Preface; contextualization of the problem, the
conceptual positions of the dissertation
I may hardly choose a more emblematic photo than
Károly Halász’s Private Broadcast[1]
to characterize the topic of my dissertation. This work by Halász, that was
made in 1970 and 1971, shows a candle in an empty television set frame. This
work of Halász’s is not without precedence, it can be considered the
cornerstone of his later work. Similar to the other workshop members he had
already got past the geometric abstract, pop art and op art studies by that
time, and simultaneously with the land art experiments started then, he
discovered the study and use with artistic purpose of the immediate physical
environment, and within, the television, the TV set. Subsequently he completed
those works that present the television set as one of their major attribute and
central element.
Nam June Paik’s installation from 1975 entitled Candle
TV[2]
uses the hauntingly identical elements as Halász’s work with similar content
that was mentioned above. At first glance, in the photographs of the two
installations we see the same: lighted candle in a TV set frame. Any difference
between the two images would only be traced in the difference in brand of the
television sets, or in the level of elaborateness of the images. At the same
time the two works differ significantly if we consider Halász’s work from a
geographically and culturally defined local point of view. This work of
Halász’s can be interpreted in a specific Central-Eastern European context much
rather with the concepts of arte povera, the assambladge and the
bricolage than with Paik’s media art tools and the set of concepts of the
contemporary American media culture and media criticism. The distance between
the works of Paik and Halász - although the photos may correspond to each other
almost entirely – does not exist only through the comparison of the oeuvre of
the two artists. It is the difference in cultural, in this case in the medial
experience along which the divergent visual models are created that
distinguishes these two, seemingly identical artworks. By that time Paik was
dealing in far greater depths with the potentialities provided by the video and
television: he had been using the Sony Portapak first generation video camera since
1965, in 1969 they make their first own video-synthesizer with electrical
engineer Shuya Abe, and the Candle TV is just one of Paik’s many video
installations and video sculptures. In contrast, as Lorand Hegyi remarks, the
television may be interpreted as a pseudo-phenomenon at Halász, as a kind of
shortage-filling in art, a special Eastern European manifestation of the arte-povera
(Hegyi 1990, 41). After all, the cultural political
restrictedness, and the resulting technical "poverty" are quite
obvious and are the outcome of the lack of high-tech and mass media tools.
Halász can only involve this medium on a conceptual level into his creative set
of tools, and he is able to construct his own medial system of codes only by a
specific, reflective way. Simultaneously, Paik was an active creator of the
American and Western European intellectual and scientific discourse on media.
His 1967 work entitled McLuhan Caged[3] that shows the American media theorist’s
video footage distorted by magnet illustrates well the different levels of
reflection on which the two artists’ media concept and medial competence
diverge. In 1967 Paik – together with artists Allan Kaprow, Otto Pien, James
Seawright, Thomas Tadlock and Aldo Tambellini – attempted to launch an
autonomous video art channel at the request of WGBH-TV in Boston with the name The
Medium is the Medium[4].
These works explored the possibilities of the genre of the video both from
stylistic and substantive respects. Paik's art – similarly to McLuhan's theoretical
orientation, who, by the way, was an enthusiastic devotee of the flux art -
dealt with the problem of television, and its role in the world.
By contrast, in Hungary, it was Gábor Bódy among the
first to employ video in artistic context in 1973, when he set up two
closed-circuit installations to study the phenomenon known as feedback. This
experiment among others can be seen in his work entitled Four Bagatelles
(1975)[5]. Bódy considered the video and the
interoperability among technical image recording media as a unique
cinematographic enterprise that he perceived as an extension and liberation of
the language – inherent in an open communication system – of photography,
avant-garde film, television and video.
He emphasizes these media’s dual function as creative instrument and
diffusion device, that is, he regards these media – and primarily the video –
as the attraction of expressions barely obstructed by freedom of thought, games
and circumstances (Bódy 1982).
Paik preceded these experiments with more than a
decade and he exceeds by far the possibilities of both Gábor Bódy and all the
other Hungarian artists who showed any affinity towards the video, including
Halász, in both access to technical device and in institutional integrity. It
was only in 1978 during his study trip in Amsterdam that Halász had the
opportunity to directly try out, and use for artistic purposes the video
technology[6].
