Supervisor: Prof. Dr Judit Takács, Freie Universität Berlin, Feb 13. 2024
El Kazovszkij Revisited: Queer In/Visibilities in State Socialist Cultural Fields
“climates where homosexual identity is not forbidden but simply unthinkable” – J. Jack Halberstam
glossary
table of contents
In 2014, for a MA seminar paper, I collected the secondary literature available about the Soviet-Hungarian artist El Kazovszkij (1948 Leningrad, USSR – 2008, Budapest, Hungary) and examined these texts by their approach to the artist’s gender identity and the oeuvre’s queerness. While I have found that the dominant narrative respects the artist’s identity, there is a general ambiguity surrounding the thematization of queerness in the oeuvre. The texts present a sort of queer essentialism, reflecting a belief in a cross-cultural universality of homosexuality. The interpretations of the queer relevance of the oeuvre are paired with methodological inconsistencies and a distinctive theoretical attitude compared to contemporary oeuvres.
There is a wide consensus that El Kazovszkij’s oeuvre is a queer one. El Kazovszkij came out as a transgender homosexual man in 1987, which he later reaffirmed several times. Even without the biographical details, the oeuvre continuously and consequently manifested ideas presuming a non-heteronormative view on gender and sexuality in public exhibitions and performances from the mid-1970s (See Appendix X and Y for the full list of exhibitions and performances). Here I primarily refer to some of El Kazovszkij’s core symbols, the idols: androgynous figures in his paintings and beautiful young men in his performances. These choices disrupt one of the oldest and most common topoi of European culture: the female body as the object and, at the same time, the metaphor of desire. The replacement of female bodies with non-female, androgynous and male bodies in the context of love and desire signifies the disruption of traditional social and cultural gender roles, therefore the desire-realities other than the hetero-normative majority’s. The question was never whether the oeuvre was queer, but the why and how? Why and how did an artist establish a highly successful queer oeuvre in the Hungarian People’s Republic under state socialism?
Yet this question of why and how an artist created queer cultural artifacts, moreover an entire queer oeuvre under state socialism, has never been asked by experts. Instead, it became rather usual to incorporate marginal commentary about the artist’s gender identity and sexual orientation in a self-explaining mode, emphasizing the personal struggle and tormented personal life. This approach implies a psycho-biographical interpretation. Nonetheless, these authors relied on prejudices about queer lives under state socialism and the artistic representation of queer desire instead of evidence-based inquiry to establish the connection between the private and the professional. Their wording implies that the artistic manifestation of queer ideas results from an unsurpassable force of queerness, it is somewhat “natural” to the queer essence.
The authors did not follow the reconstructionist approaches dominating the Cold War era East Central European cultural history. Contemporary art history essentially focuses on artists’ subversive or transgressive political attitudes and reflective conceptual art programs. Accordingly, art historians put great effort into the empirical investigation of the artists’ network and information capital relevant to their genre, stylistic, theoretical or thematic considerations. However, these aspects do not arise in the secondary literature on El Kazovszkij. Given the artist’s notorious intellectual hedonism and bright analytical logic demonstrated in his public communication, the unreflected distinctive treatment is particularly contradictory.
As contemporary Hungary is not known for its thriving LGBTQ+ friendliness, one might assume that this lack of consideration is reflective of the oeuvre’s national situatedness. However, some insight into the contemporary Hungarian art field sheds a different light on the matter. First, all the above-referred authors are well-established scholars whose work contributed valuable interpretations of other aspects of the oeuvre. Second, in their public, professional and personal communication, they cherish inclusive attitudes in politics, society and academia alike. Third, all of them had a personal and/or professional engagement with the artist. Therefore, it seems unfounded that they would have neglected the importance of queerness, one of the most central elements of the oeuvre, out of either a moral bias, professional unpreparedness, or inconvenience. What piqued my interest in the limited queer reading of El Kazovszkij’s oeuvre is its inconsistency with the professional situatedness of El Kazovszkij’s secondary literature. Simply put, the interpretative anomaly surrounding the oeuvre cannot be deduced from the situation. The problem lies elsewhere.
