations of text and several thousand works, which the artist left behind, could be installed in a classic space. MúzeumCafé spoke with one of the exhibition’s curators, András Rényi, who, since the death of El Kazovsky, has been seeking ways of presenting his oeuvre, the ideal place and method, which, without producing an exhibition of a life’s work or a homage, would dislodge Kazovsky’s art from its generational isolation. The dream was realised. The exhibition opened in the Hungarian National Gallery in November.

  Half a year ago the foundation dealing with El Kazovsky made an appeal to find his hidden works. How successful was that?

We found a surprisingly good number, but there are major works the whereabouts of which we are still ignorant. All we know about one of the early paintings is that it was still seen in Rome in the 90s, but has disappeared since then. There are some large works appearing in catalogues as being in private ownership, the traces of which have been lost due to the work changing hands many times.

  To what extent can the exhibition embrace the oeuvre? Is that the aim of the show?

In no way did we start the planning with that in mind. The foundation which looks after the legacy has for years been compiling a database, trying to find all the artworks. We would like to make this freely accessible for the public as soon as possible. You can’t organise a retrospective for several reasons. One is that the oeuvre is huge and in the course of assembling the database it has turned out that, despite the fact that the number of works included is about 3000, it is far from being complete. This includes everything from Kazovsky’s college years to incidental works, as well as installations. These sometimes comprise several items, but they are registered individually, so this means around 1,800 to 2,000 independent works.

  So at most about one fifth of that can be exhibited.

The number of exhibited works is around 400. The material is unevenly distributed and this is reflected in the exhibition, but the arrangement has its own rhythm. There is one room with 50-60 works, another with just two. Building A of the National Gallery comprises a huge space, which can only be filled with strong works. I admit that the exhibition is intellectually heavy-laden and difficult. It’s a curator’s exhibition in that I had the conception of an El Kazovsky image and tried to demonstrate that with different installation techniques in different ways. I had certain considerations, for example not to create an exhibition paying homage, since that is not interesting. The problem with El Kazovsky is that in a certain sense he was already canonised during his own lifetime. From the second half of the 80s practically everyone knew who he was, and since then the situation has essentially not changed. Very early on he created his own circle and his own world, and he thus carried on in his own way, such that from then on he wasn’t influenced by anything, he wasn’t affected by any impulse which would divert him. Internally he was so coherent and consistent that he wasn’t influenced by fashions and current trends. In the generation in which he grew up there was in effect a consensus regarding his position in the canon. Everyone acknowledged that he was a significant artist. It’s another question as to whether there was also the required intensive analysis. Many people wrote about him, including very good things. However, in my opinion his oeuvre has not been systematically examined. He died in 2008. Seven years have passed since then and it seems that his canonised position has remained locked within one generation. Those following, those in their forties today, not to mention those in their 30s, know next to nothing about him. They have heard about him, but nothing about his real legacy.

  The new generation of collectors don’t even buy him.

That’s right. It’s a symptom of being locked in a generation. He had his own collectors – we are working together with many of them successfully – but they, almost without exception, are of his generation. One of the aims of this exhibition to rescue him from this isolation.I recently had an informative talk with the excellent Hajni Tarr, one of the best Hungarian artists of her generation. She said that she did not know what to do with the artist’s role that El Kazovsky represented. Undoubtedly, this role is not self-evident for the present contemporaries. The aim of the exhibition is to deconstruct this artist’s role without contesting the strength of the art. El Kazovsky well suited Lóránd Hegyi’s ‘new sensibility’, the post-modern subjectivity cult of the 1980s. Yet if you study his oeuvre,
the private mythology building in his case turns out not to have been a passing fad. I was interested in what had been behind his self-mythicising approach and what makes it interesting today. My original idea of giving a stronger socio-historical dimension to the gender issue, to El Kazovsky’s well-known transsexuality, has not been implemented.

  Why not? Raising the issue may seem obvious in the case of El Kazovsky.

Several of my students are researching the theme, some are LGBT activists so they are motivated from another direction, too. However, El Kazovsky is not really suitable for demonstrating the issues of sexual minorities, especially their present situation in Hungary. Today the issue is usually rather approached by an attitude to the movement: to human rights, against the ruling social and political system and for making sexual minorities accepted. But El Kazovsky was not at all interested in the gender issue as a social, equality, minority representational or political problem. I thought perhaps to look at what the reaction was in the middle and at the end of the 1970s, when he came out with this sexuality. We haven’t found anything. There is nothing about it. He was brave because he came out and didn’t make a secret of it, but he was not engaged with the problem of women’s equality. Transsexuality is difficult to present, since every content has to be turned into a visual effect at an exhibition. In the end this problem does appear in the exhibition, but it did not acquire a radically new context.