Then were created his first video-performances, the Transition - A Native
American in Amsterdam[7]
consisting of the seven independent sequences during which he repeats on one
hand the earlier Private Broadcast and Pseudo video
photo-performances, and, on the other hand the stamped images, his new
painting procedure are introduced, that are to be elaborated during the
eighties. These works of Halász are not followed by a systematic
analyzing-creative work regarding the video; his use of technique is confined
to a few later performances, for example the documentation of the performance
entitled Going, going and staying[8]
in the Miskolc Gallery in 1979. It is obvious, that behind the two photographs
of Paik and Halász we can identify a totally different artistic canon, a
fundamentally different socio-cultural context, medial competence and
experience.
Yet how can this dissimilarity, that is, the
difference between the two "TV with candles" pictures, and more
broadly the discrepancy between the Western and the –Central-Eastern European
neo-avantgarde trends made tangible? Along which different hermeneutical procedures,
methods, and methodologies can the two grounds of art be divided? How does a
"geographical environment", a "topographical entity", a
"spatial experience" define the status and the identity of a work of
art?
Central European neo-avantgarde: the problem of
spatiality
"Spatiality"
provided new types of viewpoints for cultural studies in the analysis from a social
perspective of identity constructs (nationalism, tourism), of the
"loci" (changing spatial and temporal experiences) and of the
processes of globalization (neo-colonialism, Americanization) (Arias-Barney
2009; Döring-Thielmann 2009). In the eighties, the evolving spatial turn
in the social and cultural science discourse did not only help make more
tangible the rearrangement of the structuredness of the geographical
environment but it also placed the restructuring of the various social
subsystems in a different context. The ideas that were developed along concepts
such as the ‘global village’ metaphor (McLuhan 2001) in the sixties and seventies,
or the space of flows concept formed in the eighties and the nineties of the
global society (Castells, 2005) delimited new spatial and temporal experiences
and knowledge types. This new topography in fact defines the space of social
communication where the various, mainly mediated interactions construct a new
type of mediated experience and knowledge.
In some art history works in
the last two decades there were put forward those suggestions that emphasize
the divergent characteristics of the Central-Eastern European avant-garde and
neo-avantgarde when compared to the American and Western European art
movements: the different conceptual and socio-cultural contexts of the
interpretation of the art works. Piotr Pitrowski’s work In the Shadow of Yalta
can be seen as the most comprehensive study of the art history works that deal
with the (Eastern) Central European characteristic features (Piotrowski 2009a).
Piotrowski tries to explain the formation of the Central Europeanism with
unique identity strategies. Among these he displays the political and social
searches of solutions for new self-images instead of the socialist past, the
current affairs strategies of the adherence to the European Union, as well as
the nostalgic, multi-ethnic and multi-cultural image of the Habsburg Empire.
Piotrowski takes into account as a specific Central European study the
intentions and events that constructed the region, and he aspires to discover
their historical motives; during the contextualization of the avant-garde
endeavours he is confronted with the multi-pole character of the avant-garde
that was thought of as universal (Piotrowski 2009a, 23–24).
I attempt to display the
activity of the workshop and the created works of art in this spatial-locality
sphere of concepts; this idea is flexible enough to allow me to place my
subject of study in this – from the point of view of social sciences –
relatively undefined setting, and to be able to do the examination along
various methods. The concept of locality is difficult to be interpreted without
the consequences of the post-modern affecting the different spheres of society
and culture. The local narratives and the tradition turning reflexive, as
appearing in opposition to the requirement of universality of modernity created
situations by the sixties in which the everyday and self-reflective practices
related to the place and the components of local identity had become more
valuable. One of the emphatic statements of the dissertation is that the neo-avantgard
took a prominent role in the loss of illusion of modernity and in turning
against its program. Moreover, I argue that the neo-avantgarde – and here I
think primarily of the so-called second-generation tendencies in Pécs – may
more likely be classified as belonging to the post-modern trends, and also,
post-modern elements can be found in the activities of the Pécs Workshop. This
phenomenon – as a transition to be seized at the boundary of the stylistic
periods that fall in the foreground of this study – can be identified in the
shifting or newly emerging art forms and art types. The crisis of art after World War II
was not only indicated by the formal and ideological style inclusions and the
politically and ideologically crystallized art trends in the totalitarian societies;
the returning "neo-trends" (expressionism, constructivism) after the
war show how fine arts are compelled to reach back and reinterpret pre-war
principles and practices.
