Oldal 174 [174]
OCR
KARINA KOPPÁNY Tamet arrived in Budapest with his friends and many journalists to marry Judit Kele, the art object. Although she remarked that neither the divorce nor the new marriage were actually real, Tamet was very much into the role and behaved as if Kele really belonged to him. Only Tamet and Kele and their witnesses were allowed to enter the Octogon wedding hall, and the place was guarded by civilian police officers. Traditionally, the wedding group that appears when the initiating parties get married is made up of several communities, all of whom are involved in the event: first category, the female and male gendered society (such as bridesmaids or groomsmen); second, the spouses’ relatives (first and foremost the father of one of the people to be married and the maternal relatives). In the third group, van Gennep classifies kinship, both in a narrow and a broad sense. Special societies (e.g., religious communities) form the fourth category, while the fifth category represents the local group, i.e., in Kele’s case, citizens of Terézvaros, the district where Octogon is located.*° Although there is no drama in a wedding, the plot of the wedding is the customary civil process of a given wedding; of course, the specific text remains, the “I do” part, which must be spoken, but the underlying purpose for which two people connect their lives forever and marry, lies beneath. The pattern, which would show expectations for further events, does not appear in the life of the artist and Tamet together, only on a level of rehearsal. After the marriage became an actual reality and Kele received her French visa, they moved to France in May 1981. Nothing could be undone*! that is, the parties made an attempt to live together after the wedding.” Kele’s mind was irrevocably disturbed by this dual consciousness, of being a work of art and a human being. She began to think oddly about herself, the whole scenario - the way it had changed her life. It is customary for a person’s life to change when they go through such a ritual event, marrying, connecting her life with someone else’s, even in the most profane sense of the word. Kele recalls disturbed thoughts: “I came to Paris and didn’t know who I was. Complete schizophrenia. And after a while, I didn’t want to live life as a piece of art in reality anymore.”*? However, this madness in her mind was probably not caused by the betrothal, but rather by the plethora of accelerated events, the abandonment of her previous love, a sudden new bond, and then life as art. In other words, considering that Kele’s case was not only a new marriage, a wedding, but also a divorce which provoked several transitional rituals. She developed a kind of identity disorder, she explained in her 2011 interview with Balkon. As Arnold van Gennep writes in Transitional Rites, each culture has 30 Gennep: Ibid., 129. 31 Turai: Ibid. 32 Richard Schechner: A performance. Esszék a színházi előadás elméletéről, 67. 33 Turai: Ibid. «172 +