From the start, I have focused on pragmatic-based approaches. However, it took a long time to formulate the exact problem statement to anchor the research. From an art history point of view, neither the Hungarian nor the regional or global sources on the ECE region could provide eligible support. In fact, the sporadic Hungarian and international literature on queer cultural history in ECE further complicated the above-described ambivalence with additional contradictions. The revelation came from an unexpected source. In the volume, In a Queer Time and Place, J. Jack Halberstam described the non-urban American queer spaces as the “climates, where homosexual identities are not forbidden, but simply unthinkable.” This notion has unveiled the ambivalence of secondary literature. The interpretative anomalies surrounding queer cultural representations during state socialist ECE stem from the fact that they were created under state socialism, in a milieu where they are considered unthinkable. This is not a problem of isolated cases, not a problem of disciplinary unpreparedness, not national specificity. It is an epistemic anomaly affecting ECE cultural history. Furthermore, this deficit is not an autonomous phenomenon but can only be interpreted in the light of the imperialist and universalist Anglo-American queer episteme (see in detail in Chapter I. Introduction. From the Organized Chaos to Queer (Self-) decolonization. Obstacles and Constructive Solutions in East Central European Queer Episteme).
With all this in mind, revisiting El Kazovszkij’s rich and well-documented oeuvre holds research prospects beyond the case. It enables us to reflect on questions concerning ECE queer epistemic lacuna and to establish new methodological and theoretical considerations to enrich the queer (cultural) history under state socialist regimes. In other words, apart from giving a new reading to the El Kazovszkij oeuvre, I am looking for an answer to how one can approach queer themes in art and culture in a climate where queer identity is not forbidden but deemed unthinkable. Beyond the frame of the individual case and art historical perspectives, the research outcome could become a further step in the socialist and post-socialist ECE queer studies and the cultural decolonization to defy the East-West queer epistemic hierarchies.
Before moving forward on the outline of the dissertation, I must briefly touch on my empirical sources. I had originally planned to rely primarily on two sets of sources. First, the artist’s archives – including original works, drafts, manuscripts, correspondence, journals, library and personal objects – managed by the El Kazovszkij Foundation since 2008. Second, I have started to conduct semi-structured exploratory interviews with peers, friends and acquaintances of El Kazovszkij to map the artist’s professional and informal habitus, to support the interpretive work. Unfortunately, both options were suspended. Since late 2019, the archive has been blocked in court due to an inheritance dispute. The interviewing process ended with the outbreak of the Covid-19 epidemic. Since the questions would have touched on the interviewees’ private and/or intimate lives, virtual meetings could not have replaced a confidential and informal atmosphere of personal presence. I could not conduct enough interviews to cross-check what was said. Thus I had to exclude the vast majority of the already conducted interviews as reliable source materials.
My main sources were radically reduced, which forced me to restructure my research. The original plan was based on rich archival material and decades of unrecorded personal memories of El Kazovszkij's acquaintances. It was particularly difficult to accept as the original plan was based on rich archival material and hitherto non-recorded decades of personal memories. In the end, what remained were the artworks and published texts of the artist, as well as secondary literature. In parallel with the concretization of the research questions, an interesting methodological game has emerged: what to do with such a limited set of information when the goal is to draw conclusions on both El Kazovszkij’s complex oeuvre and the ECE queer epistemic deficit surrounding it, and the East-West epistemic hierarchy influencing the post-socialist integrative canonization of ECE culture and our thinking today. However, the research may have ultimately benefited from the limited source material of works and texts existing publicly, compared to hypothetically close to infinite possibilities offered by the private archive of thousands of objects and processing decades of oral history. The new framework helped me to organize my questions about the oeuvre around the artistic ego, programmatically performed in public, avoiding the speculative psychologizing that involves sporadic subjective information about private matters of an already passed artist
Turning now to the dissertation’s outline, the questions derived above must be turned around. I move from the structural questions into the direction of the case study. Thus, the opening chapter of the dissertation aims to de- and reconstruct the epistemological framework. In Chapter 1. From the Organized Chaos to Queer (Self-) Decolonisation. Obstacles and Constructive Solutions in East Central European Queer Episteme aim to outline the epistemological gap/ambivalence that frames Cold War-era East and Central European queer cultural production and art history: the belief bias solely focusing on imagined totalitarian state persecution and censorship. The pursuit was primarily motivated by the lack of consistency between evidence and theory: the historical situatedness of state-socialist queer cultural production and the post-socialist scholarly literature on them. I interpret the epistemological ambivalence from three perspectives stemming from the intersections of queer, postcolonial, and post-socialist studies and ECE cultural and art history. First, I analyze the obstacles and possibilities for adapting queer studies to ECE's Cold War past. Second, I examine the role of sexual custom concerning the center-periphery East-West epistemic dichotomous hierarchies. Third, I demonstrate how the post-socialist queer art history literature organically fits within the prevailing discourse of the self-colonizing culture of the periphery. Finally, to minimize the possibility of interpretative bias, I propose to return to pragmatic-based research aims. Rather than focusing on the hiatus of terms and conditions of Western democracies in the Eastern Bloc, we should focus on what can be said about the queer cultural artifacts produced under state socialism based on the evidence of their existence in their historical situatedness.
