As a response to the removal of the Lukacs statue and other enforced erasures by the Hungarian government, Zsuzsanna began to experiment with the image of the statue through an iterative artistic project. What follows is a list and image of each installation and a longer essay on the project.
Zsuzsanna Varga-Szegedi’s Artistic Investigations of the Lukács Story
An Essay by Emily Shoyer
Interested in the erasure of the Lukács legacy from collective memory, Varga-Szegedi began artistically experimenting with projecting images of his statue throughout the summer of 2019.
“Each time I show this project, another Lukács aspect gets highlighted. Each location is different but connected…neither I, the creator, nor the work, or the location can exist isolated from the issues of our society. It’s always location and it’s always an ideation of the previous, not linear, instead branching, unfolding, constantly becoming.” – Zsuzsanna Varga-Szegedi
The Lukács story has been particularly generative for Boston-based interdisciplinary artist Zsuzsanna Varga-Szegedi. Prior to the removal of the Lukács statue in 2017, Varga-Szegedi had been artistically thinking through the government’s attempts to erase the memory of communism in her native Hungary, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. As she argues, the current Hungarian regime uses “the negative effect of a failed communist era…to validate the act of erasing everything in the way of national sovereignty, including progressive thinking and [any] intellectual legacy that might interfere with [their] political goals.” The artist first projected the image of the removed Imre Varga statue of Lukács on the facade of the Boston Center for the Arts for In the Words, In the Bones, curated by Magdalena Moskalewicz (May 23 – July 21, 2019). The exhibition also featured work by Marina Leybishkis and Nyugen E. Smith, and considered postcolonial and postcomunist identities as grounded in both language and the body. As Moskalewicz writes in the exhibition catalogue:
Varga-Szegedi brings back the statue in Boston, not so much in a direct reconstruction, but as a personal reaction. She creates 3D scans for a printed head modeled after photographs of the Lukács’ monument combined with her own gestures, with data undergoing a series of digital and manual mediation. The artist also projects the image of the Hungarian statue on the façade of Boston Center for the Arts, offering Lukács’ ghost-like presence in a very different urban public space. New technologies give Zsuzanna Varga-Szegedi the power to symbolically fight the erasure. What interests her is identity beyond the nationalistic calibration of belonging.
Struck by the melancholic aesthetic of Imre Varga’s statue since her childhood in Hungary, the artist was particularly intrigued by the lingering impact of the aesthetic even in a totally different locale. As she writes, “I was so conditioned to the style of Imre Varga in Hungary that I needed to see one of his displaced figures to understand the otherwise subtle socio-political commentary he so clearly had been depicting all along.” For the BCA exhibit, Varga-Szegedi used internet imagery and photographs she took on a 2017 visit to Hungary right after the statue’s removal to create the projection and a clay bust of Lukács’ head. After the BCA opening, in May of 2019, Varga-Szegedi travelled to Budapest, desiring to achieve a full 3D scan of the original statue which was removed to the Imre Varga Collection. At this time she also interviewed Lukács’ grandson. After her visit to the Imre Varga Collection she reminicised, “It wasn’t that hard to locate the missing György Lukács statue. It’s not even the location itself that matters, the physical space that this bronze philosopher takes up, since it’s peacefully standing here at the garden of [the] Imre Varga Museum among his other masterpieces. ‘He’s safe here,’ said one of the guards.”
From Budapest, the artist traveled to Tel Aviv, Israel to install (de)Fault Lines: Michal Geva and Zsusanna Szegedi, curated by Ofra Harnam at Maya Gallery in June of 2019. For (de)Fault Lines, Varga-Szegedi projected an image of the head of the censored and abandoned sculpture on clay based on the 3D scan she took in Budapest. As Harnam wrote in the exhibition text, “the scan of his head is incomplete and leaves a crack or fracture in his skull.” By warily restoring the head of the homeless monument onto a piece of clay, the artist points to the importance of restoring the Lukács legacy in the minds of people, but not necessarily physically to St. Stephen’s Park.
