Little Warsaw: Game of Changes (2009)

The point of departure for Little Warsaw’s video is Gábor Bódy’s film The Third (1971); an “experimental documentary”’ film in which young intellectuals rehears Faust on a rooftop. The original story is intertwined and underwritten by the participants’ own lives and relationships that appear as extended discussions about understanding the world. One of these young men in Bódy’s film is Zsigmond Károlyi, Little Warsaw’s former professor at the Art Academy, a well-known and important painter. Little Warsaw take the original footage from 1971 with Károlyi’s musing about learning, knowledge acquisition, and the role painting plays in these processes, and juxtapose it with the artist’s contemporary thoughts on the same topic, including his vision and reflections about historical change and the possibility of learning from history. Thus the video is not only a multi-layered reference to Bódy and Károlyi, but a significant element in Little Warsaw’s – perhaps rather understated – pursuit of producing missing elements in the construction of an archaeology of Hungarian neo-avant-garde art.
(Katalin Timár)