In the second section, II. Queer Lives and Queer Cultural Representation in the Hungarian People’s Republic after 1961 first I introduce II.I El Kazovszkij’s Biography. Apart from introducing the case to the readers, I establish that the oeuvre was consciously and continuously queer, and it was also highly successful and supported by the state-socialist cultural authorities. Then I raise the question of whether El Kazovszkij’s case was exceptional or rather resulting from systematic opportunities.
In II.II Queer Matter in the Hungarian People’s Republic, I examine the stat-socialist (cultural) authorities’ systematic attitude towards queer cultural representation. Mixing quantitative and qualitative research, in the context of a legal-political and social overview, through the genre of film, I conclude that the state socialist authorities did not persecute, censor or ban queer cultural representation. And that the possibility of creating and succeeding with queer-themed cultural products was in fact systematic. In the last section of the chapter, I dive into details of the lived experiences of queer citizens, including queer cultural creators of the period.
After establishing evidence-based contexts, returning to the case study, in the second section, I explore the issue of the possibilities of III. Queer Consciousness in the Hungarian People’s Republic, following aspects of knowledge and self-representation. In Chapter III.I Circulation of Queer Information in the Hungarian People’s Republic, I take account of El Kazovszkij's queer cultural capital, including medical and psy-sciences literature, fine literature, fine arts, film, as well as the weight of the artist’s subcommunal integrity in Budapest queer circles under state socialist period. In the second part, III.II. Queer Camp in the Communist Camp? Two Attempts to Read Camp in the Hungarian People’s Republic, I approach what we know as a queer camp interpretation connected to El Kazovszkij's oeuvre and public self-representation. Contrary to the existing secondary literature, I arrive at the conclusion that El Kazovszkij’s self-representation was camp and queer, but it is contradictory to what we know as a queer camp from the primarily American context, as it does not refer to an integrative socio-cultural signifier of a collective identity. Instead it highlights the absolute uniqueness of the artist’s performed genius persona.
I have devoted the last Chapter III.III Building a Transcendent Queer Universe in the Hungarian People’s Republic to the reconstruction of El Kazovszkij’s theoretical artistic program. Opposed to the essentialist understanding, I demonstrate that the queer themes in El Kazovszkij’s oeuvre are an integral element of a highly reflective theoretical artistic program.
I anticipate that the argumentation of the dissertation is linear on the surface. However, plenty of loops and crosslinks between chapters may occasionally slow down the argumentation. Yet they are vitally important in providing a steady basis of empirical support for the new hypothesis system I have constructed.
Supervisor: Prof. Dr Judit Takács, Freie Universität Berlin, Feb 13. 2024
El Kazovszkij Revisited: Queer In/Visibilities in State Socialist Cultural Fields
“climates where homosexual identity is not forbidden but simply unthinkable”
J. Jack Halberstam
glossary
table of contents
In 2014, for a MA seminar paper, I collected the secondary literature available about the Soviet-Hungarian artist El Kazovszkij (1948 Leningrad, USSR – 2008, Budapest, Hungary) and examined these texts by their approach to the artist’s gender identity and the oeuvre’s queerness. While I have found that the dominant narrative respects the artist’s identity, there is a general ambiguity surrounding the thematization of queerness in the oeuvre. The texts present a sort of queer essentialism, reflecting a belief in a cross-cultural universality of homosexuality. The interpretations of the queer relevance of the oeuvre are paired with methodological inconsistencies and a distinctive theoretical attitude compared to contemporary oeuvres.
There is a wide consensus that El Kazovszkij’s oeuvre is a queer one. El Kazovszkij came out as a transgender homosexual man in 1987, which he later reaffirmed several times. Even without the biographical details, the oeuvre continuously and consequently manifested ideas presuming a non-heteronormative view on gender and sexuality in public exhibitions and performances from the mid-1970s (See Appendix X and Y for the full list of exhibitions and performances). Here I primarily refer to some of El Kazovszkij’s core symbols, the idols: androgynous figures in his paintings and beautiful young men in his performances. These choices disrupt one of the oldest and most common topoi of European culture: the female body as the object and, at the same time, the metaphor of desire. The replacement of female bodies with non-female, androgynous and male bodies in the context of love and desire signifies the disruption of traditional social and cultural gender roles, therefore the desire-realities other than the hetero-normative majority’s. The question was never whether the oeuvre was queer, but the why and how? Why and how did an artist establish a highly successful queer oeuvre in the Hungarian People’s Republic under state socialism?
