Jurányi House, Budapest
School of Disobedience performance evening
16 December, 2023.
10 minutes
The performance commemorates the life’s work of Jolán Simon, while at the same time seeking to reconstruct the lost and stagnant value-creating agency of the avant-garde. This is why at the end of the text concludes with a reference to Nikolas Bourriaud’s theory of art sub-modernity, in which he searches for a cultural alternative to the post-postmodern era, which he defines the term as translation. This can also be interpreted as a demand for the resurrection of the avant-garde movement. In this way, the work of the Hungarian artist Jolán Simon, who was associated with the early avant-garde, and especially the Russian avant-garde, will be updated and translated into the present day.
Our work is reminiscent of radio sound theatre performances, representing both the temporal distance and the double act of translation. At the same time, through a performed rite, we create both a monument to the life’s work of Jolán Simon – the two-headed fetish – and, through a communal action – with the active participation of the audience – we create the possibility of living through a kind of utopia-creation for the future. It is as if we are “training” the spectators in the ability to imagine sub-modernity by having them perform the ritual.
The voices of the performers are heard through a loudspeaker, in a sound poetry solution that expresses the content and evokes the song-events by Jolán Simon.
Text from the loudspeaker:
Commentator 1:
Jolán Simon was a seamstress from Újpest, the Count’s maid and later a factory worker, an avant-garde artist. In her twenties, as a mother of three, she divorced her furniture carpenter-helper husband after a few years. At that age, neither divorce nor divorce from a husband was the norm. Jolán organised recitation groups with workers, where she read avant-garde poetry with dozens of factory workers like her. This was not the custom either. This to be happened today is unthinkable.
Commentator 2:
Everyone knows who Lajos Kassák was. Who Jolán Simon was, almost nobody knows. Without Jolán, Kassák would not have survived emigration in the 1920s. It was Jolán who did not give up. No one would know about Kassák today without her. Kassák or Jolán Simon? Who is stored away in our collective memory?
Commentator 1:
In 1938 Jolán was working as a social worker. One day in September, aged 53, she opened the gas tap at the stove and did not light a match or put the soup on. The gas killed her. As the Nazis would kill millions of Jews a few years later. Jews or Nazis?
Commentator 2:
I’ll light the gas to put te dinner on. Jolán Simon. Why didn’t you want to cook dinner for anyone anymore? Life or death? To go or to stay? Soup or no soup? To eat or not to eat?
Commentator 1:
We have transformed the Enlightenment Ration into a curious object that is the two-headed fetish. It is at once machine, animal and human. An object of ubiquitous experience, always reduced to two for the sake of easier consumption. Constantly condemned, constantly deconstructed, it remains untouchable. Now, on this special day, we allow a direct encounter, even a touch. The empty centre of existence as a shadow becomes visible only through its distortions, but now, only here and now, it is torn from the digital for the sake of the awakening of an analogue vision of the world.
Commentator 2:
The dual mother fetish is here among you. In fact, in you. The fetishization of duality sets the primitive to be progressive. Do not let your thinking be reduced to a choice between the two. Do not destroy, do not build, destroy by building and build by destroying. It’s face to face, it will remain between us. We will not betray the rebellion to anyone. We are two, but not alone. The stake of the rite is the final abolition of duality. Let’s go.
Commentator 1: (theatrical intermediary voice)
The audience stands up and begins its nomadic pilgrimage towards the fetish of duality.
The audience rises to their feet to begin.
Their eyes become accustomed to the dimness and they slowly realize that they are standing in an oval space. Slowly they start walking in a counter-clockwise direction, in step with the others, in unison. Slowly start walking in a counterclockwise, counterclockwise, counterclockwise direction, in unison with the others, in unison.
Commentator 2: (theatrical intermediary voice)
The audience moves with slow, contemplative steps to get closer and closer to the two-headed fetish in the middle of the oval space.
Commentator 1: (theatrical intermediary voice)
When they reach the centre, their aim is to touch the fetish, stroke the soft animal hair, touch the signs in the fetish’s hands and join their gaze with their eyes. Then they walk around so that from both heads the ancient gaze of the sphinx shoots at them, reminding them of the senseless, life-destroying nature of duality. Then, cleansed by this, they proceed with the others to the edge of the oval, walking slowly, meditatively, back to where they started.
Commentator 2:
Fetish has a strange analogy with Capital: stigmatized yet untouchable, countless times deconstructed yet unchanging duality: old and child, round and flat, past and future, singular and plural, useful and useless. That is why its appeal is inconceivably powerful. The winners, the losers, the Fidesz, the non-Fidesz, the ageists, the sexists, the racists, the ethicists, the Roma, the trans, the transphobes, the lesbians, the heterosexuals, the feminists, the performers and the technicians all find themselves in the vacuum cleaner hose of its black hole. The power of the vacuum is powerful, reordering the spaces of conceptuality.
Commentator 1:
The operation is a self-cleaning. As a result, you can finally step out of the decision loop of the constant replay of red pill or blue pill, coca-cola or pepsi-cola, Democrat or Republican, East or West, war or peace. You will be cleansed of your entrenched lack of future, you will be no longer the atemporal rot of your own simulacrum. You will be freed from the imprint of the petty hits of your retro-mania repeated in your mind and the infinite petty bourgeois in you with its either-or philosophy will be erased, who only lets you see a black and white world through the pins and sticks in your eyes. Pins or sticks?
Commentator 2:
In this touch, mediated by the animal hair, in the meeting of the eyes mediated by the light, the animal, the machine, and the human are reunited in you. Your clichés are erased, the simulacrum returns to the image, the similar to the identical. The self and the we become one consciousness.
SILENCE
Commentator 1:
As your journey begins to move away from the two-faced fetish, you feel a reorganization in your being, a desire to create a new world awakened.
Commentator 2:
In this new space, there is no longer a subordination of self and other, and nothing is afraid to be in dialogue with that which is alien to it. You can be yourself, for you are the essence of the other as your own. In this space, horizontal generosity extends vertically. Vertical generosity extends horizontally.
Commentator 1:
You are no longer afraid of debate, the whole struggle with criticism becomes attractive, because you know that criticism is the creation of a common space in which everyone is interdependent while taking root and becoming autonomous. Like a strawberry.
Alternately:
As it goes, it grows and makes roots again. As it goes, it grows and makes roots again. As it goes, it grows and makes roots again. As it goes, it grows and makes roots again …..
Fades, then silence
