DESKE / A film by Miklós Váli, monologue script

Last Will and Testament, Budapest, November 3, 2000

I, Dezső Váli, being of competent and sound mind and not acting under duress or undue influence, declare that in the event of my death, nothing needs to be done. My pieces are scattered. Anyone can see my work on the internet or buy my CD. Everything is in a good place, exactly where it is.

Finding my profession was an unexpected affair. My mother gifted me a black photo album for Christmas -- I had already begun taking pictures, and the idea was that I could stick my photos in it.

That’s not what I used it for. Instead on the first page, I wrote the following in white pencil: “Is life beautiful after all?!” question mark, exclamation mark, and started pasting my cherished memories - the ones that tied me to life - inside. I saved, for example, the label of the champagne bottle that I got for finishing second in the National Championship when I was 16 or 17. And photos, rowing photos. I really am sorry that I don’t have those anymore.

To make the pages a bit more interesting, I pasted little garlands and decorations  on the black paper next to the photos. One day there was no photo, on the bottom there was a saw-toothed white line, above red and gray downwards pointing arrows, and underneath in white pencil I wrote, Air strike. With this, I had found my profession.

The next day I illustrated Moricz Zsigmond Place the same way with paper and colored pencil, and the collage, titled Circle place at night, still hangs on my little-big girl’s wall today. Very quickly, I purchased some oil paints and continued with those. Without my knowledge, my mother took them to a painter, who encouraged her and that’s how this life began; for the first time in my life I knew what I wanted to be, although I had no idea, and no hope, that it would be my profession. That was too high and too beautiful of a dream.

I don’t usually think back or reminisce about my childhood. I’ve seen that a lot of people often reach back there when they are thinking. I remember one important moment: when I got back from vacation when I was nine, a new desk was waiting for me in my room, ready for school. I opened the middle drawer and found a leather briefcase. At that time I still wore a backpack. This must have raised the feeling of adulthood in me in some way, because I still think back on it the same way today.

Barcsay’s Anatomy was on my pillow, I remember that. My mother wanted to pass on two things to me upon matriculation. My father’s seal ring, his family’s seal ring - at that point my father had been dead for 15 years -, and a letter that my father wrote to his son as a prisoner of war in ‘45, written probably knowing that he would soon die. To the seal ring I said thank you, but I don’t wear rings, and gave it back. The letter I also didn’t accept, the reasoning behind my refusal was probably that a dead person shouldn’t order me around without the chance for rebuttal.

In ‘56, I was 14 years old. During the victorious days we went down with my little sister, who was 13-years old at the time, and with big pliers took apart the Bartok Bela road barricade made of 14 kg. basalt blocks, because, of course, we had won; everyone was doing the same. A passerby remarked that it was too early for that yet. I saw red and blue pot covers scattered along Bartok Bela road, across it, misleading Russian tanks to believe that they were landmines.

I didn’t like High School, I didn’t like anything, I didn’t want to become anything, I didn’t know what I wanted to be and I had no outlook for the future.

I remember three beautiful chapters in my life. The first was in 1976, when I raised and then, for philosophical reasons, gave away Assy, my Bernese Mountain dog. The second was 5-6 years before that, when my minder took me to the Alps – my first time in those parts – to ski. I skied down a black trail once or twice, and with that, said goodbye to skiing. The third goodbye was perhaps the most beautiful. My son organized a canoe trip in the Hajogyari Bay for my 70th birthday. The coach asked me what kind of boat I wanted, I said a skiff, which is a heavy boat that requires one to know how to row -- there’s no help there. Then he asked me how many years it had been since I last rowed. I answered ‘46’ and then I left, in a poignant scene.