  Did the works get abroad at all, to either exhibitions or collectors?

There were exhibitions in Rome, America, Canada, even in Russia, and there were foreign collectors, though we don’t know much about them. In New York Miklós Müller purchased the artist’s works and has lent several to the exhibition. But it was not enough. Kazovsky could not break into the international art circulation. After his death, around 2009-2010 we planned to stage a commemorative exhibition in the Collegium Hungaricum in Berlin. Berlin would have been an appropriate location, since the city is really receptive to multi-culturalism, the issues of freely chosen sexual identity and similar matters, so it would have been possible to find a suitable international medium for him. There were talks about it with Can Togay who ran the institute at the time and who was also known to have been a leading character in the artist’s story, but then the matter petered out.

  The large space on the ground floor in Building A is suitable for spectacular installations, but it can also swallow the artworks.

That became the strongest point of the exhibition. When Krisztina Jerger [co-curator of the exhibition – ed.] and I first went to survey the space we came across a curator’s real nightmare: an enormous, hollow space with lighting from above, with pink shiny marble, arcades and awkward stairs in the middle. Horrible! As we kept walking around I realised that it was actually an ideal space to present El Kazovsky, since his paintings are full of architectonic motifs, like the rows of arcades, stairs and grids that make this space so desolate. In the end we made the whole lot into a monumental El Kazovsky box, since he liked using enclosed spaces: even in paintings where he depicted a desert, confined spaces can be seen. By doing so the whole lot has become dark and mystical. We covered the red marble with black industrial textile up to the top, shaping the fabric into an arched form with the same size as the arcades underneath. We intensified, so to say, the real features of the building by using it as an artificial visual motif, as a decor. The stairs are also covered to make their awkward form disappear, and they have the effect of an independent sculptural unit. In one corner we reconstructed the set of the performance Dzhan Panopticon staged at a 1995 exhibition in the Kunsthalle, and we erected the giant dog Róbert Alföldi commissioned him to make for the National Theatre. The whole exhibition is divided into 19 rather didactically numbered units of subject matters. The exhibition guide and map help you find your way, but I think it is understandable without them. Part of the concept is that the exhibition is full of the artist’s own texts and sentence fragments, and they closely join the images since he constantly encompassed and commented on his painting with his own language. Text and image for him formed an organic unit. He actually had a phrase: “I have language flowing in my blood vessels”. Kazovsky was highly educated, loved and was able to speak very well, and that had to be presented in the exhibition.

  You have said that the oeuvre is uniform. How did you manage to divide it up?

Indeed he found an issue in the 1970s and remained faithful to that throughout life: he circled round his own mythology and confined world, going round them as in a treadmill. There are actually no periods, and presenting the stylistic differences does not lead us far. I have a comparison which may answer your question. When you spread out iron fillings evenly on a table wherever you put your hand you’ll find the same material. If you want to divide it you must put a few strong magnets on the table, which attract the material. El Kazovsky’s oeuvre is such: if I want to present it well I must find something strongly ‘magnetic’ which can ‘attract’ the artworks. I originally thought of 7-8 such magnetic notions, but I could not use them consistently a number of times because, although they seemed correct at first, when I began making them work they turned out not to be. Fetish is one that has remained. He had an extremely strong aptitude for fetishising. He created idols of what was or what he made important. He could make a fetish of almost everything. For example, his David Bowie relics – LP covers, posters, newspaper cuttings and cinema tickets – are displayed in a room. He collected the relics of the adored pop star as a teenage girl. For some reason he fell in love with this punky, a bit feminine but aggressive, violent and masculine figure, and collected stuff about him obsessively. Thirty-two teddy bears that he also collected as a fetish are exhibited, but several hundred kilos of pebbles accumulated in her apartment are not. For example, many thousand – assembled together stretching for several metres – cards remain in his estate. As a tourist fetishist he bought cards everywhere; ten, twenty or forty of a monument. They seem not to have been touched again, but however many times he returned to a place he kept buying them.

  It could be called obsession, although that is not an art historical or aesthetical concept.

