Word is around about the intensification of the general public’s relationship to grand art nowadays. Mucsarnok – growing bold at the neighbour’s success – is giving up faith to its original mission, in order to exhibit four centuries of French painting. Kogart House is putting on a Christmas art fair on the model of a London art college’s end-year showcase. Ludwig Museum Budapest – Museum of Contemporary Art employs new PR experts before moving to the Palace of Arts.
Simultaneously with the income-boosting campaigns of the large exhibition places, the small ones provide free service as a part of gift economy. All they ask for in compensation is familiarity with the context. Lumen Gallery, opened recently in Kuplung, is a good example of this.
Kuplung itself is a spacious spot of subculture, located in a former car repair workshop. Its lifespan – to use a biological metaphor – is to be nine months plus-minus a week or two. Here is where the upper-crust customers of Ráckert winter through.
Muted lights in the vast hall. Tables, chairs, bar, music. The variety of the latter is ensured by Tamás Széll. The gallery is run by activists of the Lumen Photography Foundation. The exhibition area of two little rooms is situated in the far right corner. It is separated by a glass wall, and, true to its name, light is strongest here of all.
Right now the exhibition of Endre Koronczi is on show in the double block of light. The artist activates his body as a medium and transmutates into a woman for the sake of a picture. Throwing a Northern legend around his shoulder, he appears in a double role.
The male character looks us in the eye; trust me, he suggests. His female alter ego focuses on the bottom left corner, as if she had just said something wrong. So emblematic, whispers someone beside me. I pity a little that she doesn’t look me in the eye, but I agree with the speaker before me.
The issue of gender traversability is also on the agenda of other affiliates of gift economy in Budapest. Zsolt Koroknai also uses his own body for transmutation at Vízivárosi Galéria.
This metamorphosis, however, is in a completely different key. According to János Sturcz’s inspired interpretation, the artist here pans the principally feminine space of the annunciation with the help of a lipstick of light. Personifies, purges. “Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man.”
Descent to the gallery space is enveloped in the gently exact pictures of Gábor Erdélyi. These morsels of pearly glimmer cleanse our eyes, Koroknai tackles the mouth, while, according to the exhibition’s title, the two of them together purify our ears.
Wandering in the snowfall with clean eyes and mouth, my cap down in my ear, I don’t know whether I’m a boy or a girl any more. To evade the question, I decide that intimate surroundings do good to art.
If I were a boy I would put on a Woody Allen face, if a girl, the one of Ági Bárdos Deák and raise the stakes. In the principally noisy, masculine space of war, the soldier presses on toward victory like a sperm cell, while his chances of survival are minimal. From this point of view, war is encoded in the order of life. Peace today and war tomorrow, yet man’s heart is never sorrow. My dear Rrosy, Joey, July, Briggie, Stevie, Cathy, c’est la vie!