Irit Rogoff
Visual Culture, Goldsmith's College



It was a dull conference in Germany in the middle of the summer, A fierce heat wave further dulled senses already laid low by tedious conference papers and so when a suggestion was made that some of us go out to the nearby valley to look at a radically innovative factory building being designed by James Sterling, it seemed like momentary salvation. The building was indeed remarkably interesting but we had fallen into the hands of the site manager who was in love with every doorknob of a factory that stretched for miles throughout the valley, there was no water on the site and the temperature was in the hundreds. After several hours of traipsing about I had reached the end of my tether. I turned to the person next to me who turned out to be a Polish cultural historian who had, in a moment of weakness in1989 , briefly and inadvertently become the mayor of Krakow, and said that I intended to faint and thereby put an end to the group's collective misery. He responded with a pitying look and said that I had much to learn about politics. He then turned around to our guide, struck a mayoral pose with arms spread and head slanted and said with great bravura "How can we ever thank you for this magnificent tour which has been the highlight of our visit to Germany, we shall now take its precious memory home with us".

At that very moment the tour ended and I understood that claims concerning 'the death of communism' had heralded a false ending. In fact it became clear that while state structures may have toppled, the lived cultural practices of ironic allusion, oblique references and deferred meanings were not only with us but that we, sophisticated Western cultural theorists, had a great deal to learn from them about the actualities of ambivalence and split subject positionalities. What is left behind in the wake of state Communism exemplifies dense textuality, the constant production of a multiplicity of concurrent signifying effects.There is no nostalgia for lost heroic radicalisms in the desire to understand its complexities as a model for the double or triple consciousness which is required of the ever growing army of the culturally displaced at the end of the 20th century. While I would not accept such positions as Stejpan Mestrovic's which argues that the confluence of post communism and Post modernism, the loss of two grounding meta narratives, have worked together towards an unraveling of the West , I would certainly argue against the notion that Eastern Europe has been 'lost' or 'replaced' by simulacra of pure Western capitalism.
How to withstand the triumphant rhetoric of historical beginnings and political endings, a rhetoric that takes for granted and without problematizing notions of linear progression, periodization and teleological history, are questions being asked across every facet of culture. In the ephemeral remains of communist culture, in what has continued because it is psychic rather than material, we have an opportunity to construct a model that sets up theoretical inter-connections between some of the major traumas of the second half of the century. By this I mean a model which works across all three worlds to understand how the collapse of colonialism, of communism and cold war certitude's, of indigenous economies and markets, of long sustained regional and ethnic balances, can be set up in some form of relationality rather than hierarchized according to who holds claim to the greatest hardships and grievances. One of these common issues has to do with the need to avoid the effacing nature of Capitalism's global triumph or the erasures of migration's required assimilations, Another question concerns the need to de-hierarchize the radical shifts of the post-colonial, migratory, post cold war world, of how to hold on to the moment of double consciousness and produce from it a model that extends beyond the position of marginality within a hegemonic culture. In George Legrady's "Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War", a computer archive of assorted images grouped within highly personalized taxonomies and framed within the ordering principles of the former Hungarian state's propaganda rhetoric, there is a thread of double consciousness that might be followed. This is an interactive work of art on computer disk which can be engaged with in the context of the art gallery or through one's own home computer in the form of a CD ROM.

An endless process of transparent layerings and the use of computer interactivity in order to chart some negotiations between the conscious and unconscious mind of historical narrative, are the informing structural principles of this work. The first level of transparent layerings is anchored in concrete, named and acknowledged histories. The initial site of the work is the floor plan of the former museum of communist propaganda which was installed by the ruling Hungarian Communist party on the site of the former Budapest Castle and which now serves as the Ludwig Museum. Entering the archive, following along the sound of footsteps heard against cold, institutional stone floors we encounter a floor plan and are required to choose the trajectory of our visit in this autobiographical archive of an identity constructed through the cold war. The narratives that inform the archive are numerous, the history of Hungary, before, during and after the second world war, the communist takeover and the current moment. This is intersected with the narrative of one family, bourgeois and well off, whose history is overlaid but not erased by communism, continues through a combination of remaining in Hungary, migrations to Austria and Canada, partial journeys of return and Legrady's own wanderings in the region on a journey of accumulating references for reading the text which had been written over Hungarian national identity.

The museum as starting point is the site of many accumulations. A site of memory, Legrady also claims it as a possible arena for a dialogue with authority about the process of historicization. Officially sanctioned legitimacy battles it out with personal memory throughout the different rooms of the archive's floor plan. The duel is particularly interesting because it extends way beyond a simple binarism between official communist history and resistant bourgeois memory. The entire duel is set up through a series of 'seconds' as it were, an intertextuality that reads every association though numerous others, an understanding that one does not have a personal memory but always a cultural memory. For all of the archive's extremely personal artifacts; baby pictures, home movies, images of the artist's parents' young love, sagas of family houses, personal testimonials of the experience of escape, migration and the difficulties of adapting to a new culture, family voices recounting stories and much, much more - the narrative always remains cultural. One is reminded of Barthes commenting on his own autobiographical meanderings in Barthes on Barthes ;

"Here I am henceforth in a state of disarming familiarity: I see the fissure in the subject (the very thing about which he can say nothing). It follows that the childhood photograph is both highly indiscreet (it is my body from underneath which is presented) and quite discreet (the photograph is not of 'me') So you will find here mingled with the "family romance" only the figurations of the body's pre-history - of that body making its way towards the labor and pleasure of writing. For such is the theoretical meaning of this limitation: to show that the time of the narrative (of the imagery) ends with the subject's youth: the only biography is of an unproductive life."