The Hungarian University of Applied Arts was a very good school. Personal friendships were formed with the professors, who gave us everything they gathered over a lifetime. Once, we were discussing Proust in the hallways, when a statistics teacher walking past us remarked, “that’s not how it went.” And then there was the time in a nearby restaurant during lunchtime that I asked my teacher to correct a parting love letter to a girl before I sent it to her. When I got to University, I fell in love with architecture, to this day the ‘one that got away’ is either interior design or architecture. We routinely read Japanese and French publications - Kenchiku Bunka and Architecture d’Aujourd’hui - at the Architecture Committee’s library.

It’s a beautiful profession that I left painting for, with the idea that I would become

an interior architect. But I wrote down one sentence, which I have to this

day; in the beginning of my first year I wrote in my diary, that although

right now I have to check ‘painting’ into the cloakroom, my task for the

next five years was not to lose the ticket.

After 1956 a rather obscure ‘opening up’ took place in the world of literature, Western contemporary literature was allowed to a small circle of intellectuals. I read all of Durrenmatt, Max Frisch and Camus. I read Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath as well, which I believe was his first, and to this day I contend his best, after which I read all of his work. His descriptions of poverty…, slapped me in the face.

To this day, I don’t know what to do when I see a panhandler. I’m ashamed. I learned, and this stuck with me, that I was incredibly rich, with my savings, my big black car, with the clothes and the warmth in my apartment. If you don’t know what to be grateful for, be grateful that there is water running from your faucet.

The first pivotal encounter in my life as a painter was not with my master, although I did like him a lot, but rather it was with a contemporary painter who was my age, and whom I really respected, my friend Kalman Kecskemeti. He taught me to walk Budapest at night, and he gave me Strindberg’s novel Alone, which taught me to walk in solitude, and prepared me for old age. In it, a then 58-year-old man tells us of his everyday life, of aloneness.

I got accepted to college with the portrait of a middle aged model - which accidentally stuck around. Later on, when I was in the same place as a college professor on the recruitment board, we went around and looked at all of the drawings. I showed them this picture blown up to its original size, and said it’s the work of my friend’s son who didn’t want to apply, and that they should look at it with objective eyes. They ‘turned him away,’ explaining that unfortunately he was not a good fit.

I graduated in ‘67, and got together with Kata in ‘68, we got married in the summer after a rapid courtship. Her father got us an apartment at the top of Gellerthegy. We moved to the sweet little flat, with a view to the Buda castle, Rose hill and the high Tatras. I worked as an interior architect for two years after graduating.

Every summer for five years I taught at the Szonyi Istvan Free Summer School in Zebegeny. In my first year I taught mosaics, which I reworked in the following years into the collage mosaic profession. Once, the other teachers and I were eating lunch and I dropped a pastry. Afterwards Miklos Szuts, who would later became a good friend, told me how he observed that I didn’t bend down to pick it up. He thought to himself, this man is either a very disciplined person, or a very undisciplined one.

A következő évben már együtt tanítottunk, összevontuk az osztályunkat; olyan fokon belső barátom lett, hogy mindent tudott rólam; múltamat, jövőmet, szerelmeimet, mindent. Iszonyú sokat tanultam tőle, mert harmonikus és nagyon okos ember, nagyon sok szeretettel.

The next year we taught together, consolidating our classes; he was a close friend to such a degree, that he knew everything about me: my past, my future, my loves, everything. I learned an incredible amount from him, because he was a harmonious and very intelligent person, also full of a lot of love.

A little bit about this summer school in Zebegeny: In the second year, the students brought up a two meter long piece of driftwood, which was beautiful. We put it out in the middle of the class, it became a sculpture. I said, today I won’t direct anything. The day’s task was to use this as material to create whatever they wanted. By the afternoon, I think there were 22 people, who expressed what could be made of it in 22 different ways. The sweetest for me was the person that wrote a story about the dwarves that lived inside. Someone hammered tons of pins into it, outlining its veins. In the evening we sat down and the 22 students learned the other 21 perspectives from which to look at such an object. Of course there were those who painted or illustrated it...

