Boros Géza: Statue Park - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2002)
The endless promenade dedicated to persons in the labour movement
term lamp post ceased to refer to a metal rod supporting a light; what it clearly means in the language of Hungarian literature is the gallows. And here you had Béla Kun standing by the lamp post (the lamp was lit day and night). That’s why my work was a critical monument. Not to an illiterate person, of course ..." However, the monument was received by the public with aversion right from the start. On 23 October 1991, activists of the Hungarian Democratic Forum covered it with dark-blue wrapping. They pulled white hoods on the bayonets and dressed Béla Kun in ghost’s veils, putting a clown's cap on his head. The weekly magazine Új Magyaronzds ran the following comment: "A spectre once haunted Europe, and now the past ends in the same ghostly manner”. 25- Statue of Ferenc Münnich (István Kiss, 1986) Ferenc Münnich was also a leading figure of the labour movement. He played an active part in the suppression of the 1956 Revolution and the reprisals that followed. For his merits he was twice awarded the highest international communist decoration, the Lenin Prize. This statue was erected in Néphadsereg (today Honvéd) tér, in the middle of the government district, on the 100th anniversary of Münnich’s birth. The figure raises one hand in greeting, leaning with the other on a table whose legs had originally been ammunition boxes. In Tibor Wehner's analysis the work is a typical example of "how a certain style that had appeared to be original and innovative when it first emerged in the early seventies degenerated into a hackneyed cliché. It had been a hallmark of Imre Varga's work to design a type of monument where a historical personality steps off the pedestal and moves closer to the viewer’s walking level, the figure itself reduced almost to life-size proportions. This new authenticity’ is further reinforced by the use of objects that are alien in the generic context of monuments but are charged with symbolic meaning (for example by indicating the specific historical part played by the model). That is the recipe used by István Kiss, but without any originality of sculptural thought. Münnich, an ordinary person lacking any sign of charisma, is represented here by an equally nondescript figure sculpted in a singularly unexciting manner. As for the ammunition boxes, they are strangely out of context, lying as they do around a figure dressed in a banker's suit.” Led by the legendary György Krassó, the activists of the Hungarian October Party daubed the statue red on 21 March 1990. The 'boots’ were subsequently stolen, which is why the statue now stands in the Statue Park truncated, embedded knee-deep in concrete. A court case was brought against those responsible 36
