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There have been calls from opposition MPs in Parliament for the President of the all-powerful Hungarian Academy of Arts (MMA) to resign, due to controversial comments demanding ‘clear national commitment’ from potential members of the new all-powerful academy and a veiled anti-Semitic jibe against famous Hungarian writer Gyorgy Konrad, the emergence of opposition from within the MMA to the rule of Fekete – an interior designer who won numerous prizes and commissions under communism with a distinctive retro hair style to match his neo-medieval outlook, along with spirited protest actions from the art world, including a memorial ceremony in front of the Mucsarnok/Kunsthalle on 6 December, which the MMA is due to swallow up on 1 January 2013, and at 10am on 10 December a planned Gangnam-style protest demonstration on the front steps of the building.
Last but not least, the campaign Autonomy for Art of Hungary (NEMMA) has a new website with English language content including contact information for protest actions, as well as a statement detailing the key events in the government takeover/makeover of Hungarian contemporary art.
]]>Recent legislative steps in Hungary point towards the authoritarian transformation of the institutional structures and funding system of cultural life, by giving an ultra conservative artist group close to the rightwing government, the Hungarian Academy of Arts, an unassailable position of power. As a result of these decisions, the government has endangered the long term autonomy, professionalism and democratic procedures of Hungarian contemporary art…(more)
Opening speech given at the opening of the screening of Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave at the Kassak Museum in Budapest on 23 November 2012.
]]>“The miners, united, will never be defeated!”
There are three moments to be born in mind when considering Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave.
The first is the original clash between striking miners and the police that took place in the midst of Britain’s bitterest episode of industrial action, which pitted the avant-garde of the worker’s movement, led by neo-Stalinist firebrand Arthur Scargill, against the merciless logic of neo-liberal economics, epitomised by the Iron Lady’s infamous statement that ‘there is no such thing as society.’
The second moment is that of the artist’s reconstruction of the Battle of Orgreave in June 2001 and its place within the remarkable career of Jeremy Deller, from the clever twist the artist gives to the documentary approach, to the complexities of this singular example of participatory performance art.
The third moment is the present, a further 11 years down the line from the re-enactment, with Deller’s work taking on a particular resonance against the backdrop of contemporary protest movements that confront the twisted logic of austerity that presents itself as the only solution to the European debt disaster, as well as very recent attempts to finally get to bottom of what really happened on that fateful mid-80s summer afternoon.
The original ‘Battle of Orgreave’ was a key moment in the cultural and political history of modern Britain, symbolising in its violence the breakdown of the social contract between the forces of law and order and those engaged in strike action. On one side you had a government with a strategy to break the power of the unions by picking a fight with what the Tories referred to as the ‘enemy within’, on the other you had the National Union of Mineworkers led by the notorious Arthur Scargill, who barely hid his own anarcho-syndicalist ambition to bring down the elected government by blocking the supply of coal to the power stations.
The film version of The Battle of Orgreave is comprised of documentary photos of the original events, interviews with participants and politicians, and footage of the reconstruction itself, including the process leading up to the staging of the re-enactment. It is worth noting that the work existed first as a performance watched by those present on the day, then as a film that was broadcast on national television, as a book, and also in the form of a gallery installation with police uniforms and other artefacts from the battle, which was made for the Turner Prize of 2004, which Jeremy Deller won.
Although Deller relied on the skills of professional battle re-enactors, who spent months researching the events of 18 June 1984, using interviews, court testimony and press reports to ensure the maximum historical accuracy of the re-enactment, one third of the re-enactors were actual inhabitants of Orgreave, and many of these had experienced or been scarred by the original events. As a result, the re-enactment was much more passionate and affecting than if the participants had been professional actors or neutral hobbyists for whom this was just one more battle scene to recreate. There is a sense in which the re-enactment provided a way to therapeutically confront the trauma of the original event by revisiting it, and even swapping roles, with many cases of striking miners being asked to play the part of the police for the re-enactment.