But it is a theme of his painting and especially of the panopticons, which were about creating and then demolishing an idol. There were films which he held in high regard and watched some forty times: Visconti’s Rocco and his Brothers and Ludwig, Fassbinder’s Querelle and Jarman’s Caravaggio. He knew them by heart and there were scenes he especially liked. He once said: “I like sitting in the first row in a cinema, to be in the film.” Therefore we arranged a cinema room, we bought three minutes each from his four favourite films and they are shown on the full wall-size screen, and a traditional row of cinema seats was installed 1.5 metres from the screen. I primarily wanted to represent the fetishised relationship and it is secondary what the projected film or extract is. The desire for totalising is the point. In order that he could fetishise, he first lends energy to the thing, which then redevolves on him – this is the point of this relationship. It has some kind of dialectics: the actor who transmits energy also endures the power of the idol. Kazovsky was blessed with incredible energy and vitality. He wasn’t lonely, anti-social or autistic. On the contrary, he was hyper-social, hyper-communicative and very open, but a real steamroller, a dominant male. I tell you an example of what did not come about. I also thought that his private mythology, the motifs such as the swan, cypress and the antique torso can be taken in parts as in a dictionary and we could develop an El Kazovsky dictionary from them. Let’s look for works, thirty images, paintings, graphic works and sketches with the swan, load them in a cloud and indicate where else they appear in cultural history, and let us develop it into an iconographic handbook. Meanwhile, I realised that was not right, something did not work. After all, Kazovsky was not interested in the strata of meaning of symbols or how deeply they were ingrained in cultural history. He was highly educated, but an educational matrix does not help us understand what the function of making this iconography was for him. The technical circumstances, which did not allow us to compile the works created with different techniques, since they cannot be lit with the same intensity of light, helped let the idea go. Otherwise, he did not work by creating separate worlds in each work but painted in waves, 5-6 versions of a type of image in various sizes and colours. But these groups were terribly strong. A painting in itself tells less than a series of similar configurations, the metamorphoses of a type. The works are more intensive when they are next to each other and together than when individual. That is why I am not afraid of the high number of exhibited artworks: you don’t need to view each, they are not even displayed such that they can be examined comfortably.

  We have talked about the rejected concepts. Which have been realised in the end?

There was a ‘primeval event’, a meeting of love – the material documents of which are displayed in an independent unit – which he experienced as the highest level of a heavenly state. He pushed himself into this unrequited love and for 30 years celebrated that meeting of 15 January 1975 on the occasions of the panopticons. At these times he would write the date with the initials C.T. on his arm. In the estate we found a 78-page letter handwritten four years after the primeval meeting, which he did not send in the end. So that whole enormous oeuvre came about as a compensation for a banal event in his youth. The central metaphor of this oeuvre is the cast shadow which appears in all his pictures. It is a meaningful visual index, since only what is present can cast a shadow. There is an ancient myth asserting that painting is born from the spirit of love. In Pliny’s short story the lover leaves for ever, but his shadow that his lover traced with torchlight on the last night replaces him. El Kazovsky regarded something as existing that did not really exist, but he built an enormous, compensatory oeuvre on it. It is not accidental that the only art historical movement that “affected” him was surrealism, since to put it simply their problem in presentation was how something which is not real can be provided with the strength of reality. Several artists including Magritte, Dalí, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy and Chirico used cast shadow. Something is ‘present’ but the mystery is transient – the shadow indicated the power of time. It is a meaningful relation and one could write about the relationship between El Kazovsky and surrealism. It is the only avant-garde movement which cannot be defined in terms of form because it does not think on the basis of art historical references but exists outside. Surrealists did not work on ‘artistic’ problems which they could develop further. Neither ‘autonomous’ art as such, nor art history as such interested them or El Kazovsky: that is why he does not have ‘predecessors’. Although he fetishised István Farkas and György Román, and was enthusiastic about their works, their painting did not ‘influence’ his.

  You have chosen varied ways of installation. What was the aim?

The exhibition is not only, and not primarily, an exhibition of artworks in a traditional sense. This makes the somewhat provocative gesture from the aspect of contemporary art understandable, namely we have built into a big room a smaller room that can be completely walked around, with its own entrance. It is a ‘white cube’ with only four paintings with labels traditionally hung on the walls as it should be – while no traditional labels appear throughout. The installation points out the classic gallery space as at an object and I hope it suggests that El Kazovsky’s painting can certainly be viewed as pure art, rendering it independent of sexual and gender connotations, the personal history, the Russian roots, fetishism, punks, and any other contexts.