In Hungary, Roma Get Art Show, Not a Hug

[Harold F. Schiffman]

February 6, 2008

In Hungary, Roma Get Art Show, Not a Hug
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

BUDAPEST  A show of contemporary Romany art just closed on Sunday here at
the National Gallery, Hungarys grandest museum. The exhibition was the
latest nod to Europes most despised, and this countrys largest, minority.
It came and went uneventfully, which itself was an event, considering the
rise this autumn of the Hungarian Guard, a right-wing extremist group,
which has made much news dressing up in paramilitary outfits recalling the
Nazi era, ranting about safeguarding national culture and traditions and
marching on a village against what it said was Romany crime there. Nobody
is quite sure how extensive the group is or whether it is just good at
grabbing headlines.

But the Roma were perfectly sure what safeguarding national culture meant.

Around the same time that the guard held everyones attention, a
Slovak-Hungarian artist named Ilona Nemeth decided to put up bright yellow
signs along a stretch of Kiraly Street in a traditionally Jewish but now
ethnically mixed part of the city. In the languages of the local residents
she posted questions based on the Bogardus Social Distance Scale, which
measures the willingness of people to engage in social contacts: passersby
were asked (to ask themselves, in effect) whether they would welcome
so-and-so, from a different ethnic group, as a tourist, a colleague, a
spouse, a fellow citizen.

Authorities from the district ordered the signs taken down hours after
they went up, saying the project had stirred trouble where there hadnt
been any. The Hungarian news media jumped on the brouhaha, as they had
jumped on the rise of the guard, and a local rabbi, among other
neighborhood leaders, took up the artists cause. But as Ms. Nemeth
reflected the other day, by then the work had produced a media monologue
and not a public dialogue.

She added: The Roma are not part of society here. Most of this society
thinks they are not our problem. Were not trying to understand them.

Ms. Nemeths work resurrected age-old questions about the uses of art in
shaping politics and public opinion, in this case concerning the Roma, or
Gypsies. (The term isnt considered pejorative here.) An answer of sorts
then came with the show at the National Gallery.

The exhibition turned out to be a mess, but an emblematic one. Over the
years various surveys of Romany music and art in Hungary have been
organized at the Museum of Ethnography and at the Hungarian Institute for
Culture and Art, from which most of the pictures at the National Gallery
came. This show followed a multinational Romany pavilion at last summers
Venice Biennale, shared by savvy conceptualists and folk artists, catering
to the all-devouring art market.

The National Gallery exhibition, less high-concept, looked more like a
flea market, much of it fairly awful, and heavy on self-taught artists
with compelling life stories. The pictures included street portraits with
drawings about the Roma killed in World War II and Chagall-like fantasies
in candied colors.

Arranged in a long, numbing row, the art was assigned to attic galleries
so unlike the large, gorgeous rooms for mainstream paintings downstairs
that an outsider couldnt help wondering if the installation had been
intentionally devised as a metaphor (Roma here cast as Jane Eyre s Bertha
Mason in the attic of Hungarian society). One evening not long before the
shows end, when closing time was still 30 minutes away, bored museum
guards, anxious to get home, hastened out the two or three remaining
visitors, trailing behind to make sure no one doubled back, and switching
off lights along the way.

Agnes Daroczi, a Romany sociologist and arts advocate, defended the show
as part of a long Romany cultural project. She recalled that when Hungary
was under Moscows thumb, Roma werent even acknowledged as an ethnic group,
and many of their small farms were bulldozed to promote collectivization,
spoiling centuries-old customs. In that difficult climate a Romany
intelligentsia emerged.

We thought if we could gain a foothold in culture and the arts, then we
could move closer to gaining human rights, she said. The first Romany art
show she put together was in the early 1970s. Culture became an artistic
tool in a political fight, she said.

Industrialization had by then produced jobs for some 85 percent of Romany
men, roughly the Hungarian average, and by the late 70s, Romany culture
had also come to be linked with a new liberal opposition to communism.