Yet this question of why and how an artist created queer cultural artifacts, moreover an entire queer oeuvre under state socialism, has never been asked by experts. Instead, it became rather usual to incorporate marginal commentary about the artist’s gender identity and sexual orientation in a self-explaining mode, emphasizing the personal struggle and tormented personal life. This approach implies a psycho-biographical interpretation. Nonetheless, these authors relied on prejudices about queer lives under state socialism and the artistic representation of queer desire instead of evidence-based inquiry to establish the connection between the private and the professional. Their wording implies that the artistic manifestation of queer ideas results from an unsurpassable force of queerness, it is somewhat “natural” to the queer essence.
The authors did not follow the reconstructionist approaches dominating the Cold War era East Central European cultural history. Contemporary art history essentially focuses on artists’ subversive or transgressive political attitudes and reflective conceptual art programs. Accordingly, art historians put great effort into the empirical investigation of the artists’ network and information capital relevant to their genre, stylistic, theoretical or thematic considerations. However, these aspects do not arise in the secondary literature on El Kazovszkij. Given the artist’s notorious intellectual hedonism and bright analytical logic demonstrated in his public communication, the unreflected distinctive treatment is particularly contradictory.
As contemporary Hungary is not known for its thriving LGBTQ+ friendliness, one might assume that this lack of consideration is reflective of the oeuvre’s national situatedness. However, some insight into the contemporary Hungarian art field sheds a different light on the matter. First, all the above-referred authors are well-established scholars whose work contributed valuable interpretations of other aspects of the oeuvre. Second, in their public, professional and personal communication, they cherish inclusive attitudes in politics, society and academia alike. Third, all of them had a personal and/or professional engagement with the artist. Therefore, it seems unfounded that they would have neglected the importance of queerness, one of the most central elements of the oeuvre, out of either a moral bias, professional unpreparedness, or inconvenience. What piqued my interest in the limited queer reading of El Kazovszkij’s oeuvre is its inconsistency with the professional situatedness of El Kazovszkij’s secondary literature. Simply put, the interpretative anomaly surrounding the oeuvre cannot be deduced from the situation. The problem lies elsewhere.
From the start, I have focused on pragmatic-based approaches. However, it took a long time to formulate the exact problem statement to anchor the research. From an art history point of view, neither the Hungarian nor the regional or global sources on the ECE region could provide eligible support. In fact, the sporadic Hungarian and international literature on queer cultural history in ECE further complicated the above-described ambivalence with additional contradictions. The revelation came from an unexpected source. In the volume, In a Queer Time and Place, J. Jack Halberstam described the non-urban American queer spaces as the “climates, where homosexual identities are not forbidden, but simply unthinkable.” This notion has unveiled the ambivalence of secondary literature. The interpretative anomalies surrounding queer cultural representations during state socialist ECE stem from the fact that they were created under state socialism, in a milieu where they are considered unthinkable. This is not a problem of isolated cases, not a problem of disciplinary unpreparedness, not national specificity. It is an epistemic anomaly affecting ECE cultural history. Furthermore, this deficit is not an autonomous phenomenon but can only be interpreted in the light of the imperialist and universalist Anglo-American queer episteme (see in detail in Chapter I. Introduction. From the Organized Chaos to Queer (Self-) decolonization. Obstacles and Constructive Solutions in East Central European Queer Episteme).
With all this in mind, revisiting El Kazovszkij’s rich and well-documented oeuvre holds research prospects beyond the case. It enables us to reflect on questions concerning ECE queer epistemic lacuna and to establish new methodological and theoretical considerations to enrich the queer (cultural) history under state socialist regimes. In other words, apart from giving a new reading to the El Kazovszkij oeuvre, I am looking for an answer to how one can approach queer themes in art and culture in a climate where queer identity is not forbidden but deemed unthinkable. Beyond the frame of the individual case and art historical perspectives, the research outcome could become a further step in the socialist and post-socialist ECE queer studies and the cultural decolonization to defy the East-West queer epistemic hierarchies.
