h

három puszi=three kisses

háború=war

harag=anger

halál=death

hatalom=power

híradó=news bulletin

hazudnak=they’re lying

The demo for the dictatorship began with ten thousand posters of Slobodan Milošević being handed out. The bashful dictator’s arsenal of mimicry and the stations of his hair loss can be traced on historical snapshots. The twenty-fold enlargements of his passport photos indicate the bearings of his supporters. The North is benevolent and paternal, yet not suave; the East is strict, yet understanding, not expecting unnecessary sacrifices; the South is steely and implacable, a victorious military leader marching at the head of his troops; while the West is a dreamy dickhead caught off guard by the photographer, lips puckered as if blowing a kiss. The salient quiff of hair on the crown of his head gives the distinct impression of a glans. Oil and watercolour paintings that are being carried around by a creative group among the sauntering throng like a travelling exhibition are testaments to the nexus of authority and coiffure. Artists who have accepted the iconographic consistency of baldness have created uniquely personal pieces that depict the man as a political animal in lyrical tones. The perpetual shifting of the images is part and parcel of the spatiotemporal enjoyment of the portraits. A viewer has to work for his artistic pleasure, unlike in the traditional museum space, where his gaze would quickly slide past, leaving the hapless artwork, in all its stationariness, to fend for itself. The pictures do not depend on the rigid lines of a wall or museum room but fit organically into the totality of the street and the demonstration. The viewer must pursue the picture, jumping up and down among heads, avoiding placards, thus becoming subsumed into the group. The cyclic motion of the pictures is an avant-garde gesture that adumbrates early cinematography—a sign to the recipient that the pictures per se cannot represent a subject for analysis, but they need to be considered as collectively forming a composition. In this manner, the Venus de Milo and Milo Muppet communicate with a gigantic image of a Gargling Milošević that bears a hair-raising resemblance to Kojak, interacting with a petty-realistic charm that belies the mundane realities of war.

ű

űr=space

űr=blank

űr=nothingness

I went out for cigarettes, but the pedestrian street had been blocked off. Parallel police cordons stand back to back, a few feet of no-man’s land between them. In the no-man’s land there’s a cigarette kiosk, just out of reach, as though magnified through a plexiglas shield darkly. Several things then happen simultaneously. I get a craving for nicotine, and I long for the kiosk lady, who is stranded in a commercial vacuum. Only her head and chest are visible, like a magazine cover. She doesn’t move and foreign bodies accumulate around her. Before our very eyes the Belgrade riot-cops are giving birth to their most stylish installation todate. They carve an arbitrary slice out of the city, not to use it but to create a show-piece. The area under surveillance becomes an exhibit from which all protesters have been cleared. The empty pedestrian street is a statement, providing an emphatic counterpoint to the single spot into which the protesters are crowded. The riot cops are not part of but a border to this virtual world. They mark out an ideal space, henceforth liberated from the status of being a public area, its molecules now vibrating on a different plane. At the centre of this Cordon Art stands the unattainable object, and within it the kiosk lady, floating in a consumer vacuum, unable to sell so much as a box of matches. And into this vacuum that is waiting to be filled a lone protester pours his desire. He gazes with yearning at the Rousseauesque little garden in the urban miasma, with its treasure-trove of cigarettes, cigars, colour film, slivovitz, glossy magazines, chocolates, chewing gum and sweets. As consumer power grows within the crowd of protesters, the symbolic space under police protection transforms into an anti-capitalist performance — a lonely cigarette kiosk orbiting in space. Then a balloon wobbles into the air space and lands in the public vacuum on the far side of the cordon. The balloon adds a new dimension to the emptiness of the empty space with the problem of how hermetically it can be sealed off. The empty space is filled with an empty space.

There is nothing inside the balloon, yet it’s full.
 

Reading Dragonfly Wings
A Conversation with the Author after an Evening at WhiteBox Gallery in New York City

Peter Zilahy’s award-winning The Last Window-Giraffe is now available in its first US edition, complete with a foreword by Marina Abramović. To celebrate, Peter met with writer Tobias Carroll at the downtown Manhattan gallery WhiteBox to give a richly entertaining, multifaceted talk about the book and its history. The Last Window-Giraffe has been translated into 22 languages, and its unique form combining playful imagery and alphabetizing content, as well as its historical context that remains so relevant today, was a major subject for the talk.

