Surviving in the shadow of the un/seen: on the paradoxical in/visibility of El Kazovsky

It was with a certain sense of cognitive dissonance, during a whirlwind visit to Budapest in February 2016 to introduce work at a film festival that I stepped into the Hungarian National Gallery, housed in the former palace that once was home to the rulers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I was there to see ‘The Survivor’s Shadow: The Life and Work of El Kazovsky’ (see Figure 1): a massive, 19-room retrospective exhibition devoted to one of the most celebrated modern artists in Hungary, though one little known outside that country, who self-identified as trans, queer, and feminist (Rényi, 2015). It was cognitively dissonant because Hungary’s government had been led since 2010 by the right-wing populist Viktor Orbán of Fidesz (aka the Hungarian Civic Alliance) who, as part of a broader reactionary ethno-nationalist platform that also included virulent anti-immigrant policies, had outlawed the teaching of gender studies at Hungarian universities. Combining anti-gender ideology with explicit antisemitism, Orbán characterized the concept of ‘gender’ itself as a Western plot spearheaded by the Jewish financier George Soros to undermine Hungarian society by promoting pernicious feminist, queer and trans ideas that would destroy the heteropatriarchal family (Redden, 2018). Ultimately, the Orbán government closed the Soros-supported Central European University in Budapest, and forced its relocation to Vienna.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Poster for ‘The Survivor’s Shadow: The Life and Work of El Kazovsky’ exhibition held at the Hungarian National Gallery in 2015–2016.

El Kazovsky (1948–2008), who was ethnically Russian, was assigned female at birth in Leningrad (now St Petersburg); he was raised by his grandparent in western Siberia until the family moved to Budapest in 1964, where he ever afterward made his home. Even as a child, El Kazovsky had rebelled against a compulsory and unwanted femininity; he adopted an abbreviated version of his given first name and a masculinized version of his given surname as his preferred moniker while still quite young. Although he was never able to medically transition, El Kazovsky was adamant about his gender identity and its relationship to his artistic career. ‘My case is quite special’, the artist wrote, in that the life he made for himself was ‘built around the fact that I am transsexual’ (Rényi, 2015: 10). Contrasting his circumstances with that of trans women who enjoy a certain visibility ‘because in our culture “womanhood’ always makes a display of itself’, El Kazovsky noted his own visual unintelligibility ‘as a man living in what for me is a peculiar female body’. This situation was made even more complicated by the fact that he considered himself ‘a homosexual man who is attracted to very girlish-looking young men, whom I in fact see as women, and whom I love as women’. These complexities of gender and desire are a central focus of El Kazovsky’s work, which makes the mounting in Orbán’s Hungary of such an exhaustive and high-profile exhibition as ‘The Survivor’s Shadow’ seem all the more remarkable – it is hard to argue that transness is a subversive foreign conspiracy while celebrating a home-grown trans artist as a national treasure at the country’s most prestigious museum.

El Kazovsky studied painting at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts from 1970 to 1977, and participated in various avant-garde Hungarian art collectives including the No. 1 Group, the Studio of Young Artists, and Fölöspéldány (Surplus Goods). US and British glitter, glam, and punk-rock pop aesthetics, with a healthy dose of fetish iconography and a gay camp sensibility, were constant sources of inspiration for a career that nevertheless garnered many of Hungary’s top arts awards, including the Smohay Prize (for best fine artist under the age of 35), the Munkácsy Prize (named in honor of the most esteemed 19th-century Hungarian nationalist painter), and the Kossuth Prize (the most prestigious cultural award in Hungary). Each year from 1977 until 2001, El Kazovsky staged the Dzhan Panopticon, a Dionysian public performance spectacle that involved large casts of amateur performers engaged in complexly choreographed rituals, which revolved around the construction, destruction, and reconstruction of an idol that symbolized the artist’s brief, intense infatuation with a young Turkish man. Over the years, in tandem with El Kazovsky’s increasingly prominent career, the performance grew in scope and visibility; it started as an edgy underground art event for a circle of friends and evolved into something that was televised nationally and came to be considered a red-letter event in the Hungarian cultural affairs calendar. By the time of his death, El Kazovsky had become an institution.

The Dzhan Panopticon is typical of El Kazovsky’s style in that it repetitively reworks and expands seemingly mundane autobiographical subject matter (in this case, a love affair lasting only a few days) to the point that what one sees is not merely what is represented, but rather the process of elaborating the obsessions and compulsions and freewheeling fantasies that characterize the artist’s inner life. The ostensible content is but a jumping-off point for the revelation and exploration of an immensely rich subjective realm that is the actual focus of El Kazovsky’s art: as if the corporeal imperceptibility of his transness motivated and informed a unique manner of rendering himself visible through his work.

