Is Christ compatible with female nudity?

“Please do not enter if you feel you might be offended!” reads the sign above the curtained entrance of a contemporary gallery. A disingenuous statement, let’s face it, but one that aptly illustrates the contradiction inherent in contemporary visual art. Is a work good if it is provocative? Or if it touches us to the depths of our souls, or perhaps provides intellectual pleasure? And how is it possible that a bouncer understands more of all this than the anointed high priests of lofty art?

Nick Hornby’s short story tells of this, and the joint performance by Géza Bodor and Béla Ficzere is a real treat in the Exhibition Hall of the Budapest History Museum.

CiciKrisztus (NippleJesus). It’s hard to imagine a more sensational title. Yet, the premise of Nick Hornby’s story (original title: NippleJesus; available in Hungarian translation by Miklós M. Nagy [link provided in original text]) is extremely ordinary: there’s a 6’3″, 220-pound man who works as a bouncer at a disco called Casablanca. He throws out drunk “snot-noses” with a few slaps or headbutts cokeheads. But don’t think he enjoys it!

The protagonist of Géza Bodor’s monodrama adaptation is this “security expert” who, if he could be anything, would be Tiger Woods, hitting golf balls all day long – maybe with a cigarette in his mouth.

So, here’s this guy over 45 with no qualifications, who one night realizes that in the world of knife-wielding thugs, his fight-trained, tough physique is no longer enough, so he hands out a few casual slaps and moves on. But what are his options? Not many, yet a job comes up that seems relatively simple: a contemporary gallery is looking for a security guard.

This is the starting point of the story. Dave – in Béla Ficzere’s splendid, unadorned portrayal – stands before us in the exhibition hall of the Budapest History Museum, telling us about the events of the past days and weeks. Géza Bodor has retained the American setting of the story, yet it speaks validly here in Budapest too, and this museum environment does it a lot of good. Site-specific performances have seen a significant upswing in Budapest in recent years, ranging from self-serving ventures to brilliant productions. Among the latter, the Peer Gynt that Máté Hegymegi – with the Studio K team – envisioned in the tunnel system of the former Kőbánya brewery remains memorable to me.

In the case of CiciKrisztus (NippleJesus), the often non-figurative artworks hanging on the wall even create an opportunity for Béla Ficzere to point to, for example, an El Kazovszkij painting during a layman’s artistic question, asking what it is. The story is also captivating because the security guard dares to voice the very questions that arise in many of us when viewing an exhibition. In a fortunate case, we receive a valid answer to the interjection “I could do that too” as early as elementary school from a teacher, but the extremities of contemporary art, the floating ping pong balls, video recordings, “blobs,” create confusion or incomprehension in many of us. I myself rarely dare to ask why a blue – let’s be stylish: azure – monochrome painting might be titled Red Dream, but here we have Dave, who naturally raises even less complex artistic questions.

According to the story, this man is placed next to a peculiar picture depicting the crucified Christ. However, upon closer inspection, it turns out that the young female artist drew the figure of Jesus from women’s breasts cut out of pornographic magazines. Above the curtained-off picture is the aforementioned sign – if you might be offended, don’t even go in. And here begins the beautiful story in which a security guard – who doesn’t even remember if he’s ever been to a museum in his life, or has only seen them in movies – is addressed by a work of art. His initial shock turns into admiration within a day or two – the young artist’s pretty, captivating character also plays a part in this – and he becomes the work’s chief protector.

He not only invents new rules to keep away the kneeling, indignant worshippers because the bigoted figure annoys him, but also because he increasingly feels it is his personal mission to protect “his picture.” He argues with priests, explains to the incomprehending, tries to reason with those arriving with prejudices – he undertakes a serious mission. He tells all this in such a simple, everyday way that we almost have to wait until the end of the performance to realize that he is the only one here who truly loves art. He doesn’t pontificate, doesn’t try to support his insights with purple prose explanations, he simply finds it captivating, it affects him, he thinks about it.

When, the day after the protest and continuous outcry in front of the museum, some people tear down and trample on the artwork – while he is escorting out a visitor throwing eggs – he collapses. After all, he sees the face of Christ on the ground, the desecration of a beautiful work. “Christ is where you find him,” he summarizes the essence of the collage made from photos of breasts. He is the only one who is hurt by all this, as it soon turns out: the artist’s hope all along was that it would be destroyed, and she could triumphantly present the security video footage of this to the world under the title Intolerance. The performance is brilliant because it appeals to an extremely simple, minimal set of tools. It achieves a strong effect with just a few sharp changes of lighting, but its essence is the classic theatrical fundamental: there is someone standing there who wants to tell us a story.

With humor, sarcasm, incomprehension, emotions – honestly, openly. The simplicity of this – in which the director and actor found a partner in each other – keeps our attention throughout, makes us smile, and moves us. At the end, we too sit despondently over the onion that was entrusted to our security guard in the gallery after the vandalism, and we can only agree with him that there’s nothing to think about with an onion.