14 éves voltam, amikor Dobszay László megmutatta Klee Seafahrer, vagyis Szindbád című képét, ami akkor nagy erejű volt számomra, és azóta is az maradt, egész korai életemben Klee volt az apám. Úgy is mutatkoztam be a svájci Klee-múzeumban a titkárnőnek. Rohant az igazgatóhoz.

I was 14 when Laszlo Dobszay showed me Klee’s Seafahrer - that is Szindbad - titled work, which was very powerful to me, and has been since then -- during my entire adolescence Klee was my father. That’s how I introduced myself to the secretary at the Swiss Klee museum. She ran to the director.

Of the contemporaries it was trecento, which Csomay got me to love, the Italian trecento that impressed me.

Of course I saw a lot of works during my travels, this was my independent education. Egry’s ethereal levitation, Csontvary’s floating unearthly world, bitter but at the same time happy. I was in awe of Derkovits’ ideas for composition. Of the Hungarian painters - few of whom understood colors - he understood them outstandingly. Then there’s Morandi, who validated my life by showing that it wasn’t immoral to paint the same theme for 25 years. I really needed that…, I really love his work.

I went to New York for the art first and foremost, I visited the Metropolitan Museum at least 10-15 times, everyday from dawn till dusk. The pubs and restaurants of the city didn’t interest me very much.

The sights, the squares, the action of the streets. Of course just what I saw coming or going from the museum. I really loved that city.

I got to know Rothko very fast, his oeuvre is electrifying. To this day, if I lose my faith in non-figurative or abstract work, I look to him, because he perfectly validates this style. It’s an island, a miracle. Everyone is a miracle of course, and everyone an island; Schiele, who crochets a clay tile, drawing the tiles hundreds of times, with such excruciatingly intense and deadly lines…, showing the unbelievable duplicity within his person.

I accidentally accompanied a friend, Szutso to be exact, to an evening mass on Sunday, where the priest said, Repent! Praise the Lord for 20 minutes each day and you will be saved! I like numbers. 20 minutes. I could do that. The next day, I looked up the priest to find out what exactly he meant, and placed a recorder on the table so that I wouldn’t forget what he said. At this he laughed to himself, because the national security was always listening in on him. But God really got me, since I liked numbers, well there you go, he gave me the numbers. And it worked: I pray for an hour, or closer to 58 minutes, every morning.

As a daily task, I asked for two prayer intentions from everyone in the prayer group. Let us pray for the Buda Franciscan Order, and let us pray for the prevailing head of state. At times this was Gyurcsany, at times Orban; we offer their daily work to the God’s love and his grace.

The world-renowned Matisse chapel is in Vence. A very kind old nun took me inside. I looked hard at the stations of the cross and upon returning home, after a lot of inner work, I decided that I didn’t like it. It somehow occurred to me, to try to form the stations into logos. I started drawing them as very simple, minimal graphic symbols, and experimented with them day and night, even on the 6-tram.

I came up with a lot of versions before I finished. Later on, I used this same idea for a newspaper background and 20 years later the theme came back, when a priest friend of mine living in Australia asked me to post him the stations of the cross, which I did. The year of the regime change I remembered - it had been circling my thoughts for months before -, I did this with 1930’s era Budapest panhandler pictures. The editor-in-chief of Mozgo Vilag saw this work, and immediately asked to publish it. It’s 14 stations, I said, how do you plan to arrange them? One image per page it turns out, which floored me. I immediately realized that the photos were squares but the newspaper was rectangular, and then inspiration struck. I led a spiritual retreat a few years earlier, and had created a list for my patients, of everyone in life that has to be forgiven. This I placed above the 14 stations at random, although it had nothing to do with the stations, but was ultimately actually relevant. So as not to make it some pedantry from above, I had my 6-year-old little boy write it.

