György Szegő

Model

The Na­tional Sa­lons of the last four years, themed on ar­chi­tec­ture, fine arts, pho­tog­ra­phy and ap­plied arts, fol­lowed the well-trod­den path of Műcsarnok’s ex­hi­bi­tions. They at­tracted promi­nent at­ten­tion from the pro­fes­sion, so much so that the ar­chi­tec­tural Salon was even vis­ited by se­nior mem­bers of the UIA (In­ter­na­tional Union of Ar­chi­tects). The gen­eral pub­lic had shown in­creas­ing in­ter­est from one year to the next, and the 2017 Salon drew in some 25,000 vis­i­tors. The theme of this year’s Salon is liv­ing folk art: a branch of con­tem­po­rary vi­sual arts that is some­what side-lined in the of­fi­cial in­sti­tu­tions of art de­spite its con­tin­u­ous in­ter­ac­tion with the fine arts. Liv­ing folk art is in­te­grally linked to the so­cial sci­ences; for an ex­tended pe­riod in the 20th cen­tury it was even as­so­ci­ated with the pre­vail­ing ide­olo­gies, thus rep­re­sent­ing a kind of dan­ger zone of the arts, if you like, but one of its trends – which was ac­tu­ally op­posed to the of­fi­cial ide­ol­ogy of the time – pro­vided the op­por­tu­nity to break out of the lim­it­ing con­fines. This is best ex­em­pli­fied by the dance house and folk ap­plied arts move­ments as well as by the schools of or­ganic ar­chi­tec­ture that acted against the ide­ol­ogy of so­cial­ism and scored a strik­ing suc­cess, serv­ing as mod­els even today.

The Műcsarnok, a venue for ex­hibit­ing the vi­sual arts, ven­tured into a brand new realm by invit­ing liv­ing folk art within its walls; for this rea­son, the cu­ra­tor was se­lected through a re­stricted call for ten­ders. When these lines are being writ­ten, the win­ner, Katalin Beszprémy, and her col­leagues have been doing the prepara­tory work for the ex­hi­bi­tion for six months. Hav­ing re-read the sub­mit­ted ten­der pro­jects, hav­ing re­con­sid­ered the mu­tu­ally ben­e­fi­cial ex­changes of ideas with the mem­bers of the jury1 and think­ing back to my own per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ences, I feel I must list some of the processes that have led up to the Salon of 2018.

The first one con­cerns the pre­sent: in the cat­a­logue of last year’s Salon I called at­ten­tion to the in­creas­ing role of AI-dri­ven ro­bot­ics pos­ing a grow­ing threat to what can be re­garded as one of the foun­da­tions of our civil­i­sa­tion: the hand­i­craft tra­di­tion. The works of ap­plied arts and de­sign ex­hib­ited at the 2017 Salon raised is­sues that were also at the focus of the con­fer­ence (or­gan­ised by the Re­search In­sti­tute of Art The­ory and Method­ol­ogy of the Hun­gar­ian Acad­emy of Sci­ences) that sup­ple­mented the show in the Műcsarnok. Sev­eral pre­sen­ters spoke about the preser­va­tion of the hand­i­craft tra­di­tion as an epochal task. One of them, art his­to­rian András Szilágyi B., said the fol­low­ing: “At the dawn (or al­ready height) of the post-in­dus­trial age, we wit­ness a re­turn to the most fun­da­men­tal, vir­tu­ally on­to­log­i­cal ques­tions. What is art? What is a prod­uct? What is joy? What is hap­pi­ness? In what areas and through what ac­tiv­ity do peo­ple find ful­fil­ment? What is last­ing and what is tem­po­rary? What is con­tent, what is form, and how are the two re­lated? What is the true essence of man and ma­chine? Can ma­chines per chance store con­tent cre­ated by peo­ple »more ef­fi­ciently« and by so doing ex­tract this con­tent and deal a fatal blow to the whole­ness of our Hu­man­ity? Can we talk about knowl­edge avail­able to all, »open source« knowl­edge if you like, and do peo­ple’s fil­ter­ing role, tal­ent, »God-given« abil­i­ties, per­sonal re­la­tion­ships and en­vi­ron­ment mat­ter? Where are the bound­aries of a com­mu­nity? Where are the bound­aries of gen­res? Can we as­sign value to mis­takes and im­per­fec­tions? Where do we draw the line be­tween im­per­fect or »home-made« and