Neo-constructivism played an emphatic role in this conceptual and
methodological self-revision and self-building process; the
"renaissance" of the constructivist endeavours of the twenties and
thirties unravelled in the sixties, and many local art discourses were built
around this form of expression within the geographical-cultural-political
entity of Central-Eastern Europe.
The importance of these
neo-constructivist efforts in this respect in relation to the Pécs Workshop may
not be overstated. The artistic attitude of the members was not defined on the
long-run only by the structural analysis approach and the constructivist
guiding principles of visualization and image creation. It was exactly this
language of representation through which
the members of the workshop could legitimately express themselves, and join the
then current domestic and international neo-avantgarde art communication. In
relation to this can we account for the venues, people, art colonies,
exhibitions and other events that drew the scope of activities and the frame of
reference of the activity of the Pécs Workshop.
The land art works of the Pécs
Workshop: geometrical forms in rural
and urban environment
We may meet with at least the same degree of divergence
while comparing the land art activities of Central Europe versus Western Europe
and America, as expressive we would find the differences in relation to the
interpretations of Károly Halász and Nam June Paik's use of media in the
introductory example (‘candle-TV’ installations).
Neither in the case of Pécs Workshop can we speak of
land art in the same sense as it appeared in the Western European and primarily
in the American art. These distinctions do not only derive from the difference
in scale, dimensions, and the occasional grandiosity of the American works; although,
it should be also added that the feasibility of some project and plans was
limited precisely by the different socio-political situation. The
attainable project works within the American circumstances – such as Michael
Heizer’s work from 1969 entitled Double Negative[9],
for the execution of which more than two hundred thousand tons of sandstone
were moved for artistic purposes – seem hardly feasible in the Hungary of the
sixties and seventies. Due to this limitation the significant part of
Hungarian, and Central and Eastern European land art project works emerged
"only" on the level of visual designs and concepts.
It is necessary to deal with the urban environment
also for the reason that we see a number
of works at the Pécs Workshop that can be interpreted as "urban land
art". The efforts occurring
on the Western European scene consider the city[10] not merely as a specific setting formation
but also as the scenery of the organization of society, where reorganization is
only possible through visualization. We can
talk about visual constructs which much rather belong with those intellectual
trends – dealing with urban space and the urban organization – to be connected to the names of
Kevin Lynch, Guy Debord, or Simon Sadler[11]
among others, and so it happens that they belong to a lesser degree to the
visual representation program of either László Moholy-Nagy, or from our perspective more emphatic Ferenc Lantos.
We can understand the other
important difference between the Western European/ American vs. Central
European/Pécs land art aspirations if try to examine the reference range of the
works beyond questions of semiotics also from the perspectives of social and
moral philosophy. Intervention in nature is a modernist view rooted in the
Cartesian anthropocentric perception of the world which is materialized in the
rule of man over nature. The interventions of gigantic character – for example
Michael Heizer’s work Double Negative – as landscape wounds and
metamorphoses turned into art, are more likely to be considered at the first
glace the definitive formulations of a modernist authoritarian position rather
than a critique of this modernist approach. But this radicalism may as well be
interpreted as an exclamation mark kind of a gesture, which can be considered
an early, less sophisticated articulation of ecological sensibility. The
ecological way of thinking – not only in the social sciences – may be clearly
considered a post-modern tendency. Moreover, it means such a critique on
modernity which is characterized by reflexivity instead of breaking with
tradition and situational truths instead of absolute truth validity. Due to the
emptying of the social utopias and the loss of universal validity of the great
narratives[12] the awakening and appearance of those social
movements occurs among which ecology may be considered one of the defining
intellectual trend of the sixties. The normative ideological and ethical system
emerging in this intellectual environment formulates specific ideals for action
and society. Ecology as a philosophical trend basically articulates new
conditions in the man/society and culture/civilization vs. nature relationship (Ferry
1994, Schumacher 1991; Lovelock 2010).