From time to time he lost the letters and looked at me panic stricken. I said, don’t worry, cross it out and continue! “Do you want peace? And peace within? Do you want to forgive everyone once and for all? Those who smell bad, who deceived you in the store, wield rubber batons, fixed your water pipe wrong, mistreated your mother, those whom your mother hates, enemies of all faiths, haters of Hungarians, those who are more talented than you, don’t pay enough attention to you, vomit in the stairwell, blast the radio at night, didn’t lend you…, didn’t believe you when you said…, hung out with others instead of you, are more beautiful than you, showed up really late that time, beat you or your parents -even if it was just in a game-, are wealthier, are gossips, ate your snack, think you lack talent, laugh at you, broke your favorite mug, lead you on even though they’re unfit for it, shoot pornos, are old and only love their cats, wear oversized earrings, do you want to forgive Hitler, and every dictator, every nation, can you forgive the Lord for planning a better fate for you and thus condemning you? And yourself, for that time that you were such an ass? And do you want to give praise for all of these?!”

I have a friend who, every five years, asks me how it is that I’ve been painting studios for 20 years and there’s not one cross on the wall, ever. My response is that a picture isn’t sacred because - forgive me - Jesus is on it. Pilinszky said, sacred art is tautology, that is, word repetition. According to my philosophy, any picture that’s any good points heavenwards. I mean, that for a split second God shows us the corner of his cloak. Every good work looks upwards, however someone chooses to express it, whatever their worldview, it’s always towards betterment, everyone’s desired betterment. This is what the whole thing is for, what it drives us towards, why it creates desire, why it creates happiness.

I started painting in full force and two years after I graduated I became a freelancer, painting landscapes and visiting creative houses, and once I covered a corner of one of the landscapes, it worked, so I painted it. You could no longer see the tree trunk or mountain slope written into it; the title became Angelic greeting. I discovered the non-figurative for myself and happily swam in it for 10 years, until somehow I panicked from the freedom, as do many others.

At the time I had already photographed many Jewish cemeteries by accident. Scared, I painted one of the pictures, not for any sacred reason, but rather for technical, formative and visual reasons, and as it turned out this worked for me, I could very precisely create those rhythms, forms and colors that I wanted.

This lasted for 3 years, I had painted 160 cemetery images when I saw that they were becoming increasingly weak, so I stopped in one clean break. And then a photograph came into my hands, of the studio. I photographed it a lot, because all of my exhibition posters were of it, somehow this was what I liked. I took one of these, and bizarrely enough, found without hesitation what I had earlier in the Jewish cemeteries, that those forms, proportions, rhythms and colors that I love came through; my world simply flowed into it.

Around graduation my history teacher gave me Seneca’s letters, I immediately gifted the several hundred books in my library, and everything else that I could find that wasn’t important. To this day this has stuck with me, as somewhat of a mannerism perhaps, but honestly it always helps me, and carries me forward in hours of hardship, when I throw out the unnecessary. For me, I’m only living ethically if I remain poor in this sense. This mindset spilled over into the world of my work as well, and to this day it’s a great relief when I free myself of visually polluting weak pieces. This is a blessed process that happens from time to time, and I’m very grateful when, very rarely, my talent to recognize a piece or a group of pieces as bad comes alive. They get up to 1-2 months, but in the event that it’s a no, then the little Soviet circle-saw comes in. This isn’t hysteria, moreso a serenity knowing that I haven’t caused any harm to the world.

The Studio for Young Artists took us to Paris for a collective exhibit at a relatively young age. They took three or four of my pieces and priced them, and I realized with panic that there was a problem.

My piece, titled The Jewelry Merchant’s Sunday, was very important to me at the time, so I wrote in my notebook that I wouldn’t sell it. I realized that I didn’t want to paint for dentists in West Germany but rather, as pathetic as it sounds, for mine and your grandchildren, for this country. And my so-called life work stayed home. Now that what needed to be home was home, I relaxed. What I do builds a small part of Hungarian culture. Which is why I gift my better works to museums.