pro­fes­sional or, what is more, »per­fect« works? When dis­cussing these is­sues, we are not merely try­ing to es­tab­lish the lim­its of de­sign and ap­plied arts but we are rais­ing the car­di­nal ques­tions of our own human ex­is­tence if you will.” 2 This as­pect of our cre­ativ­ity forms the back­bone of the folk art Salon of 2018 and is high­lighted by its title (KÉZ-MŰ-REMEK); in­deed, its theme ex­plores the above ques­tions in the di­men­sion of com­mu­nal liv­ing, plac­ing com­mu­nity at its core. The 2018 ex­hi­bi­tion also em­pha­sises that cre­ativ­ity de­vel­ops per­son­al­ity and helps us to ex­pe­ri­ence the full­ness of our­selves, which is also at the heart of Mihály Csíkszent­mihályi’s flow the­ory. Csíkszent­mihályi be­lieves that “...​flow in­spires cre­ativ­ity and out­stand­ing per­for­mance. Un­der­ly­ing the cul­tural evo­lu­tion is an urge for ever more com­plex abil­i­ties to be de­vel­oped and the level of joy to be main­tained. This is what in­spires in­di­vid­u­als and cul­tures to de­velop into in­creas­ingly com­plex en­ti­ties. The suc­cess­ful arrange­ment of dif­fer­ent ex­pe­ri­ences is re­warded with the en­ergy that keeps evo­lu­tion in mo­tion and it paves the way for our off­spring, who we can imag­ine only vaguely from where we stand, but who will be wiser and more com­plex than we are, and who will cer­tainly take our place one day.” 3

The other an­tecedent I must men­tion here is the long, com­pre­hen­sive process of folk cul­ture re­search. It is al­most his­tory by now but I trust that it is an un­fin­ished, con­tin­u­ous past. At this point, let us take a brief look at some defin­ing fig­ures and land­marks. Chrono-log­i­cally the first such mile­stone was the five-vol­ume work The Art of the Hun­gar­ian Na­tion (1907-1922), p ub­lished b y a rt h is­to­rian D ezső Mal­onyai b ased o n t he ma­te­ri­als he col­lected with his stu­dents, artists and teach­ers about rural con­struc­tion meth­ods, houses, in­te­ri­ors, or­na­men­tal art and folk cos­tumes; this rich the­saurus serves as a valu­able source even for today’s re­searchers. Al­most at the same time, in 1906, Zoltán Ko-dály and Béla Bartók’s first folk music pub­li­ca­tion Hun­gar­ian Folk Songs saw the light of day. Bartók turned to folk music in 1905 and started using the el­e­ments of folk music in his folk­lore imag­i­naire com­po­si­tions from the 1910s. His writ­ings about Hun­gar­ian folk music, its in­flu­ence and new Hun­gar­ian music were pub­lished from the 1920s and 1930s si­mul­ta­ne­ously with his mu­si­cal pieces in which he com­bined clas­si­cal and folk music tra­di­tions. His idea of draw­ing ‘only from a pure source’ has ex­ten­sively in­fused not only Hun­gar­ian but also Hun­gar­ian art the­ory ever since. Zoltán Kodály pre­sented his Plan of the New Uni­ver­sal Col­lec­tion of Folk­songs to the Kisfaludy So­ci­ety in 1913. In the 1920s and 1930s, his Psalmus Hun­gar­i­cus, János Háry, Dances of Galánta, The Spin­ning Room and The Pea­cock earned him recog­ni­tion both in Hun­gary and abroad, thus pop­u­lar­is­ing Hun­gar­ian folk music world­wide. Kodály opened a new era in Hun­gar­ian choir cul­ture too: today the Kodály method is noth­ing short of a global brand.