El Kazovsky’s way of working is perhaps most obvious in his paintings, which are best seen in series. Individually, each one can appear as a simplistic Keith Haring-esque cartoon in which slender, androgynous figures cast long shadows across barren landscapes, sometimes in the act of elegantly dismembering, decapitating, or castrating themselves with bladelike appendages. Taken together, and viewed one after another like the frames of an animated film arranged on the gallery walls, they document the protean psychical tumult of a restless, searching soul externalizing interior experiments with a succession of imagined embodied forms. Watchful birds of prey and ambiguous dog-like creatures similarly populate El Kazovsky’s paintings; he calls them ‘mixed’ or ‘migratory’ animals that function explicitly, in his hermetic symbology, as representations of a self that is always internally divided, multiple, other-than-human, on the move, and in process, with no solid place to land (Rényi, 2015: 15).

Although ‘transsexual’ is the word El Kazovsky used to describe himself, his own sense of disgendered placelessness anticipates a more contemporary non-binary sensibility. One 2003 painting consists of a two-headed version of his familiar dog-like totem animal standing on a road that is actually an infinite loop, its heads facing in opposite directions, its body inscribed with the words ‘vágy-vágy’ (‘desire-desire’). In Hungarian, the inscription offers an obvious play on words: without the accent marks, ‘vagy-vagy’ is how one says ‘either-or’ (p. 11). This simultaneous staging and refusal of dichotomy, particularly with regard to the masculine/feminine binary that would script our desire and identities, is characteristic of El Kazovsky’s work more generally.

The particularities of the Hungarian language in fact offer an insight into the paradoxical in/visibility of El Kazovsky as trans in an explicitly transphobic social context: its third-person singular pronoun is not gender-specific. While the English-language interpretive materials for ‘The Survivor’s Shadow’ explicitly address their use of he/him pronouns in reference to El Kazovsky, the Hungarian-language materials utterly sidestep the question of naming his gender identity (Rényi, 2015: 1). His transness is there to be perceived by those with the desire to perceive it, while remaining ignorable by those who don’t.

Hungarian grammar thus harbors a capacity for not-naming what is before its speakers’ eyes that is reminiscent of a strategy of willful blindness brilliantly rendered in speculative fiction writer China Miéville’s novel The City and the City (2009), in which residents of a formerly unified but now bitterly divided metropolis must train themselves to ‘unsee’ the inhabitants of the other side when moving through the contested border territories still shared and jointly occupied by the antagonistic cities, neither of which recognizes the legitimate presence of the other. It is reminiscent, too, of the central conceit of the Swedish film The Square (2017), in which the public installation of a square of fluorescent lights in the pavement outside a modern art museum is intended to demarcate a literal ‘public square’ in which all people can express their true needs and concerns, and share rights and obligations equally; the irony is that the vast injustices already readily perceivable on the street – homelessness, poverty, crime, addiction, racism, the refugee and migrant crises – become visible only when they are framed as art within The Square (Östlund, 2017). Similarly, El Kazovsky’s transness remains socially invisible even while it remains aesthetically foregrounded in his work.

In asking my Hungarian hosts to help me better understand the socio-political dynamics of the un/seen dimensions of a retrospective exhibition over-determined as seeable given El Kazovsky’s positioning within the National Gallery as a national hero, they described similar dynamic at work in Budapest’s LGBTQ Pride Parade. Under the nominally pro-minority-rights neoliberal government that preceded Orbán’s regime, they said, the annual Pride Parade was regularly targeted by homophobic ultranationalists who threatened violence, while the government, anxious not to appear complicit with queerness in the eyes of its most reactionary citizens, stood by ineffectually and provided little actual support or protection for its LGBT population. Under the explicitly reactionary Fidesz government, however, the Pride Parade has been able to proceed without molestation – because, in the name of safety, all the streets parallel to its route are cordoned off so that it is simultaneously present but unseen in public space, visible only to those who already know where, when, and how to see it (Háttér Society, 2016). A similar logic was at play in my own presence as in Budapest – I was told that a German bank had underwritten my travel as an ‘international’ transgender filmmaker to attend an LGBT film festival in Eastern Europe and thereby promote ‘transgender visibility’, with the proviso that their financial support remain anonymous, lest they be seen as Western foreigners intervening in Hungary to advocate for transgender rights.

The transnational queer/feminist theorist Cricket Keating has termed such maneuvers ‘homoprotectionist’, which she characterizes as an emergent, globally proliferating mode of governmentality in which dominant structures of state-sponsored homophobia – for example, the codification of sex/gender hierarchies in law – are flexibly paired with strategies for ostensibly protecting LGBTQ people from domination and oppression, resulting in an expansion of the state’s power to present itself as an impartial adjudicator of the respective interests of various segments of the population, while nevertheless perpetuating the very injustices it purported to seek to remedy (Keating, 2013: 246–253). The contemporary public im/perceptibility of El Kazovsky’s transness – and, by extension, the im/perceptibility of trans, queer, and feminist subjects in contemporary Hungary – is conditioned by this homoprotectionist logic.

El Kazovsky’s life and work simultaneously offer a strategy for moving agentially within contexts hostile to his own life. Given that Orbán was granted the power to rule by fiat during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, and in light of a continuing trend worldwide toward increasingly authoritarian forms of governance that are hostile to trans folks and other minoritized and marginalized people, ‘surviving in shadows’ is not so much a past that we have escaped through a (neo)liberal progress that brings us into the light, as it is a prescient mode of existence that merits greater attention for its aesthetic and political potentials than those it has yet received.