Before moving forward on the outline of the dissertation, I must briefly touch on my empirical sources. I had originally planned to rely primarily on two sets of sources. First, the artist’s archives – including original works, drafts, manuscripts, correspondence, journals, library and personal objects – managed by the El Kazovszkij Foundation since 2008. Second, I have started to conduct semi-structured exploratory interviews with peers, friends and acquaintances of El Kazovszkij to map the artist’s professional and informal habitus, to support the interpretive work. Unfortunately, both options were suspended. Since late 2019, the archive has been blocked in court due to an inheritance dispute. The interviewing process ended with the outbreak of the Covid-19 epidemic. Since the questions would have touched on the interviewees’ private and/or intimate lives, virtual meetings could not have replaced a confidential and informal atmosphere of personal presence. I could not conduct enough interviews to cross-check what was said. Thus I had to exclude the vast majority of the already conducted interviews as reliable source materials.
My main sources were radically reduced, which forced me to restructure my research. The original plan was based on rich archival material and decades of unrecorded personal memories of El Kazovszkij's acquaintances. It was particularly difficult to accept as the original plan was based on rich archival material and hitherto non-recorded decades of personal memories. In the end, what remained were the artworks and published texts of the artist, as well as secondary literature. In parallel with the concretization of the research questions, an interesting methodological game has emerged: what to do with such a limited set of information when the goal is to draw conclusions on both El Kazovszkij’s complex oeuvre and the ECE queer epistemic deficit surrounding it, and the East-West epistemic hierarchy influencing the post-socialist integrative canonization of ECE culture and our thinking today. However, the research may have ultimately benefited from the limited source material of works and texts existing publicly, compared to hypothetically close to infinite possibilities offered by the private archive of thousands of objects and processing decades of oral history. The new framework helped me to organize my questions about the oeuvre around the artistic ego, programmatically performed in public, avoiding the speculative psychologizing that involves sporadic subjective information about private matters of an already passed artist
Turning now to the dissertation’s outline, the questions derived above must be turned around. I move from the structural questions into the direction of the case study. Thus, the opening chapter of the dissertation aims to de- and reconstruct the epistemological framework. In Chapter 1. From the Organized Chaos to Queer (Self-) Decolonisation. Obstacles and Constructive Solutions in East Central European Queer Episteme aim to outline the epistemological gap/ambivalence that frames Cold War-era East and Central European queer cultural production and art history: the belief bias solely focusing on imagined totalitarian state persecution and censorship. The pursuit was primarily motivated by the lack of consistency between evidence and theory: the historical situatedness of state-socialist queer cultural production and the post-socialist scholarly literature on them. I interpret the epistemological ambivalence from three perspectives stemming from the intersections of queer, postcolonial, and post-socialist studies and ECE cultural and art history. First, I analyze the obstacles and possibilities for adapting queer studies to ECE's Cold War past. Second, I examine the role of sexual custom concerning the center-periphery East-West epistemic dichotomous hierarchies. Third, I demonstrate how the post-socialist queer art history literature organically fits within the prevailing discourse of the self-colonizing culture of the periphery. Finally, to minimize the possibility of interpretative bias, I propose to return to pragmatic-based research aims. Rather than focusing on the hiatus of terms and conditions of Western democracies in the Eastern Bloc, we should focus on what can be said about the queer cultural artifacts produced under state socialism based on the evidence of their existence in their historical situatedness.
In the second section, II. Queer Lives and Queer Cultural Representation in the Hungarian People’s Republic after 1961 first I introduce II.I El Kazovszkij’s Biography. Apart from introducing the case to the readers, I establish that the oeuvre was consciously and continuously queer, and it was also highly successful and supported by the state-socialist cultural authorities. Then I raise the question of whether El Kazovszkij’s case was exceptional or rather resulting from systematic opportunities.
In II.II Queer Matter in the Hungarian People’s Republic, I examine the stat-socialist (cultural) authorities’ systematic attitude towards queer cultural representation. Mixing quantitative and qualitative research, in the context of a legal-political and social overview, through the genre of film, I conclude that the state socialist authorities did not persecute, censor or ban queer cultural representation. And that the possibility of creating and succeeding with queer-themed cultural products was in fact systematic. In the last section of the chapter, I dive into details of the lived experiences of queer citizens, including queer cultural creators of the period.