The processes by which the self is produced culturally is one of the strategies I would like to track in my walk through the archive. In the first room entitled Images we find a collection of "various public and personal images representative of the aesthetics, values, paradoxes and iconography of both sides of the Cold War". From the moment we enter the archive it is made clear that all of the identities involved in this long and global conflict are constituted out of one another's imaginaries. A file on 'border crossing' shows where the Legrady family crossed the border into Austria on their escape from Hungary in 1956. It serves the purpose of establishing a line of division between the two worlds, a border of personal making. In the same room / menu we have a fashion spread from Vogue magazine which uses a variety of Hungaries as the background for its fashion shoot. There is the decadent old Budapest of the turn of the century, all opera houses, cafes, casinos, crystal chandeliers and , flirtatious young women and Gypsy Princes. There is the Communist chic of early radical socialist images, of workers on the train and in industry; muscular, heroic and utopian and there are the wild horsemen of the Steppes, folkloric in costume and pre-Western in their historical allusions. A Western imaginary of Hungarian history constituted out of novels, operettas and the desire to not burden itself with too complicated a history of Hungarian internal resistance. A pictorial essay on the other face of Europe, it romanticizes and consumes politics as style.

In the next room we are treated to a display of shop windows from across Eastern Europe; in each a contemporary display of commodities from lingerie to electronics are accompanied by images of Karl Marx (the occasion for this photo journey of shop displays was the 100th anniversary of his death), of the insignia of the workers' party and the state juxtaposed with the labels of western credit cards. Each side of this conflict can only perceive of itself in terms of the other, an identity worked out through negative differentiation which proves only that they are completely inseparable. In another room we find a series of 'posings' , young men in Vietnam and the young women they left behind in trailer parks across the United States. Anther aspect of the cold war, this time articulated through a purely American language that does not demonstrate a recognition of a world outside itself even as it goes out to fight a war within a global economy of the cold war. The defiance of this knowledge expresses itself in the haunting innocence of these images, an early 1960's innocence of a suburban sensibility that had not encountered another world for some two decades, The language of this photo display is purely cinematic and it brings to mind the film Jean Luc Goddard made on the Viet Nam conflict seen from the perspective of Paris and entitled "Far from Viet Nam". Nothing could be further from Viet Nam than the innocence manifested in these self stagings, 'posings' , and refracted through that myth of decadent, knowing old Central Europe which is staged in the adjacent fashion spread.

This space is followed by two rooms entitled Stories . The first contains materials from the period of 1949, the communist takeover to 1956 the Hungarian revol;ution and the mass migration of anti communist Hungarians out of the country. ( Display images in this section; Kiss and Now, Escape Story,) Legrady's parents stage their love scene in 1952 on a famous Budapest bridge with a distinctive touristic view behind them. They claim the view, their location within it, their love becomes inscribed with Hungarianness, inseparable from its background and we begin to fear for its stability in our knowledge that it will soon be displaced onto other landscapes. Does this kind of staging insist on a bourgeois narrative for this view of Budapest? does it defy a communist takeover of a beloved culture or does it write a private love as a form of national culture? Parallel we run Robert Doisneau's famous Parisian Image of a couple kissing in front of the Hotel de Ville, an image that also writes a national, rather than a private , romance. A European intertextuality of couples kissing passionately across the capitals of Europe, an alliance that works to loosen the grip of communist encroachment on Central Europe and to return these places to an earlier geography of shared pleasures.

Forty years on, Legrady has found the exact spot of this scene and has photographed it, empty of lovers and of claims, just a blank, touristic view of the city from the bridge. Looking back and forth between the two images one begins to read the loss of the city and not of its former citizens, a city without the cultural lovers coded 'Hungarian' and 'European' rather than a couple who have been deprived of a romantic setting. They have moved on into escape, migration and the perils of adapting to another culture. This room of the 'Kiss', the ultimate European narrative is set up in dialogue with the mythical narrative of the family's escape from Hungary to Austria in1956. Legrady had asked all the members of his family to write and illustrate their memories of their flight into Austria. In this image his brother Miklos remembers train Journey's, guards of immense size, interrogations rooms, the border, the different landscape etc'. A child's memories filtered through an adult's knowledge. This is truly a version of Barthes ' family romance' , a memory of great trauma which is cajoled by the adult world into an optimistic discourse of new beginnings, of possibilities and of adventures. The cartoon style adventurous of these new worlds is counter balanced within this section of the archive by others of continuity, of the family house and its many generations of occupants and most intriguingly of the bullet holes on the facade of the Budapest house that Legrady had been born in.

