Overlooking the Danube in central Budapest is the spacious archive of György Lukács, housed in the philosopher’s residence for the last three decades of his life, which on the evening of 12 May 2010 became a site for bold artistic encounters with his legacy. Although only Hungarian artists were involved, and the event had the characteristics of an exclusive local happening, its significance arguably went beyond the national frame by addressing the discord between Lukács’s unassailable international status as the founder of Western Marxism and his reputation as a hardcore communist in Hungary. The question haunting any contemporary engagement with Lukács is how to reconcile these two positions within a global historical perspective.


Intervention in the Lukács Archive by Balázs Beöthy

Until now, Lukács has not been a significant figure or point of reference for contemporary Hungarian art. Indeed, the generation of artists intervening in his archive were brought up on the teachings of the neo-avant-garde, who preferred anti-regime figures, such as the dissident thinker Béla Hamvas, who challenged modern atheism and communist asceticism, and was forced into menial labour, apparently at the hands of Lukács himself. Symptomatically, the mere mention of the dissident’s name provoked smirks of condescension amongst the Lukács followers that gathered to observe the artists’ transgression of the hallowed space of the archive. Contemporary art’s new found interest in Lukács lies in the enigma of his personality and his precarious path through the troubled history of the twentieth century, which may provide a key to unlocking some of the complexities of political commitment on the left.

Lukács poster by Little Warsaw

Born into a wealthy Jewish family in 1885, Lukács came of age in the literary and theatrical milieu of fin de siècle Budapest, later coming into contact with Kantian and Hegelian currents at universities in Kolozsvár, Berlin and Heidelberg. During the First World War he led a Sunday Circle of intellectuals at his family estate that pondered deep cultural issues, until the schism of the Bolshevik Revolution divided the group along political lines. Pushed along by personal traumas, including the suicide of his first love and death of his closest friend, Lukács underwent a radical political conversion in 1918 that led him to disown his early life and works, to which he later referred as ‘romantic anti-capitalism’, and commit himself fully to the Communist Party, a political faith that he maintained until his death in 1971.

Lukács’s contribution to literary and cultural theory was deeply marked by his political commitment and party career, which included a brief period as Commissar for Education and Culture in the short lived Hungarian Republic of Councils of 1919, while his best known theoretical work, History and Class Consciousness, was produced during his political exile in Vienna in the 1920s. With the rise of Fascism, he moved from Berlin to relative safety in Moscow in 1933, and engaged in contemporary literary debates around expressionism, modernism and socialist realism, narrowly managing to escape the Stalinist purges. After his return to Hungary in 1945, he was first celebrated, then subjected to fierce public criticism, and subsequently rehabilitated, playing an abortive role in the 1956 Revolution.

Intervention in the Lukács Archive by Tamás Sóos (with Maja and Reuben Fowkes, Agnes Heller)

Lukács’s reputation in Western leftist circles owes principally to his theoretical innovations of the early 1920s, when he attempted to update Marxism for the twentieth century. His analysis of the pernicious effects of bourgeois ideology and influential notion of reification - a term devised to refer to the process by which capitalism enters social relations to take on an objective form - offered a way to account theoretically for the failure of the emergence of ‘revolutionary proletarian consciousness’ in the West. Today his writings on realism from the depths of the Stalinist 1930s may also contain the potential for a theoretical comeback, perhaps offering critical tools to pierce the gleaming surface of capitalism as a totality, an ambition that Lukács identified with realist authors, and ultimately found lacking in expressionist and subjective modes of creativity.

Intervention in the Lukács Archive by Little Warsaw, 2010

As the murmuring crowd of art professionals and philosophers circulated around the flat, an old man dressed in a grey coat and hat and leaning on a walking stick came in and went over to the desk, fumbled around and then walked straight out of the door and disappeared for ever. This subtly staged and barely noticeable appearance of the ghost of Lukács or a psychic projection of the long gone philosopher was actually an intervention by Little Warsaw (Bálint Havas and András Gálik). Starting off with a poster showing an unnamed portrait of the philosopher and calling for ‘anyone who looks like the person on the picture to come forward’ both served for the artists to select a lookalike actor and probed public amnesia about the Marxist philosopher. The unexpected arrival of Lukács’s impersonation wearing some of his original items and his interaction with the hermetic environment of the archive, the furniture and decoration of which date back to the Kádár era, represented a fleeting disruption that pointed to the fact that so many questions about the philosopher’s life and acts are left unanswered. Little Warsaw’s work in the archive can also be viewed as a continuation of their enduring interest in the contested feelings provoked by the cultural legacy of the communist era.

Intervention in the Lukács Archive by Miklós Erhardt, 2010

As his starting point, Miklós Erhardt took a broken memorial plaque dating back to the communist era, which was found offensive and vandalised after the political changes of 1989. The plaque on the exterior of the building was eventually replaced by a more benign version referring to the home of a world famous Hungarian philosopher, with no red stars or mention of Marxism and the Proletariat. The artist chose to cover up the damaged plaque that is now preserved in the entrance hall of the archive to bring to attention the unavoidable political and moral dilemmas raised by Lukacs’s historical role, from the executions of deserters he ordered as a red army political commissar in 1919, to his failure to condemn the Stalinist terror. Parallels could perhaps be drawn with the contamination of Heidegger’s philosophical reputation by his entanglement with Nazism. A complimentary element of Erhardt’s intervention involved the artist approaching some of those present at the Lukács evening with an obtrusive video camera and posing tricky moral questions, bringing to mind the procedures of a public investigation or trial, and raising the issue of whether it is ever desirable or right to separate a person’s theoretical insights from their actions in society.