While col­lect­ing and sci­en­tific re­search were car­ried out by promi­nent schol­ars, their stu­dents also set off on the path of com­bin­ing folk music and moder­nity. A group of stu­dents at the Tech­ni­cal Uni­ver­sity, “Fi­at­alok [Youth]”, – who also par­tic­i­pated in Malo-nyai’s col­lect­ing work – formed a new school on the foun­da­tions of Hun­gar­ian folk art, which rose to promi­nence in an in­ter­na­tional com­par­i­son too. The great­est ef­forts aimed at sal­vaging the fad­ing folk tra­di­tions by using them in the ar­chi­tec­ture of the new cen­tury were made by Károly Kós, Béla Lajta, István Medgyaszay and Ede Toroczkai Wigand. Folk music was sys­tem­at­i­cally recorded in the Pátria se­ries, launched in the in­ter­war pe­riod with the par­tic­i­pa­tion of folk music re­searcher László La­jtha. La­jtha’s ac­tiv­i­tiess in the area of folk music sci­ence also ex­tended to folk mu­si­cal in­stru­ments and folk dance re­search; he was even one of the co-founders of the In­ter­na­tional Folk Music Coun­cil in 1947. An­other ini­tia­tive which was sim­i­lar in na­ture but even­tu­ally grew into a wider, real folk move­ment was called ‘Gyöngyösbokréta’, or­gan­ised by Béla Paulini be­tween 1931 and 1944 with the aim of fa­mil­iaris­ing the pub­lic with the fes­tive as­pects of peas­ant cul­ture. The var­i­ous en­sem­bles of the Bokréta (Posy) As­so­ci­a­tion (es­tab­lished in 1935) would hold a week of per­for­mances dur­ing the Saint Stephen’s Day fes­tiv­i­ties of 20th Au­gust in Bu­dapest’s Mu­nic­i­pal The­atre (today Erkel The­atre). The move­ment was dis­banded in 1948 and from the 1950s on­wards the ac­tiv­i­ties of folk en­sem­bles aimed at pre­serv­ing rural tra­di­tions were an at­tempt to fill the gap, al­though they no longer had di­rect ties with life in the vil­lages.

In the 1950s and 1960s, two re­searchers of the Mu­seum of Ethnog­ra­phy, Edit Fél and Tamás Hofer, doc­u­mented the peas­ant tra­di­tions of Átány, a vil­lage in Heves County, ear­marked for de­struc­tion. They pre­sented three thou­sand ob­jects and eight thou­sand pho­tographs to the mu­seum. How­ever, the thou­sands of pages of re­search ma­te­r­ial was shelfed and was only avail­able in Ger­man and Eng­lish pub­li­ca­tions for decades, as it pre­sented a vi­able and co­her­ent model that would have served as an al­ter­na­tive to the col­lec­tivi­sa­tion en­forced on the rural pop­u­la­tion at the time. Hence, Átány be­came one of the most fully doc­u­mented vil­lages in the world in mod­ern his­tory. In the end, the ma­te­r­ial was pub­lished in three vol­umes in Hun­gar­ian after the change in the po­lit­i­cal sys­tem in Hun­gary: in 1997, 2011 and 2016,4 and the sum­mary of the fifty-year his­tory of the re­search was pre­sented to the pub­lic at an ex­cel­lent ex­hi­bi­tion at the Mu­seum of Ethnog­ra­phy in 2009.5 The Átány pro­ject shows a close-knit com­mu­nity whose every­day life and per­for­mance were steeped in local val­ues. Back then, local tra­di­tion and cus­toms held gen­er­a­tions to­gether and helped their cul­tural self-preser­va­tion. Wit­ness­ing the trou­bles of our con­tem­po­rary world, the need for a local ap­proach – com­bin­ing global think­ing with the preser­va­tion and re­vival of local tra­di­tions – arises more and more fre­quently, sug­gest­ing that the self-sus­tain­ing model is far from being un­vi­able; in fact, it might be the key to a suc­cess­ful fu­ture. The great­est ben­e­fit of the Átány re­search be­sides the com­pre­hen­sive doc­u­men­ta­tion it de­liv­ers is that it ex­plored the con­nec­tions be­tween the sym­bols and ob­ject usage in the rel­a­tively closed, co­her­ent cul­ture of the vil­lage.

