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Exploring issues

Although the exhibition Art and Artists in the First World War has been closed now, it raised so many fascinating questions that we turned to Enikő Róka, one of the curators, to discuss some of them.

MMO: The exhibition’s motto was a Hayden White quote: on “the common constructivist character of both artistic and scientific statements". How does the author of The Burden of History and The Historical Text as Literary Artefact become a basic source of influence for an art history exhibition?

Enikő Róka: Hayden White’s works did not only influence historians, but his statements offer plenty to think about to museologists too. White’s basic point is that writing history essentially has a type of fictional character, and historians select the facts and then, following some rules borrowed from literature, they turn these facts into a narrative. This description is basically true for museum exhibitions too. The historian – along the scientific and methodological consensus of his era – links his data to his own present and transforms them into a subjective narrative. The curator in the museum virtually does the same: selects from a group of objects, interprets them and by installing them creates a coherent, but guided narrative in line with the curatorial intentions. According to White, there isn’t a single correct view, and consequently there might be several narratives and we can depict a topic at an exhibition in several different ways. One of the starting points of this exhibition in Balatonfüred was that we wanted to offer only one possible interpretation of this vast and complex material, which is historical and art historical at the same time. The aim was to call the visitors’ attention to the fact that more than one interpretation of a historical event is possible and acceptable. Hence we began the exhibition with the present by exhibiting contemporary works of art which, in different manners, reflect on wars and history in general. Obviously, artistic interpretation is not equivalent to that of the historians. The former can handle facts more freely and, by this, it can offer such approaches which can impregnate the interpretation of historical events and of the present too. The first room with the often ironic contemporary works of art enabled the visitors to consciously think about their positions and to distance themselves from what they would see in the rest of the exhibition. This way they were offered a critical position from which they could contemplate the sometimes tragic, heroic or pathetic works and could rethink the era which imposed mechanisms of propaganda expectations, control and self-control on the artists. This hopefully led the visitors to a critical thinking on WWI and also on the present.

Enikő Róka: The contemporary section featured a work by Société Realist (Ferenc Gróf and Jean-Baptiste Naudy) titled Spectral Aerosion which pointed out the differences between points of view. It was a one square-metre Perspex sheet with the map of Europe on it featuring the borders between different countries in the last 2000 years. It is practically a fuzzy network of lines, ironically questioning the idea of nation states: in an exhibition on the First World War this brought some absurdity into the interpretation of these borders, since the war was fought partly for theses very borders. Seeing it from this angle, nothing could be taken for granted and everything was open to doubt in the exhibition which followed a reverse chronological order.