After establishing evidence-based contexts, returning to the case study, in the second section, I explore the issue of the possibilities of III. Queer Consciousness in the Hungarian People’s Republic, following aspects of knowledge and self-representation. In Chapter III.I Circulation of Queer Information in the Hungarian People’s Republic, I take account of El Kazovszkij's queer cultural capital, including medical and psy-sciences literature, fine literature, fine arts, film, as well as the weight of the artist’s subcommunal integrity in Budapest queer circles under state socialist period. In the second part, III.II. Queer Camp in the Communist Camp? Two Attempts to Read Camp in the Hungarian People’s Republic, I approach what we know as a queer camp interpretation connected to El Kazovszkij's oeuvre and public self-representation. Contrary to the existing secondary literature, I arrive at the conclusion that El Kazovszkij’s self-representation was camp and queer, but it is contradictory to what we know as a queer camp from the primarily American context, as it does not refer to an integrative socio-cultural signifier of a collective identity. Instead it highlights the absolute uniqueness of the artist’s performed genius persona.
I have devoted the last Chapter III.III Building a Transcendent Queer Universe in the Hungarian People’s Republic to the reconstruction of El Kazovszkij’s theoretical artistic program. Opposed to the essentialist understanding, I demonstrate that the queer themes in El Kazovszkij’s oeuvre are an integral element of a highly reflective theoretical artistic program.
I anticipate that the argumentation of the dissertation is linear on the surface. However, plenty of loops and crosslinks between chapters may occasionally slow down the argumentation. Yet they are vitally important in providing a steady basis of empirical support for the new hypothesis system I have constructed.
Supervisor: Prof. Dr Judit Takács, Freie Universität Berlin, Feb 13. 2024
El Kazovszkij Revisited: Queer In/Visibilities in State Socialist Cultural Fields
“climates where homosexual identity is not forbidden but simply unthinkable”
J. Jack Halberstam
glossary
table of contents
In 2014, for a MA seminar paper, I collected the secondary literature available about the Soviet-Hungarian artist El Kazovszkij (1948 Leningrad, USSR – 2008, Budapest, Hungary) and examined these texts by their approach to the artist’s gender identity and the oeuvre’s queerness. While I have found that the dominant narrative respects the artist’s identity, there is a general ambiguity surrounding the thematization of queerness in the oeuvre. The texts present a sort of queer essentialism, reflecting a belief in a cross-cultural universality of homosexuality. The interpretations of the queer relevance of the oeuvre are paired with methodological inconsistencies and a distinctive theoretical attitude compared to contemporary oeuvres.
There is a wide consensus that El Kazovszkij’s oeuvre is a queer one. El Kazovszkij came out as a transgender homosexual man in 1987, which he later reaffirmed several times. Even without the biographical details, the oeuvre continuously and consequently manifested ideas presuming a non-heteronormative view on gender and sexuality in public exhibitions and performances from the mid-1970s (See Appendix X and Y for the full list of exhibitions and performances). Here I primarily refer to some of El Kazovszkij’s core symbols, the idols: androgynous figures in his paintings and beautiful young men in his performances. These choices disrupt one of the oldest and most common topoi of European culture: the female body as the object and, at the same time, the metaphor of desire. The replacement of female bodies with non-female, androgynous and male bodies in the context of love and desire signifies the disruption of traditional social and cultural gender roles, therefore the desire-realities other than the hetero-normative majority’s. The question was never whether the oeuvre was queer, but the why and how? Why and how did an artist establish a highly successful queer oeuvre in the Hungarian People’s Republic under state socialism?
Yet this question of why and how an artist created queer cultural artifacts, moreover an entire queer oeuvre under state socialism, has never been asked by experts. Instead, it became rather usual to incorporate marginal commentary about the artist’s gender identity and sexual orientation in a self-explaining mode, emphasizing the personal struggle and tormented personal life. This approach implies a psycho-biographical interpretation. Nonetheless, these authors relied on prejudices about queer lives under state socialism and the artistic representation of queer desire instead of evidence-based inquiry to establish the connection between the private and the professional. Their wording implies that the artistic manifestation of queer ideas results from an unsurpassable force of queerness, it is somewhat “natural” to the queer essence.
The authors did not follow the reconstructionist approaches dominating the Cold War era East Central European cultural history. Contemporary art history essentially focuses on artists’ subversive or transgressive political attitudes and reflective conceptual art programs. Accordingly, art historians put great effort into the empirical investigation of the artists’ network and information capital relevant to their genre, stylistic, theoretical or thematic considerations. However, these aspects do not arise in the secondary literature on El Kazovszkij. Given the artist’s notorious intellectual hedonism and bright analytical logic demonstrated in his public communication, the unreflected distinctive treatment is particularly contradictory.