While tra­di­tional vil­lage cul­ture was dri­ven into the back­ground in the 1960s and 1970s, these decades saw the birth of work­shops teach­ing folk hand­i­craft tech­niques; rural com­mu­ni­ties were sought out by re­searchers as well as by radio and tele­vi­sion ed­i­tors who fea­tured them in pop­u­lar se­ries. It was ap­par­ent al­ready at the con­cep­tion of the process that there was some­thing point­ing be­yond a sci­en­tific in­ter­est: ethno­g­ra­phers often did not only ob­serve the ob­jects from a schol­arly and artis­tic point of view but crossed over into the pre­sent with the in­tent of find­ing ways to pre­serve and fos­ter liv­ing folk art. This ob­vi­ously ne­ces­si­tated great sen­si­tiv­ity and a timely ap­proach. The issue of main­tain­ing a sci­en­tific dis­tance while at the same time ‘liv­ing in­side the tra­di­tion’ was re­peat­edly ad­dressed in the above-men­tioned ethno­graphic re­search pro­jects, and nowa­days it is a fun­da­men­tal ques­tion; hence the spe­cial rel­e­vance of this year’s Folk Art Salon. The com­pre­hen­sive ex­hi­bi­tion of liv­ing folk art and the pro­fes­sional dis­course built around it pro­vides the op­por­tu­nity to clar­ify over­lap­ping, at times vaguely de­fined con­cepts.

The above brief out­line of the his­tor­i­cal an­tecedents has taken us to per­son­ally ex­pe­ri­enced folk art. In the 1960s and 1970s, many peo­ple turned to folk art as a re­volt against the ide­o­log­i­cal pres­sure im­posed on them, as a ges­ture em­brac­ing their own cul­ture as op­posed to the ‘pro­le­tar­ian In­ter­na­tionale’. Re­main­ing under the con­trol of the po­lit­i­cal power and en­joy­ing its sup­port, the bour­geon­ing in­ter­est in folk art lost its po­lit­i­cal over­tones and evolved into a gen­uine move­ment aimed at pre­serv­ing value. Peter Ko­r­niss’s pi­o­neer­ing pho­to­graphic se­ries of Tran­syl­va­nia doc­u­mented the dig­nity of a thus far un­known/si­lenced cul­ture with dra­matic power. Dur­ing their trav­els in Tran­syl­va­nia, Fer­enc Sebő and his friends dis­cov­ered a liv­ing mu­si­cal trea­sure rich in ar­chaic mo­tifs. The story of the no­madic gen­er­a­tion, a move­ment build­ing a bridge into the pre­sent, is recorded in József Zel­nik’s vol­ume.6 Due to the close­ness/dis­tance rep­re­sented by these forty years, I be­lieve the fol­low­ing sen­tence rings truer than a lex­i­cal sum­mary would: the no­madic gen­er­a­tion was about the re­dis­cov­ery of folk art, its fes­ti­vals, dances, folk music, hand­i­craft work­shops and so-called build­ing camps. Dur­ing the 1970s, young peo­ple came into phys­i­cal close­ness with the un­tainted music of Tran­syl­van­ian vil­lages and formed per­sonal re­la­tion­ships reach­ing across the po­lit­i­cally im­posed bor­ders. “These young peo­ple were led to the au­then­tic rus­tic music guided by the finest schol­ars: Zoltán Kallós, Pál Péter Domokos, Erzsébet Török, György Mar­tin, Imre Olsvay (...) And when Gyuri (György) Ilka from Szék played at the Hun­gar­ian Acad­emy of Sci­ences in the 1970s, his music was recorded on tape; what a dif­fer­ent mi­lieu that was (…) com­pared with the one in the 1940s! … The music of the Hun­gar­ian peas­ants, their dance music could be heard once again, tak­ing its place among rock and roll and the other dance music gen­res.” 7 And there are many more – now dis­eased – Tran­syl­van­ian mu­si­cians in the pho­tos, who handed down the vil­lage tra­di­tions to the ‘no­madic gen­er­a­tion’. One of the most in­flu­en­tial mas­ters of the ‘no­mads’, Zoltán Kallós, has sadly passed away, at the age of 92, at the time these lines were being writ­ten.