As an artwork, the Battle of Orgreave can be distinguished from the wave of re-enactments in contemporary art of the last decade, which involved re-making earlier artistic performances, actions or happenings, typically from the late 60s and early 70s, for audiences and contexts that remained within the circuits and frame of reference of the art world. At the same time, while Deller’s Orgreave project reaches out to the sphere of popular culture, which is certainly a characteristic of his work in general – including projects involving folk culture, popular music and parades – his re-enactment can also be distinguished from attempts in other more political contexts to rerun or remake history in order to change it. At the end of the day, and the end of the film, the police still win over the miners.
It is a remarkable fact that the truth about the Battle of Orgreave is only coming to the surface now, almost three decades after the event, breathing new life into theories voiced in the film that the battle was deliberately staged by the police in order to break the will of the striking miners. One week ago the BBC ran a news report about a new investigation launched into South Yorkshire police for ‘possible assault, perjury, perverting the course of justice and misconduct in a public office’. Central to the investigation is the observation that dozens of police statements after Orgreave contained word-for-word identical passages that were clearly designed to create the impression that the violence was started by the miners.
Part of the fascination of the Battle of Orgreave today lies in its status as the last popular struggle in Britain based on a traditional notion of class. It was an old style industrial conflict, the last gasp of the unionised world of work of the 1970s, a doomed fight for survival of a distinctive British working class culture. Today’s struggles are about equally stark issues of survival in the face of austerity and today’s protesters face an equally ruthless police machinery, but in the era of globalisation and counter-globalisation the forms and agents of protest have visibly changed, and the stubborn figure of the militant working class British miner has entered history.
What remains is the power of the miner’s chant which, corresponding to psychoanalyst and theorist Felix Guattari’s understanding of the refrain, evokes in tuneful repetition the irrepressible emotional truth of the strike: ‘The miners, united, will never be defeated…’ To hear that refrain again, many years after what in retrospect seemed like the inevitable defeat of the divided miners, will bring a lump to the throat of anyone who was touched by the Great Miner’s Strike.
Hard to believe at first, but it seems to be true that Hungary’s second most important art space, the Műcsarnok/Kunsthalle, will find itself from 1st January 2013 under the ownership and control of an ultra conservative arts organisation, the Hungarian Academy of Arts or MMA, which has stealthily been installed as the leading authority for Hungarian art, with its preeminent position written in to the new constitution or Basic Law and bolstered by a huge grant from the government. This coup de force has triggered protest letters and petitions from both private gallerists and the Hungarian branch of AICA, who warn that the move will undo decades of progress towards the integration of Hungarian contemporary art within international circuits.
The political and aesthetic views of the president of the MMA, whose name is Feketeand often also dresses in black, are well symbolised by the fact that he earlier criticised the director of the Műcsarnok for his show Mi a Magyar?/What is Hungarian? for ‘blaspheming’ the Hungarian nation, which was ironic considering that most art critics had rightly recognised the exhibition as basically in line with the government’s nationalist cultural agenda and that Gábor Gulyás had himself been directly appointed to the position by the government, overriding the usual procedures and against the wishes of progressives in the art world. Cue fellow-traveller GG’s resignation, and the penny finally drops that only mind-blowingly ultra-traditionalist tendencies are welcome in the shrinking world of state-sponsored Hungarian art.
* Fun Boy Three 1981
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A visit to the former Jewish spa town of Otwock was a highlight of the programme of events for the 2012 Igor Zabel Prize in Warsaw last weekend and was led by celebrated Polish sculptor Miroslaw Balka and Kasia Redzisz, curator of the town’s low key but thoroughly international public art project. Along with the privilege of an intimate tour of the artist’s childhood home and legendary studio, we saw a vandalised monument to several hundred North Korean orphans (pictured) who were displaced to the small town in the early 1950’s before being redeported six years later, our number 11 bus got stuck in the mud causing an unplanned schedule change, and we experienced a ruined mental hospital (pictured below), now haunted by paintball fanatics in military clothing with presumably little understanding of the traumatic history of the place or the value of the site specific intervention they inadvertently destroyed.