Upon seeing the statue’s aesthetic decontextualized internationally through her projections, the artist became curious about its melancholic style. Following the opening of (de)Fault Lines in Tel Aviv, Varga-Szegedi travelled back to Budapest to interview Tamas Varga, the son of Imre Varga, who is also an artist, and actually worked on the sculpture of Imre Nagy. Their conversation illuminated Varga-Szegedi’s understanding of Hungarian aesthetics. From Budapest, the artist traveled to Rome where she experimented with a low resolution independent projection of the Lukács statue. In August of 2019, she attempted another independent projection of the Ghost of Lukács in Paris.
In September of 2019, Varga-Szegedi was invited to participate in an artist-run residency on the small island of Krapanj in Dalmatia. There, she met Tibor Weiner Sennyey, a researcher and author on the work and life of Béla Hamvas (1897-1968). A Hungarian philosopher and writer who focused on spirituality, academic accessibility and uniting global worldviews, Hamvas was an intellectual rival of Lukács who was banned from publishing by the Communist regime from 1948 until his death in 1968. The life and work of Hamvas has been posthumously celebrated by the Orban regime. Inspired by the tension between their research subjects, and the language we lack to hold productive debates, Varga-Szegedi and Sennyey projected their work, overlaying the two different world views on top of each other. Eating, swimming and conversing throughout the residency enabled them to meaningfully discuss their differing perspectives, culminating in the spontaneous projection collaboration.
Following the residency program, in October of 2019 the artist was invited to Gratz, Austria as a Lukács researcher for a festival in his celebration. There she was able to meet and brainstorm with other Lukács experts, artists and thinkers. After the festival, Varga-Szegedi travelled to Vienna to install György Lukács by Zsuzsanna Varga-Szegedi at 12-14 Contemporary Art Gallery. As the site of Lukács’ exile, the projection was particularly poignant in Vienna. The exhibition text explains, “Acknowledging the power of creativity in exile, the use of new technologies is not merely artistic expression, but also a vital tool.” The projection in Vienna recalled not only the creativity Lukács himself enjoyed in exile, but also his theory of transcendental homelessness – that we can find home anywhere through philosophy. At the moment of the Vienna iteration, Varga-Szegedi herself was determining where to call home so the texts that she overlaid on top of the projection from Lukács’ writings on Transcendental Homelessness took on a personal tone.
The most recent exhibition of Ghost of Lukács opened on August 14, 2020 as part of AREA CODE Art Fair in Salem, Massachusetts at Salem State University, O’Keefe Sports Complex. The haunting image of the Lukács statue in the United States in 2020 took on a new meaning and a new format. Varga-Szegedi overlaid the projection of the statue with a scrolling series of text taken from Lukács’ Soul and Form (1908). As she describes, “so his ghost is looking over and asking heavy questions. But more specifically, [as] a response to our current moment of abuse … police brutality and the contemplation of death and our roles as humans living together…” Today in the United States, a movement yearning for reconciliation and asserting the value of Black and other marginalized lives is toppling monuments to historic perpetrators of enslavement and mass violence. As we question the valorization of symbols of nationally sanctioned violence in the US, Varga-Szegedi questions the erasure of symbols of communism and what the removal of such symbols imply. She queries:
How to reconstruct the body of a historic figure, while giving room for the expressiveness of my own body making it a generation and a continent away from his presence. Because, is it enough to put back what was removed? As soon as a statue was made of Lukács, a symbol was created, I’m interested in what that symbol is now, and what it could be. It is the objecthood of the symbol and its removal of this symbol that my work reflects on…How can reparation occur when we’re still trying to diagnose and articulate the problem. How does one represent that argonaut?
These same questions can be asked about the symbols we create through monuments to confederate leaders, enslavers and colonizers. Their erasure and absence are a form of symbolic reparation but have we truly diagnosed and articulated the larger deep-rooted problems at hand? As Russell Rickford argues, in toppling the statues the demonstrates are “reclaiming history. And in so doing, they may help stimulate a greater intellectual and social awakening.” Lukács himself advocated for an intellectual and social awakening through his theory, but today Orban’s government wants to erase that past from Hungarian public discourse, symbolized by the removal of his statue. What symbols of our past can or should we stomach erasing?
One passage of text overlaid on the projected melancholic form of the statue reads, “the great problem of human beings living together [is] the problem of what one human being can mean in the life of another.” We affect each other’s lives and this is the tension of being human. Varga-Szegedi does not attempt to answer for this tension, but rather encourages us to softly mull it over through the breathing, ever-changing and growing Ghost of Lukács project.