Four Glass Cubes (Item Description)
Four glass cubes, with colorful pieces of paper sticking out of them, partially embedded in the material. From the estate of Ms. Eliza Sárásréti.
The Sárásréti Cubes are some of our most curious acquisitions, created by Ms. Sárásréti, a chartered public accountant employed by local company Silberstein és Tsa., who led a reclusive life, and was during her lifetime not considered an artist of note.
These pieces appear to be cube-shaped blown glass paperweights, of unknown provenance. Pieces of paper cut thin or sometimes torn ostensibly by hand from advertisements and other leaflets have been embedded in the material of each paperweight, in patterns of varying complexity. Some of the cubes resemble hedgehogs, with paper strips and slices haphazardly jutting out of them, while others could be compared to flowers, with the paper elements placed along a logarithmic spiral or some other pattern. The ‘hedgehogs’ are generally considered earlier work, though the Cubes are difficult to date with precision despite the incorporated print advertisements. Dozens of them were found in Ms. Sárásréti’s home after her passing, mostly in the kitchen and dining area, with some on a living room coffee table. No other exemplars are known.
The mystery of the Cubes lies in their unknown means of production. While embedding paper in transparent epoxy resin is commonly done, embedding paper in glass is not feasible without using custom-made paper, due to the high temperature at which glass melts. None of the necessary apparatus or materials for such were in evidence in Ms. Sárásréti’s small townhome, and the paper used was sourced from advertising leaflets. Further, it is unknown whether she constructed the glass paperweights herself or whether she only inserted the strips of paper into premade paperweights.
The currently most accepted theory proposed by Gerard et al. states that the Cubes were produced using a psychokinetic process, though there are several facts that seemingly contradict this approach. Ms. Sárásréti was not known to possess any psychokinetic capability—she had been screened twice, at both middle school and high school graduation. No other phenomena of anomalous perturbation were documented to occur in her surroundings. Her townhome was situated in Zone Three, making such highly controlled manifestations unlikely without enormous expenditure of energy. Further, the only available eyewitness testimony (see below) suggests that Ms. Sárásréti made the Cubes herself and by hand, though by an entirely unknown method. Grinfeld et al. have noted the similarity of the Cube patterns to some sketches and other marginalia in Ms. Sárásréti’s notebooks.
Even though the Cubes are visually striking, to the extent that they have become symbolic of our region, it is unclear if they were produced or intended as art. While some of the artist’s watercolor landscapes were shown as part of student group exhibitions at the local arts center, she never made the Cubes available for public display or sale.
Ms. Sárásréti lived alone and never married; according to her social media profiles, she described herself as an asexual lesbian. She occasionally dated, but never invited her dates to her home. The only person who witnessed the Cubes during Ms. Sárásréti’s lifetime was her neighbor and friend Ms. Renáta Berger-Udvardy. According to Ms. Berger-Udvardy, the Cubes were “just haphazardly lying around in her kitchen, I always assumed they were part of an unfinished crafts project of some sort, or maybe Christmas ornaments.” (The Christmas ornament theory can be safely rejected based on the available evidence that Ms. Sárásréti belonged to a small, close-knit Traditional Egalitarian Jewish congregation, and was not known to observe Christmas.) Ms. Berger-Udvardy also claimed to have witnessed Ms. Sárásréti “poking little rolled-up pieces of paper into the cubes, just by hand.” No accompanying visual or auditory phenomena, or unexpected temperature changes, were observed. Both the cubes and the pieces of paper appeared to remain solid throughout the construction process, though Ms. Berger-Udvardy admitted “not paying especially close attention.”
Kovács and Mihajlovics proposed that the Cubes might have been produced as part of so-called “stimming” behaviors often demonstrated by persons on the autism spectrum, not as art for display; underscored by the fact that Ms. Berger-Udvardy observed Ms. Sárásréti work on the Cubes while carrying on a conversation, an activity with social components that could presumably be stressful. However, Kanalas et al. noted that nothing precluded autistic artists from enjoying their work the same as neurotypical artists would. Nyáray et al. reviewed available evidence for Ms. Sárásréti’s neuroatypicality and noted it to be scant; they also offered an alternate interpretation in favor of attention deficit disorder. We note that some replicas offer removable and reattachable slice segments, and these have seen an enthusiastic uptake as stim toys, despite some of their characteristics making this activity somewhat hazardous (see later).
Jameson and Roberts offered a popular interpretation that the Cubes were intended as an ironic, deconstructive take on Rubik’s Cubes, but Kanalas et al. rejected this interpretation as one based on American stereotypes about Hungary. Further argument against this theory is that two tetrahedral paperweights were also found, of the ‘hedgehog’ type, in the Sárásréti estate; making “Cubes” as a term itself somewhat of a misnomer. Another theory expressed by Gregg et al. considers them a similar deconstruction of “rainbow capitalism”—here, a speculative parallel can be drawn with the fact that plastic replicas of the Cubes have proliferated widely in recent years, in part due to them being read as a symbol of homegrown queer resistance. (The intra-community controversy over whether Ms. Sárásréti could be called a “patron saint” is discussed at length by Székely and Salamon.) The overt queerness of Cubes has been contested, e.g., see in Istvánhegyessy et al., mostly in relation to appeals to traditionalism. A widely reported court case determined the Cubes did not fall under the remit of laws restricting homosexual propaganda.
One must note that the edges and corners of Cubes are unusually sharp; this characteristic tends to be maintained across replicas.
© 2022 Bogi Takács
About the Author
Bogi Takács (e/em/eir/emself or they pronouns) is a Hungarian Jewish agender trans person and an immigrant to the US. E is a winner of the Lambda award for editing Transcendent 2: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction, the Hugo award for Best Fan Writer, and a finalist for other awards. Eir debut poetry collection Algorithmic Shapeshifting and eir debut short story collection The Trans Space Octopus Congregation were both released in 2019. You can find Bogi talking about books at http://www.bogireadstheworld.com, and on various social media like Twitter, Patreon and Instagram as bogiperson.