ICA Dunaújváros

The new show Ghost Rider at ICA Dunaújváros takes us back to the 1950s, an era when behind the Iron Curtain new socialist cities were built at breakneck speed, while paranoid conspiracy theories raced around the Bloc. East German-born artist Tilo Schulz uncovers the bizarre story of an alleged American superspy who may never have been a spy at all and shows it in a town that, if history had turned out differently, might never have been built there at all.

Tilo Schulz takes as his starting point the strange and conspiratorial tale of Noel Fields, an American anti-fascist intellectual who had the misfortune to show up in Eastern Europe just as the Stalinist show trials were getting under way in 1949, and immediately fell under suspicion. He was arrested in Prague and then deported to Budapest, where he spent five years in jail on spying charges. His name was connected to the cases of several leading communists in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, who had fallen foul of the party leadership in Moscow, although he never actually appeared in court and no details came to light of his precise involvement in their alleged treachery. In 1954, as the political situation eased after the death of Stalin, Fields was released because of ‘missing evidence.’

It seems that five years in prison had not put this American off Hungary, and instead of returning to the States he spent the rest of his life living quietly in Budapest as an employee of the state publishing house, until his death in 1970. This intriguing project by Tilo Schulz deals with the unfathomable truth about the ambiguous figure of Fields, who may or may not have been a spy, informer or double agent, as the available evidence does not provide any definitive answers about his mission in Hungary. For the artist this could be a metaphor of the collective difficulty we have in approaching the experience of the Cold War and of the mysterious otherness of life in communist Eastern Europe.

Tilo Schulz was born and grew up in Leipzig in the German Democratic Republic, and so had the chance to personally experience the workings of both political systems.  His parents fled to West Germany in the 1980s, and he was left alone to face interrogation and surveillance by the East German police, an experience that fed into his later work on conflicted identities and the problems of German reunification.  He is one of the Leipzig circle of artists famous for their painterly style, although he actually made his name through installations and conceptual interventions.  

For the curator of the show, Franciska Zolyom, there are particular local resonances in organising this project in Dunaújváros, because of the city’s own intimate and paradoxical involvement with the ideological history of the communist era. ‘Danube New Town’ was originally known as Sztalinváros and is still dominated by the imposing neo-classical architecture and heavy industry from the period of the building of socialism. The city itself was also in a sense the result of a historical accident, as according to the original plan it was meant to have been built 120 kilometres to the south near the Yugoslav border. After Tito’s acrimonious split from the Stalinist camp, the decision was taken to move the strategic steel town to its present location.

Tilo Schulz often refers in his work to the black and white ideologies of the Cold War, which he approaches through distinctive abstract patterns in complex gallery installations. Abstraction in the art of the 1950s was closely associated with the West and despised by the communist authorities, while secretly desired by many artists in Eastern Europe. Ghost Rider confronts the spectres of the past with a collective amnesia that still stalks the streets of Dunaújváros.