Golf, stupid!

Piotr Sikora: Let’s start with structure of the book, which I understand is the outcome of your residency at Schloss Solitude.

Gábor Kristóf: I’ve been working on the topic of golf for five, maybe six years now, across four shows, and I just want to wrap it up. While working on this quite unobvious topic I gathered a lot of stuff I don’t really exhibit, such as photos, or research materials on the computer that I used for drawing. So I thought: There’s all this material, and I really like the texts you wrote for the exhibition openings – so maybe it could become a book. I went back to the first exhibition Picnic On A Driving Range, which took place in Banská Štiavnica in 2021.

PS: Was it part of the Banská Štanica residency there?

GK: No, not even. It was at the Schemnitz Gallery there cocurated by Vladimír Beskid. It ended up happening by chance – not planned as a show about golf at all – but the lockdown brought some changes. During the pandemic I was walking a lot, everything was closed, and I somehow ended up at this golf club in the hills of Budapest. And it immediately became the topic.

PS: You went down the golf hole?

GK: Exactly! It was both fascinating and irritating – these guys playing golf in a private club, complaining about the view, when the view was actually blocks of flats where average people were stuck indoors. I was also fascinated by the landscaping – this curated, artificial environment. It was love and hate at once, and that tension still keeps me hooked.

The first show coincided with the centenary of a rather obscure painter – Pál Szinyei Merse – which went completely unnoticed during the pandemic. I started writing diaristic reflections about the pandemic and this golf encounter – addressing them as letters to that painter, as if explaining to someone 100 years ago what the world looks like now.

Five years passed, and I realized I had to write a new letter – to update that fictional conversation. So the project became a way of checking my own sanity over time.

 

PS: I assume you are going to start with letters to Paul and end with a follow-up letter to create some kind of eclipse.

GK: Yes. However I have to warn you that the book’s structure doesn’t follow the chronology of exhibitions. It follows how I encountered the topic – a process of digging into the core of it, going down the golf hole.

The first chapter is about observing the phenomenon of golf from the outside – naïve fascination mixed with anger. The second chapter deals with borders: between the manicured golf course and the wild forest next to it. Golf courses are hermetically sealed worlds – membership, fences, even underground nets so moles can’t surface. They use ultrasound to scare away birds. You have to fight nature to maintain that illusion of eternal youth.

Golf balls, though, escape – they radiate out into the landscape, invading nature. They become geological sediment. Fields next to golf courses are full of them. This reminded me of a text by David Haskell, a biologist who observes one patch of land for a year in the book The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature. In it he finds two golf balls and debates whether to remove them. In the end he leaves them, imagining they’ll become part of the sediment over geological time. I love that idea – that even artificial objects eventually integrate into nature.

That links to my third chapter. I realized nothing is truly synthetic; even what we call artificial is still made of the same materials that existed since the Big Bang. You can decompose and recombine, but it’s still the same matter.

That thought – together with research at the Helmholtz Center where they synthesize materials for new technologies – led me to imagine tiny universes hidden inside golf balls, microcosmic worlds within the game. Going down that rabbit hole, you end up thinking on a planetary scale again.

 

PS: Zooming in and zooming out. Sounds like the mushroom hunting we did yesterday in the woods.

GK: Exactly. You feel connected to the universe while peeping through the tiniest hole in the dead wood. This approach helped me make peace with golf – at first I condemned it, hated golfers, but now I see it differently. I’m not part of that culture, but I can grow something on top of it – my own »dung,« my mushrooms. Speaking of mushrooms – in the second chapter, mushrooms start appearing among the golf balls. They look similar, spherical, sprouting in unexpected places – symbols of another form of life, something between plant and animal. Maybe mushrooms even arrived on Earth on a golf ball shot from a galactic course! That’s why golf balls have dimples – to travel through space faster (laughs).

PS: The first, second, third chapters are set. What comes next?

GK: The fourth – a detour – deals with golf balls as seeds rather than sediment. They fall to the ground and germinate. Each is unique, like DNA. For that chapter I created columns made from cut golf balls for a show Continental Weeds at Kiscell Museum, which is near a golf course in Budapest. The driving range faces the castle gardens. There were jokes that celebrities aimed their shots at the museum – so I took that literally. These columns of »failed shots« became plants – recomposed collections of lost balls planted around abandoned courses. And finally, the last and most important chapter: the founding of the Untitleist Club. That was the breakthrough – a way to coexist with golf culture by hijacking its structure, creating a parallel community. The club can focus on mushroom picking, urban golfing, community work – whatever grows from the same soil.

This idea emerged while preparing The Greenkeeper’s Nightmare exhibition in Budapest Gallery. I realized many influences from other artists were already inside me – their methods, aesthetics, instincts. So I invited them to join. For each collaborator I designed a one-on-one experience: sneaking into a golf course at night, lying on the green, listening to the grass. It became clear that golf was just a metaphor, a vehicle for connection. Even now, when I take someone to a golf course – recently in Stuttgart – new insights always emerge. The work isn’t about golf; it’s about the human impulse behind it.

PS: It’s fascinating how you adopt the existing structure only to a certain extent, then subvert it through subtle modifications that generate a new collective meaning.

GK: Yes, exactly. Golf itself can be read as a model of society – built by the wealthy, regulated, obsessed with order and suspended youth. It’s fake freedom with strict rules and uniforms. At first it frightened me, but now I see it as human nature. Golf began as shepherds playing with balls in Scotland – innocent fun. Over time it grew into a neoliberal monster. The game isn’t the problem; it’s what it became.