So who be­longed to the no­madic gen­er­a­tion? Turn­ing the pages of Zel­nik’s book and re­call­ing my own mem­o­ries, I will at­tempt to list the lead­ing fig­ures of the move­ment: Sándor Csoóri, Béla Hal­mos, Fer­enc Sebő, Ilona Budai and the Vízöntő band. Laura Faragó, Éva Fer­encz, Sándor Tímár, Gergely Koltai, Gábor Czakó, Emil Gaul, Péter Éri, Mihály Sipos, Zoltán Farkas, Zoltán Zsuráfszky. The Boróka band, the Muzsikás band, the Bihar Dance En­sem­ble, the Téka band, Márta Sebestyén, the Mákvirág band, the Jánosi band, and the Fanyűvő band. And let me share a quote by Zel­nik again: “…The real spir­i­tual leader of the dance-house move­ment was Sándor Csoóri. He was a kind of wiz­ard on the Hun­gar­ian cul­tural scene of the sev­en­ties, bal­anc­ing be­tween op­por­tu­ni­ties and im­pos­si­bil­i­ties with an ex­quis­ite skill (…) ac­com­pa­nied by his es­say­is­tic think­ing and lin­guis­tic so­phis­ti­ca­tion. All of this in­spired by such greats as László Németh and At­tila József and »cor­rupted« by the sur­re­al­ists.8 In his rec­ol­lec­tions, he quoted a state­ment once made by Csoóri: “Cul­ture – whether folk of high cul­ture – has the power to build com­mu­ni­ties at all times. Wher­ever it man­i­fests it­self, it re­veals the true na­ture of progress, which is not lin­ear ad­vance­ment but ful­fil­ment in every di­rec­tion. It is, there­fore, our duty to live at the cen­tre of time, at the cen­tre of a na­tion’s spirit…” 9

The two vol­umes of Zel­nik’s Gen­er­a­tion of No­mads fo­cused on the ac­tiv­ity of the work­shops of the Young Folk Artists’ Stu­dio and the work­shops of the Makovecz school of young ar­chi­tects in Tokaj and Visegrád, where old-new val­ues were cre­ated. Some ex­am­ples of these camps re­viv­ing the tra­di­tion of folk crafts should be men­tioned here: Fadd-Dom­bori, Csillebérc and Bal­a­ton­szepezd or Velem, where István Vidák and Mari (Mária) Nagy, Katalin Landgráf, Győző Szatyor, Piroska Székely, Erzsébet Rácz, Antal Rácz and oth­ers built yurts, kilns, log houses and wicker-abodes. And let us not for­get about György Csete and the Pécs Group, where Ildikó Csete, Gyöngyvér Blazsek and other artists di­rectly sup­planted the use of ma­te­ri­als and tech­niques from folk art into con­tem­po­rary tex­tile and fur­ni­ture de­sign. Mas­ter ar­chi­tects Csete and Makovecz cre­ated a school, on the foun­da­tions of which new life was breathed into the or­ganic ar­chi­tec­tural tra­di­tion in the decades to come. It was not only the con­struc­tion tech­nol­ogy that was re­vived since Makovecz ex­pected his vil­lage houses to be built by the mem­bers of the com­mu­nity he de­signed them for and even co­or­di­nated these pro­jects. Thus, the com­mu­ni­ties or­gan­ised around Imre Makovecz’s vil­lage houses did not only con­struct their houses in sum­mer camps but in situ, in their own vil­lages. The shared mo­ments – some fes­tive, some mun­dane – are tes­ta­ment that vil­lage com­mu­ni­ties be­lieved to have sunk into obliv­ion can be re­born in mod­ern times. The stu­dents of Makovecz and Csete scat­tered around the coun­try: those who were mem­bers of the Wan­der­ers’ School of the Károly Kós As­so­ci­a­tion did so out of their own choice, while the force­fully dis­banded Pécs Group had no say in the mat­ter. But they have all sown the seeds.