But with the transition to democracy that began in the late 1980s, and the
collapse of state industry it caused, Roma found themselves first to
receive pink slips. The figures speak for themselves. Roma make up an
estimated 8 to 10 percent of the population. Romany unemployment now tops
80 percent; the national unemployment average is 7.7 percent.

In 2005 the World Bank, the Open Society Institute and other organizations
initiated in Hungary and eight other countries a program for whats being
called, in typical Euro-speak, the Decade of Roma Inclusion, to improve
Romany education, employment, housing, human rights and health care. Last
year the government here adopted a plan to carry out that agenda. But
Romany children, as they have for generations, still find themselves often
segregated in schools and made to play in separate playgrounds.

In the permanent fight for emancipation, weve shown the beauty and
diversity of our culture, Ms. Daroczi said about the art shows over the
years. But clearly they have had little if any practical effect on daily
life for Roma in Hungary.

One recent morning I found Jeno Zsigo, president of the Roma Parliament, a
nongovernmental Romany rights group, looking deeply forlorn in his office
in the citys part-Romany Eighth District. He was mourning the fate of an
arts camp he had run for hundreds of Romany children, whose operation has
been suspended because, like the parliament, it has run out of money. He
blames official indifference.

Romany art goes on display as a favor, he said. There are a lot of
talented Romany artists, but the question is still whether there is going
to be any real acceptance and integration.

Gyorgy Kerenyi, a journalist and radio producer who in 2001 started Radio
C, the countrys first Roma-run radio station, put the situation in a wider
European perspective: Its not violent here, like in the Czech Republic or
Romania  the Hungarian Guard seems like a small thing  but most Hungarians
are prejudiced. The situation hasnt really changed much in 20 years. The
European Union, which is afraid of Romany migration to Western Europe,
shakes the hands of Eastern Europeans who start some initiative or sponsor
some show, but its all window dressing.

He recalled Romany excitement when Radio C started, finally giving Roma
their own voice in the media. It was like in a Kusturica film, he said,
laughing. A cavalcade of people showed up, friends, kids, gangs, tucking
their heads in to say hello or just to see how it all worked.

Radio C caters to Romany listeners. Mr. Kerenyi remarked that, for the
general Hungarian public, the popular television program Megastar,
Hungarys American Idol, has probably made the biggest impact: it has
lately catapulted several Romany singers to national stardom.

These were Roma who proudly said theyre Roma, and the program showed their
families at home like other families, he said.

Which still left open the question of the effect of the National Gallery
show. Wim Wenders, the German film director, has said that Europeans like
to comfort themselves with the false belief that the misery and isolation
of the Roma is actually an act of self-chosen freedom.

You hear this often in Europe. Roma are casually dismissed as criminals
and outsiders. The Romany art show, in a similar vein, let skeptics write
off the work as primitive or, worse, charming, while functioning as a sop
to the national conscience.

Confronted by that thought, Peter Szuhay, from the Ethnological Museum,
who put the exhibition together, fell glumly silent. Over the years he has
organized what would seem from their catalogs to be intelligent, sensitive
shows documenting Romany life  contrasting how Roma are portrayed by
others with how they depict themselves. These exhibitions have multiplied
over the years as the plight of Roma, despite his efforts, has worsened.

Mr. Szuhay was in the musty loft of his split-level office in the museum,
surrounded by peeling paint, fluorescent lights and stacks of papers. He
has spent 28 years accumulating the collection that surrounded him.

You have authentic personalities among these artists, whether theyre
academically trained or self-taught, which is a division were trying to
overcome, he said. I want to show how important the Roma are to
Hungarians, to make clear theyre like the rest of us.

Noble sentiments, and true. But the goal today seems as remote as ever.
Meanwhile, Mr. Zsigos children are still waiting for their summer camp.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/06/arts/design/06roma.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin

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