I Love You To Bits: El Kazovszkij & Artistic Obsession
El Kazovszkij, Vajda Sheets, 1980-86, © El Kazovszkij Foundation, mixed media on paper, detail
Lajos Vajda, Still Life with Plate and Bird, © Estate of Lajos Vajda, pencil on paper, photograph Ferenczy Museum, Szentendre
December - January 2018/19
Between 1980 and 1986 the late, great Russian-Hungarian artist El Kazovszkij (1948-2008) made over three hundred “variations” on two drawings by Lajos Vajda known as the “Vajda Sheets”. Vajda was considered the master of Hungarian Surrealism, a brilliant talent that died far too young in 1941 at the age of 33. I have deliberately used inverted commas for the word “variations” as what El Kazovszkij did with Vajda’s drawings should more properly be called mutilations. Kazovszkij was not interested in appropriation, nor in entering into dialogue with Vajda. What Kazovszkij wanted was to smother Vajda, to silence him, to cover him up, to usurp him. The “Vajda Sheets” cannot even be considered an homage, in the traditional sense of the word, and yet they are also perversely like acts of love, because Kazovszkij loved Vajda, above all the other artists who influenced him, he loved Vajda to bits, literally, and when it came to love, it doesn’t get much more complicated than El Kazovszkij. Born Elena Kazovskaya in Leningrad (today St. Petersburg) on July 13th, 1948, he was born biologically female but was openly transgender and defined himself as an androphile man. In other words, from the youngest age Elena knew that he was a boy imprisoned in a girl’s body. Not only that, Elena knew that he loved boys, but not like the sissy girls he hated, like a boy who loves boys.
El Kazovszkij, Observing Christmas (Body Stories IV), 2004, © El Kazovszkij Foundation, paper, digital photo montage of the artist in fancy dress as a child
Of the two Vajda drawings that Kazovszkij worked over, it was “Still Life with Plate and Bird” (1936) that took the greatest beating. The other drawing was “Szentendre Facades” from 1937.
Lajos Vajda, Szentendre Facades, 1937, © Estate of Lajos Vajda, pencil on paper, photograph by me (hence the questionable quality…)
“Still Life with Plate and Bird” is a drawing that at first seems to almost tremble with its delicate lines, so fragile, so poetic, so innocent and lyrical. But look again and you see strange things are afoot in this still life. Firstly the play on perspective. Is the plate seen from above, or is it suspended mid-air? Is it actually a plate? Or perhaps it’s a face, or a head that we’re looking at. The left eye has even been drawn in, maybe, and the creature has doors for eyes, and behind them surely lies his soul. Look again and you see a long giraffe-like neck and then the body of this hybrid mutt. Part-boy, part-plate, part-chicken. And what about that big, sharp knife? It’s dangerously angled down, not just at its own body, but at you, the audience. Knives and sharp objects were important to El Kazovszkij, he collected them (and lots of other things too), he painted them often. In his own words:
“I very much like sharp and threatening spaces.
I am a creature with sadist leanings.”
When you look carefully at his “Vajda Sheets” that knife keeps re-appearing, always in the centre of that plate, that face, that sun, that bulging third eye that’s watching you. Pauline Réage is there too, top row, third sheet over with the very disturbing O-like figure and the title of her dark progeny “Histoire d’O” written into the side of Vajda’s plate. El Kazovszkij didn’t just like knives, he liked strong colours, thick lines, bold, unapologetic actions like mutilating & adoring the master to bits, 300 times over. Working him over in India ink, tempera, pen, felt-tip pen and chalk, in colours like blood and colours like death.
El Kazovszkij, Vajda Sheets XII (Selected Monuments IV & VI), 1980-86, © El Kazovszkij Foundation, paper, mixed media
El Kazovszkij, Vajda Sheets & non-Vajda Sheets. Theatrical Graphic Novel, 1980-86, © El Kazovszkij Foundation, Indian ink, pencil on paper,
The “Vajda Sheets” may have had their origins in love, or rather obsession, (the two cross over repeatedly in Kazovszkij’s complicated life and vast ouevre), but by the time he’s done working them over they are relegated to backdrops, theatrical backdrops, and the drama that is played out before them is yet another of Kazovszkij’s grand obsessions. That drama is the story of Pygmalion and Galatea. Written by Ovid over two thousand years ago it is about Pygmalion, king of Cyprus, who became so disenchanted by women that he sculpted himself a creature of perfection with whom he fell in love. By Aphrodite’s grace the sculpture is brought to life and becomes Galatea, Pygmalion’s companion. What you see repeatedly in his “Vajda Sheets” is a miniature re-enactment of Kazovszkij’s very own version of Pygmalion and Galatea, only it is a reversal of the story, where Galatea begins as a beautiful man/woman, the androgynous neither/nor kind, and is gradually turned into a sculpture, as perfect as any of the ancient Greek statues that so passionately obsessed him.
Early on in his career while still at art school Kazovszkij painted many nudes which he called “still lifes”. He would take a live model, cover their heads up, bind them, and then paint them. It is the human made sculptural, literally turned into a still life. If Cézanne wanted to “humanise” his apples, El Kazovszkij desired to turn his humans into apples.
“For me they were precious objects…
I painted them out of pleasure, like I would a peach, or an apple.”
El Kazovszkij, Landscape with Remnant II, 1975, © El Kazovszkij Foundation, oil on fibreboard
Perhaps his worship of bodily perfection over all other forms of love stemmed from his profound resentment at having been born a man in a woman’s body? Perhaps he felt his own body was so egregiously wrong that he sought in others the unity and perfection he had been denied from birth? Either way he adored Greek statues with the passion of a lover.