Writing became an unexpectedly important thing for me. As a daily journal came to being I was shocked to notice, 30 years in retrospect, that I’m not a person that just gets through life till the end, but one that really enjoys it till the end. Mine was so full of happy moments and delights, that I didn’t realize that that’s what I’m living all the time. My own writing slapped me in the face and showed me.

As an adult, I ran and practiced yoga every morning for 14 years. I quit yoga because I found the Lukacs pool in 1990. Since then I swim 1200m there every day.

When they invented the internet, I got on it pretty fast, specifically so that there wouldn’t be a single version of my opus list written with pen. This wasn’t a question of vanity, but rather to make what I created, if anyone needed it, available and accessible. We digitalized my entire opus list, all of my works, photos, graphics, and whatsits, numbered and listed. Later they went on the website, which was created for the same reason.

On the fourth day my friend Miklos Szuts says, Old man, this is really cool!

At the time this kind of thing didn’t really exist - to this day it doesn’t - a catalogue of life’s work on the internet. “This is really cool, they’ll see, they’ll look at what you painted, then they’ll look at it half a year later. But it needs something relevant as well. It immediately clicked, that the monthly letters written in Le Meux, whose contents I collected on labels, that these need to be uploaded to the web, and it also became clear that we could write daily, instead of just monthly.

Complemented with my photos, my paintings. Since then I write it daily, together with picture and photos, going 14 years now if I’m counting right. Now I have around 130 daily readers that constitute a new friend group, because they immediately react. I put up a half-finished piece, and I immediately get a mail from a stranger, that it’s too red. It’s happened before that I painted over something based on this kind of correction. Or I get a letter from Canada, that I’m here with two kids, my husband has left me, I barely speak the language, I’m completely lonely, I can’t go home because of the two kids. We exchanged a few letters, so that she could hear some Hungarian words, thoughts. I really love to write, sinfully so, it’s so good. In essence, it’s not the writing I enjoy -- it’s the thinking.

Politics is probably always connected to the arts, and vice versa. I don’t know much about this. I’ll leave it to those, whom this interests more, I narrow my gaze to my own area.

I think it was in Altamira when pieces began to begin as a thought. This continued in force with the holy pictures and continued with the portraits, among others. Or there are those obviously commissioned square meter pieces depicting the Grand Canyon at the end of the 19th century.  There were among those some that were strikingly beautiful, these were conceptualized beforehand as well. The other end of the spectrum exists just the same. For a long time I was embarrassed to admit this even to myself -- I can’t picture an image even three minutes ahead of time. So it’s not that I don’t have a plan for where I want to end up, I don’t even have a route. Something happens that I quickly try to correct, and if I’ve reached a point of rest, I look for a direction for my next step that is less precarious.

The point of the work is always to lift you up, and direct your attention to the most important things. It motions towards self-examination, it’s about love, death, life, suffering and pleasures. The artist’s role in this is up for debate, it’s a secret. The artist puts bat grease, worms, cat innards, beetles, and wasps into a big cauldron, stirs this mixture with a big wooden spoon for weeks, months, 1-2 years, and then in a puff of smoke the rainbow appears, shining in the depths. This is alchemy. You don’t know what will become of what, and when; if indeed anything will become of it. This is the job.

After seven years of treatment, Kata was declared barren, and we adopted a little girl. I went into it, but I was terrified of the situation, worried about my work, my profession, but there’s no denying a woman this. There was no choice, they showed us one little girl under the protection of the building’s caretaker, otherwise we would have had to wait for years. Miraculously, when I saw her, all of my fears dissipated, all of my fears dissipated. (At this point I started crying, wiping my nose). I came to love her a lot. I sewed her a dachshund. I was sewing the nose in the front and she was already petting its behind.

In those years I couldn’t fathom what a boy child was for. But laying on her mother’s tummy, Zsofi prayed a child into it, and despite every medical diagnosis Miki was born, with whom I had around two very happy years, when he was with me in the studio instead of the nursery. I think that in those two years I made an artist of him. Today they are already grown ups.