As contemporary Hungary is not known for its thriving LGBTQ+ friendliness, one might assume that this lack of consideration is reflective of the oeuvre’s national situatedness. However, some insight into the contemporary Hungarian art field sheds a different light on the matter. First, all the above-referred authors are well-established scholars whose work contributed valuable interpretations of other aspects of the oeuvre. Second, in their public, professional and personal communication, they cherish inclusive attitudes in politics, society and academia alike. Third, all of them had a personal and/or professional engagement with the artist. Therefore, it seems unfounded that they would have neglected the importance of queerness, one of the most central elements of the oeuvre, out of either a moral bias, professional unpreparedness, or inconvenience. What piqued my interest in the limited queer reading of El Kazovszkij’s oeuvre is its inconsistency with the professional situatedness of El Kazovszkij’s secondary literature. Simply put, the interpretative anomaly surrounding the oeuvre cannot be deduced from the situation. The problem lies elsewhere.
From the start, I have focused on pragmatic-based approaches. However, it took a long time to formulate the exact problem statement to anchor the research. From an art history point of view, neither the Hungarian nor the regional or global sources on the ECE region could provide eligible support. In fact, the sporadic Hungarian and international literature on queer cultural history in ECE further complicated the above-described ambivalence with additional contradictions. The revelation came from an unexpected source. In the volume, In a Queer Time and Place, J. Jack Halberstam described the non-urban American queer spaces as the “climates, where homosexual identities are not forbidden, but simply unthinkable.” This notion has unveiled the ambivalence of secondary literature. The interpretative anomalies surrounding queer cultural representations during state socialist ECE stem from the fact that they were created under state socialism, in a milieu where they are considered unthinkable. This is not a problem of isolated cases, not a problem of disciplinary unpreparedness, not national specificity. It is an epistemic anomaly affecting ECE cultural history. Furthermore, this deficit is not an autonomous phenomenon but can only be interpreted in the light of the imperialist and universalist Anglo-American queer episteme (see in detail in Chapter I. Introduction. From the Organized Chaos to Queer (Self-) decolonization. Obstacles and Constructive Solutions in East Central European Queer Episteme).
With all this in mind, revisiting El Kazovszkij’s rich and well-documented oeuvre holds research prospects beyond the case. It enables us to reflect on questions concerning ECE queer epistemic lacuna and to establish new methodological and theoretical considerations to enrich the queer (cultural) history under state socialist regimes. In other words, apart from giving a new reading to the El Kazovszkij oeuvre, I am looking for an answer to how one can approach queer themes in art and culture in a climate where queer identity is not forbidden but deemed unthinkable. Beyond the frame of the individual case and art historical perspectives, the research outcome could become a further step in the socialist and post-socialist ECE queer studies and the cultural decolonization to defy the East-West queer epistemic hierarchies.
Before moving forward on the outline of the dissertation, I must briefly touch on my empirical sources. I had originally planned to rely primarily on two sets of sources. First, the artist’s archives – including original works, drafts, manuscripts, correspondence, journals, library and personal objects – managed by the El Kazovszkij Foundation since 2008. Second, I have started to conduct semi-structured exploratory interviews with peers, friends and acquaintances of El Kazovszkij to map the artist’s professional and informal habitus, to support the interpretive work. Unfortunately, both options were suspended. Since late 2019, the archive has been blocked in court due to an inheritance dispute. The interviewing process ended with the outbreak of the Covid-19 epidemic. Since the questions would have touched on the interviewees’ private and/or intimate lives, virtual meetings could not have replaced a confidential and informal atmosphere of personal presence. I could not conduct enough interviews to cross-check what was said. Thus I had to exclude the vast majority of the already conducted interviews as reliable source materials.