Balázs Beöthy, Hancsi, video 2'10", 2010

Balázs Beöthy disturbed the orderly and static appearance of the archive by scattering a selection of papers and letters on the philosopher’s desk, in order to break through to the more chaotic essence of Lukacs’s eventful life. The artist’s intervention also foregrounds the ‘archive within the archive’, the hidden collection that started with a suitcase containing hundreds of personal letters and writings that were deposited in a Heidelberg bank vault in 1918, symbolically marking Lukács’s dramatic break with his bourgeois past. Fascinatingly, the philosopher went back to the bank to renew his arrangements before leaving for political exile in Moscow in the 1930s, but never mentioned it to anyone, and the suitcase was only discovered accidentally by a bank clerk two years after his death. Beöthy also introduces a memento of his own, a short video work entitled Hancsi, which in a whisper delivers a tragic story of love and fate that the artist installed next to a letter from the young Lukács’s abandoned sweetheart, for whose suicide he felt a terrible responsibility.

Intervention in the Lukács Archive by Tamás Sóos

Tamás Sóos offered a more personal intervention in the archive, which involved the artist sleeping on a pile of books in front of the bookshelves in Lukács’s working room, an enlarged photograph of which was displayed on the spot, together with a pillow of books, which some visitors took as an invitation to repeat the action. It was the childhood experience of seeing his father setting off for a communist holiday with a copy of Lukács in his toolbox that originally sparked the artist’s interest, while as a young man he tried to visit the aging philosopher by ringing the doorbell on the street, but was repeatedly told that Lukács was busy. In the quest for firsthand knowledge, the artist also approached Lukács’s most celebrated student, the philosopher Agnes Heller, and photographs of the pair engaged in lengthy discussions in the archive were shown. Although as a hardened realist, Lukács might well have disapproved of such a subjective artistic approach, Sóos searches for a deeper psychological truth about the philosopher’s personality, probing precisely the problem of emotional indifference in his life and work. The Freudian atmosphere was enhanced by the suggestive furniture in his room, with a single bed in one corner hinting at a suppressed desire for psychoanalysis. Despite the fact that Lukács consistently rejected Freudianism, the scant autobiographical notes made during the last years of his life dwell on childhood traumas, such as being locked in a cupboard by his despised mother and anger towards his father for doting exclusively on her and neglecting the young Lukács, patterns that were seemingly repeated in his own adult life and relationship with his adored wife, while his children did not merit a single line in his autobiography. As Agnes Heller put it that evening – “Lukács was a cold man”. 

Intervention in the Lukács Archive by János Sugár  (photo András Bernát)

Pointing to the fact that the archive is an actual living space that needs to be maintained, and not just a museum that should be preserved in its original state, János Sugár came equipped with a set of tools and carried out minor repairs on the flat, such as fixing the handles on the balcony doors. Demystifying the philsopher’s shrine, Sugár approached the archive as a contemporary research space, and focussed his attention on the present and the future. A further action involved removing a picture from the wall opposite Lukács’s desk, and spray-painting a stencilled slogan in the empty spot. Using the language of Kant and Hegel, the graffiti read: ‘Arbeite gratis oder verrichte eine Arbeit die du auch gratis machen würdest’, referring to Lukács’s role in reinterpreting Marx and his labour theory of value and warning us either to work ‘gratis’, or only do work that we would undertake for free anyway. By addressing the issue of work and ethics, Sugár points to the commercialisation of the art world on the one hand, while on the other, wittily comments on the enforced working conditions of immaterial labour, where time and creativity are never adequately rewarded. This sentence also includes an element of ‘institutional critique’, as the whole event in the archive was done on a friendly basis, which was an unchallenged tradition of the East European neo-avant-garde, but is a rare exception today. This debate will remain hidden behind the picture, which the artist immediately put back into place, until in an unknown future the archive is disturbed again.

As is so often the case in post-socialist countries, contemporary art is irresistibly drawn to tackle the trickiest subjects on the cultural and political horizon, exploring positions that are difficult to accommodate within the dominant ethos of neo-liberal globalised consensus, and reopening loaded questions from the recent past that the mainstream has forgotten. Stumbling upon Lukács and faced with the enigma of his archive, the artists had recourse to an inventive, contemporary and ultimately realist methodology that, in the philosopher’s favourite terms, went beyond ideological ‘appearance’ to disclose the ‘essence’ of Lukács in his social totality. Still suspended in the grey zone between the constructions of communist and national culture and laden with historical complexity, Lukács is revealed as a true twentieth century man, a modernist intellectual with classical emotional hang-ups, and despite the efforts to empathise, the evident contradictions between his theoretical achievements and questionable real-life actions remain unresolved.

Maja and Reuben Fowkes
www.translocal.org