I don’t like it when they praise me, I always avoided it. I never invited professionals to my exhibition openings, but rather my friends, who would hopefully fool around.


 

[A film expert of my opening where I’m speaking:] Ladies and Gentlemen! The length of the Lukacs pool is 28m and 49cm. I measured it. I start every day by diving in, and trying to swim across the entire length. Underwater I mean. To this day around 6,500 attempts have been made, one per day. I’ve succeeded eight times. Thank you for coming! [End of excerpt]

Szuts said the most over the course of my exhibition openings, his last speech was my favorite, I even decided that that’s what should always be read; which is what has happened multiple times. He talks about the last half hour of my life, more specifically my death: [Szuts’ voice:]

The man with the cotton coat.

It had been dusk for a while. The valley was covered in fog, blurring the sharp contours: by night time every object had blended together. The sun drew the copses of interlocked trees sharply onto the top third of the mountain, highlighting the fine divots that could never be perceived by the setting sun.

A man was ambling up the mountain. His checkered flannel shirt recalled the rock and roll styles of the ‘60’s, and the shorts below it were - at least to outside observers - completely unnecessarily held up with blue-striped suspenders. His feet were shod in slightly bulky clogs, obviously purchased for their durability, and gray-green cotton socks.

On his shoulder a decidedly worn brown messenger bag, whose shape and size was conspicuously adjusted to their task. Around the man’s neck, squeezed into the flannel shirt’s neck, a metal clip on a string, pinching a spiral notebook. He had short, graying hair, and a similarly gray, close-cropped and sparse goatee.

He was ambling up the mountain at an even, leisurely pace. Every now and then he stopped, and, furrowing his nearsighted eyes a bit, looked down at the valley below from him behind his steel-framed glasses. Then he would nod, and continue upwards.

At the top, not to far from the ridge, another man sat on a flat stone, leaning his cotton coat clad back onto a cliff. He was whittling a tree branch with his pocket knife. Sometimes he looked up. Far off he noticed the man ambling up from the valley.

The man in shorts was nearing slowly. He didn’t look up at the man sitting next to the cliff, he knew that he was waiting for him. His pace seemed neither tired nor impatient as he neared the ridge.

Reaching the cliff where the whittling man waited for him, he stopped. He slowly put down his shoulder bag, opened it, and pulled out a yellow, half-liter plastic bottle of lemon water. Untwisting the cap he took a pull from the bottle, and then held it out to the other man. The man took it, drank and gave it back to the man in shorts. He carefully put the top back on and stood the bottle on a rock.

-- That’s it? Asked the cotton-coated one.

-- That’s it. Answered the newcomer.

-- Family, kids?

-- A wife, two kids, grandchildren. Oh and I had a Bernese Mountain dog.

-- Want a smoke? Asked the cotton-coated one, offering up a wrinkled pack of cigarettes.

-- vakarozni szoktam..

The cotton-coated man nodded. He pulled out a crooked cigarette from the pack, placed it in his mouth, and rustled up a match from his pocket. Then he lit it. -- And then? - he asked, blowing smoke out in front of himself.

-- And then? - the bearded man reached into his shirt, took out his notebook and paged through it: -- Well pictures.

-- A lot? -- asked the cotton-coated man, taking a fresh puff of his cigarette.

-- Enough.

-- And are they good?

-- As good as I could make them.

-- Love, wild passions?

-- Pictures.

-- Love, sacrifice?

-- Yes: pictures.

-- Is everything in order?

-- Everything is in order.

They fell quiet. They sat quietly, peacefully.

-- Let’s get going, said the man in the cotton coat. He snuffed out the embers of his cigarette on a rock. He straightened out the cig and put it in his pocket together with the pocket knife. Then he stood up and started down the other side of the ridge.

The other one put the plastic bottle back in its place, closed and shouldered his leather bag, and, tucking the notebook back into his shirt, followed him.