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Hosök tere, the sterminated Heroes'Square. From
the hotel, guest-quarters operating within the national
bealth service, you can see the green-blue bronze of the
forefathers of the native land- Arpad dominating the
other heads of the Magyar tribe on the gigantic monument
of the millennium of the Hungarian State. Budapest has
the demographic and productive weight of the country on
its shoulders. It's a metropolis with two and a half
million inhabitants, one quarter of the total Hungarian
population. It holds all the responsabilities and
contradictions of the new confrontation with the outside.
The latter can be seen in the position of the
intellectuals who, they tell me, could be divided into
two classes: for a necessary surrendering of tradition in
favor of international integration or, on the contrary,
for the transformation of national tradition of
unescapable and intentional peculiarity. The speed of
integration, considerable for questions of little value,
luckily also strengthens the organizational field of
cultural life. New ways of becoming contemporary
"Hungarians" have come into being. The
knowledge of the role of contemporary art has just grown
recently, but with very high peaks: an example is the
birth, in 1996 of the first independent Museum of
contemporary art of the country. The
activity and the space of the Ludwig Museum (see the
contribution of its director, Katalin Néray) are
absolutely competitive and, a fact not to be
understimated, the average age of its administrators is
thirty. In the Exhibition Building, edifice on Heroes'
Square, twin to the neoclassic Museum of the Fine Arts
(where the Italian works excel in the outstanding
collection of the Old Paintings gallery), the major
activity is contemporary art, seen to by the Mucsarnok,
the Hungarian Kunsthalle. The new, updated magazines of
art and culture are international and have totally
substituted the gray bulletins armoured for any
confrontation of the artists Unions of which we were
accustomed (see the contibution of Kristina Szipocs). The attention given to contemporary music, to
the learning of this music with experimental classes at
the conservatory, and to the acknowledgement of the
greatest authors to which streets and monuments are
dedicated - Béla Bartók in first place - is by far
superior to ours. Reading is widely practiced,- Péter Esteházy (see his conversation with Péter Zihaly) is
very popular; during "book week" every book
store becomes a place of collective reading and debate on
the texts, with free tea and drink. In the latest
edition, the most appreciated editorial novelty was the
translation of the "Canone Inverso" by Paolo
Maurensig. I also believe that the cultural ties with
Italy are sincerely felt. I had the opportunity to speak
in Italian on our art history and I was told that in many
secondary schools Italian is a primary foreign language,
along with English and German, and that in the country,
there are now schools in which all the teaching is done
in two languages. And to attend the Hungarian Academy in
Rome is legendary (as Zsuzsa Ordasi reports
here). Above all, places for meeting and research are
growing. I was able to visit in Buda the Center for
Culture and Communication directed by Miklós Peternák
who, with the help of Zsuzsa Megyesi, has just organized
"Inter/Media/Art", an important panorama on
all that in Hungary uses advanced technologies, promoted
by Mucsarnok and the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest at
the Ernst Museum. It is an entire building used, thanks
to the Hungarian Soros, as a multimedial laboratory, witb
rooms for testing, laboratories and a number of terminals
connected to a central one of electronic elaboration from
Cape Canaveral ... plus the free use of at least a dozen
Internet postings, which are always very crowded. Katalin
Molnár, a very young PR of the soon-to-be Trafó (House
of Contemporary Art), while showing me the building yard
of this center which is rising up on the south street of
access at Pest, in Liliom Utca, from an old utilitarian
building which stored the transformers of the old
electric power plant, talked to me at length:
"European integration is not just economical and
political, but also cultural and for this reason
necessitates, in the cultural sphere, organizations
capable of producing this integration. In Europe there
are many cultural centers which offer dance programs,
concerts, art exhibitions and movies, but they also
facilitate creative work by putting balls and
laboratories at the děsposal of young artists. At the
basis of these centers is the knowledge that a cultural
institution can't limit its activities to
"exhibiting" works of art, it has to provide
what is necessary so that it may also be conceived and
elaborated. In Hungary we still don't have a center which
has these aims. It's important to fill this void because
the greater part of the experimental artists, those who
guarantee the development of art, has neither its own
financial resources nor a place in which to work. That is
why on October 16 Trafó has its opening ". The
center will host the offices of the Association of young
artists, a multipurpose auditorium of 300 seats wih a
fully equipped stage, an exhibition gallery with monitor,
videoprojectors and computers on the underground level
and a club-restaurant, which will have a small stage for
conferences, studio performances, debates, a series of
rooms-libraries and laboratories. The possibility of
recuperating the building and initiating the activities
is given by an enlightened municipal administration,
which had to sell the building in the city center that
had always been entrusted to the Association of young
artists, but that nevertheless wanted to offer an
alternative of a practicable and updated life. I don't
think Katalin Molnár, will mind if I underline the term
Trafó (electric transformer), because there is no better
metaphor that captures in one image the fervor of the
young Budapest of culture and of eastern Europe in
general.
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