My main sources were radically reduced, which forced me to restructure my research. The original plan was based on rich archival material and decades of unrecorded personal memories of El Kazovszkij's acquaintances. It was particularly difficult to accept as the original plan was based on rich archival material and hitherto non-recorded decades of personal memories. In the end, what remained were the artworks and published texts of the artist, as well as secondary literature. In parallel with the concretization of the research questions, an interesting methodological game has emerged: what to do with such a limited set of information when the goal is to draw conclusions on both El Kazovszkij’s complex oeuvre and the ECE queer epistemic deficit surrounding it, and the East-West epistemic hierarchy influencing the post-socialist integrative canonization of ECE culture and our thinking today. However, the research may have ultimately benefited from the limited source material of works and texts existing publicly, compared to hypothetically close to infinite possibilities offered by the private archive of thousands of objects and processing decades of oral history. The new framework helped me to organize my questions about the oeuvre around the artistic ego, programmatically performed in public, avoiding the speculative psychologizing that involves sporadic subjective information about private matters of an already passed artist
Turning now to the dissertation’s outline, the questions derived above must be turned around. I move from the structural questions into the direction of the case study. Thus, the opening chapter of the dissertation aims to de- and reconstruct the epistemological framework. In Chapter 1. From the Organized Chaos to Queer (Self-) Decolonisation. Obstacles and Constructive Solutions in East Central European Queer Episteme aim to outline the epistemological gap/ambivalence that frames Cold War-era East and Central European queer cultural production and art history: the belief bias solely focusing on imagined totalitarian state persecution and censorship. The pursuit was primarily motivated by the lack of consistency between evidence and theory: the historical situatedness of state-socialist queer cultural production and the post-socialist scholarly literature on them. I interpret the epistemological ambivalence from three perspectives stemming from the intersections of queer, postcolonial, and post-socialist studies and ECE cultural and art history. First, I analyze the obstacles and possibilities for adapting queer studies to ECE's Cold War past. Second, I examine the role of sexual custom concerning the center-periphery East-West epistemic dichotomous hierarchies. Third, I demonstrate how the post-socialist queer art history literature organically fits within the prevailing discourse of the self-colonizing culture of the periphery. Finally, to minimize the possibility of interpretative bias, I propose to return to pragmatic-based research aims. Rather than focusing on the hiatus of terms and conditions of Western democracies in the Eastern Bloc, we should focus on what can be said about the queer cultural artifacts produced under state socialism based on the evidence of their existence in their historical situatedness.
In the second section, II. Queer Lives and Queer Cultural Representation in the Hungarian People’s Republic after 1961 first I introduce II.I El Kazovszkij’s Biography. Apart from introducing the case to the readers, I establish that the oeuvre was consciously and continuously queer, and it was also highly successful and supported by the state-socialist cultural authorities. Then I raise the question of whether El Kazovszkij’s case was exceptional or rather resulting from systematic opportunities.
In II.II Queer Matter in the Hungarian People’s Republic, I examine the stat-socialist (cultural) authorities’ systematic attitude towards queer cultural representation. Mixing quantitative and qualitative research, in the context of a legal-political and social overview, through the genre of film, I conclude that the state socialist authorities did not persecute, censor or ban queer cultural representation. And that the possibility of creating and succeeding with queer-themed cultural products was in fact systematic. In the last section of the chapter, I dive into details of the lived experiences of queer citizens, including queer cultural creators of the period.
After establishing evidence-based contexts, returning to the case study, in the second section, I explore the issue of the possibilities of III. Queer Consciousness in the Hungarian People’s Republic, following aspects of knowledge and self-representation. In Chapter III.I Circulation of Queer Information in the Hungarian People’s Republic, I take account of El Kazovszkij's queer cultural capital, including medical and psy-sciences literature, fine literature, fine arts, film, as well as the weight of the artist’s subcommunal integrity in Budapest queer circles under state socialist period. In the second part, III.II. Queer Camp in the Communist Camp? Two Attempts to Read Camp in the Hungarian People’s Republic, I approach what we know as a queer camp interpretation connected to El Kazovszkij's oeuvre and public self-representation. Contrary to the existing secondary literature, I arrive at the conclusion that El Kazovszkij’s self-representation was camp and queer, but it is contradictory to what we know as a queer camp from the primarily American context, as it does not refer to an integrative socio-cultural signifier of a collective identity. Instead it highlights the absolute uniqueness of the artist’s performed genius persona.
I have devoted the last Chapter III.III Building a Transcendent Queer Universe in the Hungarian People’s Republic to the reconstruction of El Kazovszkij’s theoretical artistic program. Opposed to the essentialist understanding, I demonstrate that the queer themes in El Kazovszkij’s oeuvre are an integral element of a highly reflective theoretical artistic program.
I anticipate that the argumentation of the dissertation is linear on the surface. However, plenty of loops and crosslinks between chapters may occasionally slow down the argumentation. Yet they are vitally important in providing a steady basis of empirical support for the new hypothesis system I have constructed.