Kopin Katalin (szerk.): Test objektív. A test reprezentációja a kortárs művészetben - Ferenczy Múzeum kiadványai, C. sorozat: Katalógusok 5. (Szentendre, 2013)

The paper is an updated and enshortened version of the author’s scholarly essay published in ***Erotics and Sexuality in Hungarian Art (Budapest, 1999). It reflects on the main trend of the nineties that focused on the body, and body politics. It introduces the Western, mainly American trends, and their leading figures, and compares the difference between the subsequent generations in their understanding of the body, especially the female body. It examines the parallel phenomenon, the similarities and differences in the Hungarian scene. The author states that in the mid-nineties the over-politicized local scene in which the formalist-modernist attitudes were fossilized, both in sense of art practice and critical reflections, was rather hostile and unprepared for the reception and interpretation of this discourse. As a consequence of the hierarchical and conservative, male dominated local context, even those works (made mostly by women) that reflected on the discourse were forced to accept the structure of the scene if they wanted to be seen and heard. Their strategy was to outwit, camouflage or apply tricks of disguise as tactics of survival. The other characteristic of the local version of the body trend is that the significant generational division in attitudes and in understanding body and body politics that branded the Western art works of the last decades of the 20th century did not exist at all. Different notions and attitudes could easily merge in the Hungarian works.

The paper identifies Mária Berhidi as the forerunner of the new way of thinking about the body, who carved small marble sculptures (Fetish, 1979; Butterfly, 1988) in the late seventies and eighties reflecting on the ambiguity of female body seen from an inner female position. The paper analyses the art works of the most important artists in time of political transition, when women artists were the more active protagonists of the body. Among them are Ilona Németh’s installations, that arose the sensation of getting inside the body. However, the notion of “abject” was present only in a deferred addressing, that is, in a very subtle and less direct way. The male artist Tibor Gyenis is the only one who explicitly utilizes the artistic possibilities of abjection and border crossings. Ilona Németh is a champion of other explorations of the body as well. She demonstrates the power of medical gaze through her Gynecological chairs and when she excludes the objectifying male gaze exposing female sexuality in her king size red velvet bed, named Get laid! Multifunctional woman. Marianna Csáky and Luca Göbölyös break taboos surrounding blood and meat and decaying female body as well as homosexuality. Kriszta Nagy who is the most radical woman artist of the scene addressed the issue of the constructed nature of the body that not just culturally but also medically is controlled. She also exposed the media generated notion of the ideal body and the mutant body in her digital print 200 000 HUF. In the new millennia regional, socio-political issues and the economic and political difficulties of transition got into the forefront of Hungarian art, while body issues, body politics took a back seat.

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