Sebestyén Kodolányi and Csaba Uglár: Abuse
Exhibition in the Museum of Contemporary art - Ludwig Museum Budapest, project.room
12. November-8. December 2002. Guest curator: Emese Süvecz

Sebestyén Kodolányi and Csaba Uglár’s project abuses the toposes of confraternity and the noble-spirited sentiments of men’s brotherhood. The “documentary film”, an experiment, documents a fraud. The “spiritual community” is dwelling on some scholarly topic first in a room of utterly mysterious atmosphere, then sets out and marches along against a backdrop of the streets, the blocks and the inhabitants of the city. The group of men, in garments which imitate sacred habits visualise both the brotherhood of men in the gospels of the classical early Christian world and the life of orthodox monasteries today, as known to the western world mostly from documentary films. The camera, following the gloomy figures on a sunny summer afternoon goes on a pilgrimage through the embankments, the empty streets and neglected tenement blocks of Budapest, till finally drops into the vortex of the carnival.

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The objective character of the project however proves to be a fraud; the observer of the scene gradually realises that the camera is filming itself throughout. The employment of a documentary style and the implicit objectivity of it is sheer imitation. Communion is only an illusion, too. The apparently collective marching is actually the internal journey of the subject. The background “Oriental” music is not an illustration to, but rather an amplifier of the “apparent documentary character” of the film; it dramatises the spiritual journey. The monotony of the music is associated with the well-known atmosphere and the repetitive rythm of the prayers and other religious ceremonies. The dramaturgy of the film, the alternation of the inside scenes and the outside sequences in the city is an allegory of the immersion of the subject “deeper and deeper” into the self. The language of the philosophical - religious speculations however is a mumbo - jumbo imitative of the phraseology of mystical teachings, so what the dramaturgical trick really means is the illusion of the subject’s reality.

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There is another component of the documentary character, the imitated Orientalism of quasi folk objects (like the camera with its tawdry sequin decoration and felt - tip pen calligraphy organised to create a uniform surface in the sense of horror vacui) which, again, is a paraphrase of the Oriental sacred aesthetics. The deliberate exoticism of the Oriental world is a fraud as well as allusion to the sacred myths of the brotherhood which suggest universality and timelessness, especially because the ideology behind the “noble - spirited sentiments of men’s brotherhood” operates another possible type of bonds among men, this is the heroism and solidarity of terrorists. The ethos of sacred confraternity thus turns into the narrative of monk - colonel/major characters in which the world of Oriental objects is replaced by a series of hints at the mass-murdering militant functions of technology.

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Kodolányi and Uglár’s Abuse is manoeuvring off the well-known toposes of masculine subjectivity embedded in Oriental and technological pseudo-folklore. Their story is documented partly with solemn and charismatic declarations, partly with somewhat theatrical scenes. Thus they direct a parody of the old banalities of masculine myths, a parody of themselves in fact which will complete their fraud when their artistic subjectivity scintillates through abuse and illusion and still talks to us.

Emese Süvecz