Born out of the mu­tual in­spi­ra­tion of folk hand­i­crafts – left for­got­ten so many times in the past –, the in­sti­tu­tions of a re­viv­ing folk cul­ture, and sci­ence, the Salon of 2018 seeks to find the way to con­tinue a tra­di­tion that started at the turn of the 19th and 20th cen­turies and was car­ried on by the move­ments of the 1960s and 1970s, and to iden­tify points of con­nec­tion be­tween the pre­sent time and liv­ing folk art. To con­clude, let me cite the motto of the Átány vol­ume, pub­lished in Hun­gar­ian in 2017:

“When coun­try folk talk about their na­tive land, they will sooner or later end up talk­ing about their place of birth, their »im­me­di­ate home-land«: a vil­lage, a yard, a kitchen and then a room with two win­dows where they once learned their mother tongue. In other words, they in­stinc­tively re­live the his­tory of a word in re­verse, savour­ing the an­cient mo­ment when home and home-land meant one and the same thing.” (Gyula Illyés)10

 

1 Those in­vited to par­tic­i­pate in the ten­der: Katalin Beszprémy, Anikó Fehér, Zoltán G. Szabó, Csaba Jakab, Péter Lágler, Mrs Miklós Pál, Miklós Su­lyok, Béla Szerényi, István Vidák – Mari Nagy. Pres­i­dent of the jury: Fer­enc Sebő; mem­bers of the jury: István Csu­por, György Fekete, Katalin Keserü, György Szegő.
2 András Szilágyi B.: De­sign – A fo­ga­lom evolúciója a posztin­dusztriális ko­r­ban [De­sign – the Evo­lu­tion of the Con­cept in the Post-in­dus­trial Age]. Speech at the con­fer­ence Fo­gal­mak és összefüggések az iparművészetben és ter­vezőművészet­ben [Con­cepts and Con­nec­tions in Ap­plied Arts and De­sign] held in the Műcsarnok on 4 May 2017.
3 Mihály Csíkszent­mihályi: Flow – Az áram­lat. A tökéletes él­mény pszi­chológiája [Flow – The Psy­chol­ogy of the Per­fect Ex­pe­ri­ence]. Akadémiai Kiadó, 1997.
4 Edit Fél – Tamás Hofer: Arányok és mértékek a paraszti gazdál­kodásban (I., Bal­assi Kiadó, 1997) „Mi ko­r­rekt parasz­tok…” Ha­gyományos élet Átányon (II., Ko­rall Kiadó, 2011) A parasztem­ber sz­erszámai – Átány község népra­jzi monográfiájának I. kötete (III., Nemzetstratégiai Kutatóintézet, 2016) [Scales and Measu­res in Peas­ant Farm­ing (I) “Proper Peas­ants…” Tra­di­tional Life in Átány (II) A Peas­ant’s Tools – Vol­ume I of the Ethno­grao­hic Monog­ra­phy of the Vil­lage of Átány (III).
5 Egy falu az országban: Átány [A Vil­lage in the Coun­try: Átány]. Népra­jzi Múzeum [Mu­seum of Ethnog­ra­phy], 18 No­vem­ber 2009 – 13 June 2010. Di­rected by: György Balázs, Péter Gra­nasztói, György Máté.
6 József Zel­nik: Ne­gyven év után [Forty Years Later], MMA [Hun­garian Acad­emy of Arts], 2012. Reprint of Nomád Nemzedék [No­madic Gen­er­a­tion] reprint in the sup­ple­ment (pub­lished in 1981with the sup­port of the In­sti­tute of Ethnog­ra­phy, the County Cul­tural Cen­tre of Kecskemét, the József Ka­tona Mu­seum of Kecskemét and the Stu­dio of the Folk Art Stu­dio of the Stu­dio of Young Ce­ramic Artists in Kecskemét, ed. Fer­enc Bodor).
7 Fer­enc Bodor: Parasztzenészekről [Peas­ant Mu­si­cians] in: Nomád nemzedék [No­madic Gen­er­a­tion], ibid.
8 József Zel­nik, op. cit.
9 Sándor Csoóri: Élni az idő közepén [Liv­ing at the Cen­tre of Time] (1971) in: József Zel­nik, op. cit.
10 Edit Fél – Tamás Hofer, op. cit.