“For as long as I can remember, I’ve been in love with Greek statues…
even today I creep around them until I can get my hands on them…”
El Kazovszkij found a most novel way to get his hands onto Greek statues and it did not involve sneaking around marble Adonises in museums. Between 1977 and 2001 Kazovszkij created large scale performances known as the Dzhan Panopticons. Before we get to Dzhan, let’s just consider the word panopticon for a moment, from the Greek meaning all seeing. The first panopticon was a kind of crude telescope device with a little peep hole through which such delectable sights as the capitols of Europe could be seen. The other panopticon was the name of a circular prison designed in the 18th century for mass control and surveillance. Anyway, the Dzhan Panopticon performances were played out on varying scales and in various locations across Budapest for more than two decades. Dzhan was yet another obsession of El Kazovszkij, perhaps his greatest. He was a Turkish-Hungarian boy with whom he had a fleeting love affair in 1975, but whose impact reverberated throughout the artist’s career. These performances were in many ways yet another re-telling of the story of Pygmalion and Galatea in reverse.
There is always a ‘puppet’ and there is always a Pygmalion –
I take the role of Pygmalion.
For Kazovszkij the performances were ritual celebrations, akin to Christmas, or sacrifices to the gods. They were a way in which Kazovszkij could re-create the brief ecstasy of Dzhan, but they were also like religious life cycle rituals:
“An idol is born, and perhaps given a soul, but then it is slowly worn out and destroyed,
after which a memorial is erected to it, which becomes a new idol.”
El Kazovszkij, Dzsan Panopticon XXXI, or the Dream of Arcesilaus XI, February 26 1991, Feszek Klub, Budapest, © El Kazovszkij Foundation
His performers were magnificently arrayed (Kazovszkij also designed sets and costumes for the theatre), often bound and then made to stand on stages and pedestals, utterly still, as it was from this remove that his human statues could best be adored. Indeed this form of obsessive idealization was rendered into image time and time again in both his performances and paintings. The idealized object of desire is repeatedly depicted on pedestals, columns, mountain peaks and theatrical stages. Decades earlier, in “Still Life with a Plate and Bird”, Vajda had drawn his bizarre, little bird onto a pedestal.
After the “Vajda Sheets” Kazovszkij no longer painted live models, instead he mined the riches of his personal history, rendering his obsessions into paint. Whether it was about being transgender, or about unattainable emotion, or his lifelong search for faith, he filled his paintings with the obsessively recurring images of his very own mythology. Clouds, swans, sharp objects and shadows, to name just a few. There were so many obsessions in El Kazovszkij’s art and they came to life with such originality and passion that they were like acts of devotion. Whether a marble torso, Vajda, dogs (a whole other obsession), David Bowie or Sid Vicious he loved them all to bits. He was not interested in conforming to anyone’s expectations. He was not male and not female, not Russian and not Hungarian. The spaces and landscapes he painted were of this world, and akin to the moon. He was in a constant state of becoming, of transfiguration and metamorphosis. This intense movement, the manifestation of his restless, brilliant mind, can be seen in each and every one of his unforgettable paintings, which deserve far more loving attention than I can give them in a single essay. He made lots of paintings, constantly, and he sold just about all of them too. Then he’d use the money to travel the world. He mostly painted on cardboard because it was cheaper than canvas, and he painted quickly, not because he was careless but because painting was rhythmic, and urgent. His thick, lush, heavy, ecstatic brushstrokes would trip off one painting and onto the next. As a writer I long for the physicality of art. Maybe that’s why I love writing about art so much, because it brings me closer to the dynamic movement that we writers are denied.
El Kazovszkij, 1987, © István Halas
I love this photograph of El Kazovszkij. He’s so beautiful here, so very like a woman wanting to be like a man. The perfectly soft skin, the delicate mouth, the tapered fingers, the eyes. Eyes that gaze directly out at us but remain vulnerable and veiled. And yet he is also unmistakably and very deliberately ambiguous. He died of ovarian cancer in 2008. It was a cruel death for him, further proof that the body he was born into had never truly been his own. In a life so full of ambiguities one truth stands out: no art can be made without obsession. Obsession is what binds me to my writing. Without it there can be no urgency, and without urgency what hope can there be to write anything that’s truly captivating? The other side of artistic obsession, its more prosaic side - the side that is intensely boring in films about writers and artists - is discipline. There is no mystery to discipline, only bloody-mindedness, but that too has its appeal. It needs no questioning, one has simply to obey the reflex, to submit. There is also a much more ordinary obsession to which I am in thrall, and that is the obsession of children. The one obsession stokes and shapes the other. And then there is the obsession of one love. The obsession of the single lover, of one body given to another to adore, but not from afar, from very near. ◊
A little news from me:
In 2019 two of my short stories will be published in the United States. “The Red Ghost” will be published by the Chaffin Journal, and “Night Skies” will be published by Evening Street Review. Both of these short stories are off-shoots from my novel-in-progress. From 2019 Poetic Boost will become a quarterly publication. I’ll be keeping it Magyar and Modern, starting off with a piece about György Kovásznai in March. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year & Seasons Greetings to you all! Thank you for reading. See you in March.
*All of the El Kazovszkij quotes are translated by Steve Kane and appear in the exhibition catalogue of “The Survivor’s Shadow: The Life and Works of El Kazovszkij”, which took place in Budapest at the Hungarian National Gallery, Building A, November 6, 2015-February 14, 2016.