The house had been marked by numerous bullets during the fighting in the second world war and it probably acquired more bullet holes during the fighting in 1956. Legrady had videotaped all of the bullet holes turning them into a narrative of punctured facade. They too continue a pre-communist Hungarian history, European and bourgeois. A couple of years later he returned to find the bullet holes filled in and the house, neglected throughout the years of communism, repainted and resurfaced.

Of all the many hundreds of images which are crammed into the archive, like a mind bursting with associations and references, it is the bullet holes and the room entitled 'money' which I find most intriguing and productive for the interactivity which the computer opens up to the public. The section on Money is simply a set of images of coins and bills and the stories and histories associated with them. It opens with a set of coins entitled 'loose change' which Legrady found at his grandmother's in Hungary after her death. Through them he sketches the history of foreign interventions into Hungarian History from Austria, through fascist Germany to Russian. Their status as relics, as the debris of the long gone, vanquished and replaced empires and regimes, their stripping of agency , a currency with neither use value nor exchange value make them a particularly useful and debased set of historical referents. They are framed with other stories of money, from the second world war, from the communist regime of Hungary from Russia and Czechoslovakia and East Germany, from the moment in which Soviet federal Rubles ceased to be a currency of exchange in the breakaway Ukraine and so on. A history of money as a non capital entity, money which does not circulate, whose value is not in its live buying power but in its dead symbolic power, money which serves as a testament to all the failed political and national and military adventures which printed it as their most pervasive and widely circulating representation.

The sections on bullet holes and on coins and money puncture the surface of the archive, they suture onto their spare images all of the associations we encounter every where else within it and they effect the transition of what Barthes called the Studium to the Punctum . The Studium, says Barthes ;

..."is the application to a thing, taste for something, a kind of general enthusiastic commitment , of course, but without special acuity. It is by Studium that I am interested in so many photographs , whether I receive them as political testimony or enjoy them as good historical scenes: for it is culturally that I participate in the figures , the faces, the gestures, the setiings, the actions" ... .. "The second element will break (or puncture) the Studium. This time it is not I who will seek it out (as I invest in the field of Studium with my sovereign consciousness) it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: the word suits me all the better in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation, and because the photographs I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, ... these marks, these wounds are in effect so many points ...this second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefor call the punctum"

It is at this moment of punctum in which the archive shifts ground from a narrative, a series of historical accounts to a critical model for the lived conditions of disrupted histories and displaced identities. A narrative recounts a series of events in a temporal sequence and narratives are only available to us through processes of narrations by situated authors. In the moment of punctum that authorial position and that narrative sequence are disrupted. one element, a bullet hole or a coin exit their original narrative structure,their story ,and begins writing a new one for which no narrative structure exists at the present. Through the archival layering of the computer we begin to arrive at an imaging of a communism that overlay bourgeois culture but did not erase it. Bourgeois culture CO-existed within and beside it through the not yet told narratives of bullet holes and loose change, through a debris that begins to come together through a process of interetextuality, a process which reads it not through itself but through other texts. In Legrady's archive communist culture is a facade overlaying bourgeois culture. As long as communist culture was nascent it required the proof, the bullet hole, the coin in someone's dresser drawer, that it had pierced the heart of bourgeoisie culture. In its demise these were plastered over - the integrity of the bourgeois body, first was punctured and then resurfaced. Neither is at an end for their mutual narrative structure sustain each other.

The cultural displacement of the family to Canada, to the New World and the return of Legrady on numerous scavenging journeys to Europe begin producing the final stage of what I would like to term 'CO-inhabited histories' This term designates the confluence of two conditions;
- Historical narratives inhabited by subjects who are only partially entitled, who cannot claim complete, or coherent or state sanctioned belonging.

- - Subjects who are themselves inhabited by several historical narratives concurrently. Narratives whose relation to these subjects may be tangential, phantasmatic or imaginatively claimed.
To think through a Central European communist history through bourgeois narratives viewed from North America is to set up several structures of co-inhabited histories, One of the most promising aspects of this concept of co-inhabitation for the post colonial world of hybrid and displaced subjectivities is that it cannot be reduced to one logic, one order and therefore one point of origin or one claim to conclusion. It becomes a specific variant on Foucault's notion of genealogy. The disruptive claims he made for genealogy such as ".. if interpretation is the violent or surreptitious appropriation of a system of rules, which in itself has no essential meaning, in order to impose a direction, to bend it to a new will, to force its participation in a new game, and to subject it to secondary rules, then the development of humanity is a series of interpretations".

The archive, layered simultaneously through the technologies of the computer's simultaneity and through the simultaneity of historical co-inhabitation, shifts ground from traditional historical narrative to the form of what Deleuze and Guattari term a Rhizome . Unlike the arborescent structure that is traditional linear account which is centered around organized power, in the rhizomatic form of the archive there is no center. A smooth space of deterritorailization and distribution emerges, a nomadic historical structure rather than a narrative of historical nomads. A nomadic historical structure could not entertain the concept of endings, false or otherwise, for it would constantly be searching for the untold, circular and continuing histories within the hidden crevices of its unfolding spaces.