Without having experienced the exhibition, based solely on the title, one might expect to find church steeples, a bearded statue modeled after a politician from the Reform Era, a fountain, and turn-of-the-century eclectic architecture right in the middle of the city. In contrast, Marcell Németh’s works depict prefab apartment buildings, factory chimneys, floodlights, tower cranes, and playground equipment from the Kádár era. We are certainly not in the center of a historic, free royal city. This is the center of an industrial city…
Today, the industrial city exists only in its ruins and in the recent past. It used to be operational, but not that long ago—I, for one, was already well into my life back then. The people of the industrial city lived among factories, worked in factories, and the factories killed many of them. In Miskolc, I knew of places like the ironworks, the machine factory, the wire factory, the house factory, the paper mill, the bread factory, the dairy, and the chocolate factory… There were more, but they had more complicated names. Where meat products were manufactured at the confluence of the Szinva Stream and the Sajó River, that was the meat industry or meat processing plant. The factory bosses decided that bread and milk could be produced, but meat was a different matter.
We didn’t have a toy factory, nor were there many toy stores; the spherical sign on the main street—which occasionally spun and lit up—can be seen these days in the courtyard of the Miskolc Gallery. The handheld toys available in the toy store were made of plastic, while the playground equipment was made of iron—so the ironworks was involved after all. According to this, as children in the 1970s and 1980s, we lived in prefabricated apartment blocks and spent our time on playgrounds built by the ironworks.
The works of sculptor Marcell Németh feature details of industrial city streetscapes, isolated from their everyday surroundings and set against a grayish-white background. The fleeting glances of passersby in snowy or misty weather evoke a similar feeling. From a distance, these are vaguely familiar public objects and structures. The choice of materials inherently evokes a metallic grayness, which also complements the scattered gravel facades of the prefabricated apartment blocks.
White is the color of mourning in Japanese culture. An industrial city belongs more to the past than to the present, let alone the future. Herds of reindeer in Lapland, with frozen caution, give a wide berth to the route of the high-voltage power lines and poles. Perhaps their relative proximity is harmful even to us, unsuspecting urban passersby; yet, as part of our everyday framework, they radiate a certain sense of familiarity. A dangerously familiar one. And the remnants of playgrounds from the Kádár era, where joy once reigned: desolately familiar. The ruins of our childhood.
It’s been about 50 years since then. By now, the phantom playgrounds that remain from the decades of state socialism are undoubtedly “non-places”—rusty, fragmented traces of a recent past that perhaps saw better times. Just yesterday, from the window of my prefab apartment, I could see a broken chain swing and a tall wave-shaped climbing frame. My bike doesn’t fit there; it would be nice to chain it to the climbing frame, but it would surely get stolen. What function should we find for these phantom playgrounds? At least a few should remain as monuments; we could lay wreaths there on Children’s Day. It’s surely unbelievable, but they disappeared just this morning…
There’s no solution yet; for now, there are only stories. Of course, there’s no longer any way, occasion, time, or need for classic, ceremonially epic storytelling around the dinner table; yet, given our anthropological nature, stories remain an essential part of our existence. Marcell Németh tells stories in a truly modern way—using objects. Peti enters the exhibition space. He’s alone, looking around. He’s alone, but he hears a rustling sound. He steps closer, leans in. Strange—the yellow slide is whispering something to him. It whispers to us, and suddenly we see Peti as a little boy, running, climbing, and swinging among the ten-story apartment buildings of Avas’s first phase, sometime in the 1970s. Peti, Péter Veres (1971–2026)—my friend, our colleague, and master exhibition designer—lived for 55 years, and sadly we must accept that his funeral will be held tomorrow.
As for me, true revelation is no longer really possible, so now that I’m over fifty, I approach these objects with a kind of superficial, Buddhist detachment. There’s no room in my studio apartment, but I’d make an exception now, because Marcell Németh’s exhibited works are so good that I’d take any of them home, welcome them into my world—after all, they’ve been there from the very beginning.
Krisztián Kapusi