The interview began with a short story about a Q&A in Ukraine, one of the many countries the book has played an important role. The event was held at a large venue with a couple hundred people, video projection, music, and artwork. Yet at the technical end, the electricity shut off as a result of a city-wide blackout, resulting in a cozy candlelit Q&A. “It was a perfect divine intervention, by the way the lights were still out when I came back a week later.” Peter stressed the importance of intimacy in literature. “Reading a book should be considered an occasion, you may dress up or dress down as you please. I prefer taking a bath with a good book.”

In Ukraine, his novel was used as a manifesto and a manual of sorts, which had long been espoused by the publishers of the book after journalists lauded it as such. But Peter was only able to confirm this much later when a postgraduate student from Oxford University called to discuss that aspect of the book with him. “A lot of students had a copy, because it won the Ukrainian Book of the Year Prize, so when the Orange Revolution broke out, they were simply using it as a manual for the protests. Life was imitating art.” According to the Oxford researcher, the book and its content had been regularly coming up in interviews with the students, concrete evidence for the book’s doubling as a manual.

The problem of translation is singular to this book, as it is based on the Hungarian alphabet, which contains 44 letters, but there are ways to tell whether a translation turns out well. According to Peter, “Usually, a good translator has a number of very detailed questions about very specific things and hearing the right questions, you immediately feel in safe hands.”

“It turns out that European languages, and many non-European ones too, are based on the alphabet, so the book stands up in all translations. After all, it’s a dictionary; it works in Cyrillic, Greek, and other alphabets too.” Peter was wondering what the book might look like in Chinese or Japanese: “They have no alphabet, so it couldn’t work in the same way, and they’d have to invent a different structure that carries the stories.”

Certain translators have their own lore, with the Italian translator being the only one that Peter has never met in person due to his usual work being classics, with their authors already long dead. On the other side of the spectrum, the Dutch and Russian translators met and fell in love after exchanging emails and giving tips to each other on how to translate the book. Soon they moved in together, got married, and they’re still together today. 

The form of the book remains one of its most enduring aspects, and also the most revealing. Peter reflected on its inspiration: “This book is about protest and dictatorship and in a sense, in dictatorships we are all treated as children by the regime… so the idea came naturally to use the form of a children’s dictionary to talk about dictatorship.” Artistically speaking, the book cycles through a variety of images, much influenced by Peter’s own experience with filmmaking and visual art. The Last Window-Giraffe is also heavily influenced by centuries of hand-painted books and their own history, and this book hearkens back to that tradition. “I wrote this book, that is also partly about history, with also the history of books in mind… And that history is very pictorial.”

In discussing the particular images utilized in the book, Peter noted the variety they utilize, ranging from pictures of soccer players to currency to political cartoons, as well as how the font mimics that of some particular Hungarian children’s books. This is also how the form began to grow, stemming from smaller essays and the images associated with them, and how they began to coalesce and mix together in creating a bigger picture, growing organically to the 44 letters of the Hungarian dictionary. Peter added one more for a healthy 45.

The cover was another important element of the new edition. The original cover 25 years ago had “boots of riot police and there's a butterfly flying nearby referring to a piece in the book about the butterfly effect.” The new version has a dragonfly on it, taken this year by Peter himself, and “on the wings, there is a giraffe, it's a geometric pattern, you cannot make this up.”

When Peter was asked about his relationship to the book and how it has changed over the years, he said that “the window-giraffe is an animal, it’s alive… it's even more relevant today because of the war and all the things that we are going through. It's either that or the world adapts to my book. It still speaks to the people. It’s still getting published after 25 years. That’s a long marriage. People who’ve been together for that long hardly ever divorce, so we are fine.”

Since the book is partly about the former Yugoslavia, it remains perennially important with its particular emphasis on ethnic and religious conflict. Peter noted “we have seen the war in Syria, and now in Ukraine, it’s uncanny how similar some of the stories are. Unfortunately, this makes my book never go out of fashion.”

Near the end of the talk, Peter was asked about the role of creativity in oppression, which was likely my favorite exchange of the interview, a rich discussion of the contrasting notions of time in capitalist democracy and communist dictatorship. “In capitalism no one has time, your cleaning lady, your kids, everyone is so busy you have to make appointments. Time is a commodity, so everybody’s time is precious, while in a dictatorship there’s a certain timelessness. Your life is not worth much. You’re not important, so you have all the time in the world… You can learn Swahili, or Japanese, you can go knock on the door of your friends at 2:00 AM, nobody will be mad at you, because they are just as unimportant as you are. You couldn't call them anyway, because most people had no telephones. It is easier to forge a community when you are all against something, yet you can’t only be against something, because you’re risking becoming a parasite of the regime no less than the cronies. You then cease to have an individual existence.”
 

By Samuel Haecker