I want to get married

8. April - 29. May 2010.

Opening speech and catalogue-presentation: Dr. László Baán, Director of Museum for Fine Arts

Luca Gőbölyös' work „I want to get married" mixes and ironically contrasts the mass media with the preserved knowledge of traditional communities and archaic rituals practiced or believed by them, meant to ease the task of finding a mate in an ironic way.

The five-episode cooking show goes into details on love-related magic tricks that are meant to help single Hungarian women. It presents a model of the entire lifetime of a relationship: finding „The One", chaining him, getting married, getting him back or getting rid of him.

The vision of the special recipes with the ingredients and instructions written on them can be seen also as a textual still life. And just like at the end of a real cooking show, a cookbook will be available in the bookstores. We can see now, that In Gőbölyös's work all these are realized in a consequent way, adequately to the complex media form.

But the question still remains: does this proposition seem inadequate in an age when being single is becoming a common way of life, or can marriage be the road to happiness today?

When social and economic factors drastically change people's lives, it may lead to an increased need for the sense of security provided by traditional roles and situations, such as belief in traditions and superstitions. Everyday rituals become popular, such as cooking, which provides both intimacy and creativity.

These recipes for singles are not yet available, (not even in the "Bible" of the single way of life, the show 'Sex and the City'.) Although the main character's (the guru of flirtation and relationships) publications may seem like such recipes, her public presentation about the subject in on of the episodes leads to total failure, with success only resulting from her instincts.
Gőbölyös reflects with only one gesture on it, but more intensive on the fact, that television became basic medium of our earning information.

Gőbölyös' work invokes the cult series just with a single element. Her project becomes a parody of the cooking show, a popular form of mass communication, as the work imitates precisely the structure and practices of this type of media program. Through this structure, she presents a current adaptation of the intimate wisdom and love superstitions, with no room for doubt as to the irony of her cooking show.

The recipes written on perfectly presented commercial photographs trick us the same way as media does by manipulating our desires. Though it is hard not to believe their seriousness, the mechanism is made clear by the environment: a room reminiscent of the advertisement and beauty industry, coated in shiny white, with the elegant silver and chrome furniture of beauty salons and plastic surgery waiting rooms.

Even her own role reflects irony, as she presents herself as the host and as the bearer of wisdom, while in reality she is a successful single who has not yet reached the state she preaches. Her doubt as to 'Choose Knowledge'-type shows thus becomes clear.

The communication forms of media and advertisements are well known. By using both Hungarian and foreign superstitions for her work, she shows how universal this phenomenon really is, as their similarities (or even sameness) goes beyond local relations. Gőbölyös' work emphasizes phenomena and role models common in private lives and in social sciences (sociology, media studies) by ironically paraphrasing the forms she uses. This is done with grace and a sense of humor, something quite uncommon in contemporary Hungarian art scene.

Erzsébet Pilinger