Imre Kertesz
The Age of Anxiety
Last year, one fine afternoon at the end of summer, my wife phoned me
from her office and asked me to turn on the television because they were
speaking about something quite extraordinary, something which she found
to be unbelievable. She wanted me to tell her what was really happening.
To be frank I was irritated, partly because I happened to be in the middle
of working and also because I have a distaste for television and radio
news reports. For after all, being a writer, my every effort is aimed at
being able to escape being swamped by public discourse, which in Hungary,
perhaps for the sake of some conceived average level, almost always is
aimed at such impossible targets as, for example, me. Come to think of it
the majority of my writing activity consists of nothing but this torturous
battle repeated every morning: that I should resist this banal common
language and create my own world of words in which my existence imprints
clear definitions. It took a while therefore before, overcoming my natural
resistance, I finally convinced myself to push the required buttons on the
remote control.
The image burst out of the dissolving gray just like a catastrophe escaping
all bounds. I saw blood-red flames and figures leaping from windows. It was
September 11.
I am describing this incident because it could be one of the variations upon
the 1999 experiment which Alexander Polzin undertook, inspired by W. H. Auden's,
so to say, "bucolic" poem: to illustrate images of fear. The painter, and for
this it is enough to take a look at his work to date, belongs to the ranks of
those artists who were [are] described as being "driven". But what exactly does
this mean? "Humiliation is just as immortal unfortunately as greatness and the
connection between the two is not so great as they would have us believe", he
wrote some years ago, describing classic Weimar. Goethe attributed the rise of
creativity to the influence of inspiration, but indeed where should a contemporary
artist be looking, who instead finds only shame, distaste and revulsion, if not
denial, complete rejection? He, the artist of today, if he takes his art seriously,
finds the springs of his productivity in negativity, suffering and identification
with those who suffer.
My intuition tells me that this is the same as Polzin's efforts. The artist fights
a hard battle in order to express fear, and this is quite understandable. Fear is
not an abstract but a very real state: distorting the face and the character. With
its frightening fingers it plays on a wide scale ranging from individual fear;
fear of death to public fear, political terror. Today we are all aware that political
terror is a crime. Most often it is used by illegitimate regimes to hold on to their
illegitimate power as long as possible by frightening people politically. If
legitimate regimes practice political terror that is even more unforgivable, because
in this case they use illegal ways to hold on to, or to prolong, their power. A
legitimate government becomes illegitimate by practicing political terror. But
political terror never, or rarely, stays within the boundaries of one country. First,
it is used to target intellectual and minority groups by using populist ideology
until its expansionist nature inevitably turns it against its environment and the
community of democratic countries. In theunfortunate twentieth century, in the times
of mass killings and genocide we have seen several examples of such terror. In
Hungary we lived in the fear of political terror for long decades, and it is a sad
reality that people could get used to it by giving up part or all of their human
dignity. We sincerely hope that there will never be a political power in Hungary to
gain courage from such experiences, or even if there would be such power it would never
achieve political power.
I think that this exhibition of Alexander Polzin's work which I hereby open, in
addition to its artistic and aesthetic pleasures provides a good framework to overcome,
at least in our minds, the "Age of Anxiety" which showed its terrible face last year,
on September 11.