However, these philosophical currents reached Hungary and the post-Soviet
region with considerable delay only in the eighties, when the ecological
thinking, as an intellectual trend, became conceptually and methodologically
tangible and reflected upon. (Szabo 1989).
With reference to the above mentioned the Pécs
Workshop stood much closer to the ecological attitude that may be expressed in
contemplation rather than intervention and not "merely" the respect
towards nature – as opposed to the land art projects operating with the
radicalism of intervention, causing landscape wounds. This means at the same
time a fundamentally different attitude in cognition too, since cognition in
modernity shifted from being the way to understand reality into being the tool
for domination over nature. This new way of thinking brings with itself also
the integrating vision and a kind of holistic approach besides/instead of the
analytic backtracking of the phenomena.
The neo-avantgarde use of media
Another set of issues to be addressed is the use of
media in photography and photo-based works of art - and slightly expanding the
question – of the neo-avantgarde; this can be unfolded from the media-oriented
aspect of the avant-garde expansion. The Hungarian neo-avantgarde expansion
designates two overlapping areas: a critique of the system sometimes to be
considered radical, sometimes more acceptable (here it is worth thinking about
the relevant works of Miklós Erdély, Gyula Pauer, Endre Tót, Sándor Pinczehelyi
and Tamás Szentjóby among others). In this context we may speak about a type of
work of art that is responsive to the socio-cultural situation and is aiming
for the eradication of the boundary between the aesthetic sphere and reality,
and, in another respect, there is a medium-oriented expansion to be mentioned.
In the avant-garde tradition the field of concepts of
the media-oriented expansion appears as a feature of the neo-avantgarde
alongside the social expansion. This means a kind of extended concept of image
and medium, where the artist on the one hand involves a variety of tools in the
broadest sense for one’s imaging repertoire; on the other hand (and this is the
dematerializing process) the mediatization occurs also on conceptual level:
that is, the artistic idea, design, or the concept itself appears as an
autonomous form of art. And, although the so-called dematerialized conceptual
art works are less typical of the activity of the Pécs Workshop, conceptualism,
in this sense, is the substance of neo-avantgarde artefacts. As László
Beke draws the attention as early as in 1972, the use of the photo was promoted
by the spreading of trends such as action art, happening, the project art, land
art and conceptual art. Besides the photo’s documenting and reality depicting
purpose, thus were called to life new types of functions – magical,
metaphorical, and reproductive ones (Beke 1972a, 8–9). Lóránd Hegyi defines
this bipolar expansion on one hand as an anti-artistic phenomenon, and on the
other hand, "as a creation of the synthesis of the arts".
"Anti-art attempts to create a new cultural situation by the criticism and
destruction of the existing cultural values." (Hegyi 1986, 122)
The Pécs Workshop makes
palpable a very specific class of phenomenon both in terms of art technology
and media use. On one side, it renders easily perceptible the theory which was
displayed by Walter Benjamin in the 1930s in the concept of the apparatus. This
covers not only the given use of technology and the conveyed nature of the
artwork but we are also to include the institutional formations and the
institutionalized relations connected/connecting to the technical means. And in
the same way this assumption is to incorporate some modes – defined by the
technology and the apparatus – of the ‘representation’, the imagery-visual
expressible character and the creation of reality (Benjamin 1969,
315-327). In Vilém Flusser's view, the
main characteristic of the technical image is that it is produced by
apparatuses and he perceives these apparatuses as the constructions of
(scientific) texts. (Flusser 1990, 13). The activity and history of the Pécs
Workshop may be positioned in the hermeneutic space between these two interpretations. On the other
hand, it gives the iconic impression of a unique area of phenomena of photo-based
imaging, that is, of a special part of domestic neo-avantgarde photo use, which
was formed in this case in a very specific geographically and culturally
defined medium in the seventies in Pécs.
This is well illustrated by
the workshop members’ photo performances becoming a tendency in the early
seventies – for example Halász’s works Private Broadcast, 1973-74 and Pseudo
video 1975[13].
These works show the artist in a empty TV frame: he is either squeezing himself
into the empty TV frame in different positions, or he is sitting on top of the
device with a bouquet of flowers, naked or in underwear. Halász called these
works photo actions, but they are in fact photo performances. Here the artist
does not create for the audience directly observing the action, but he shows
his actions to us through the camera and the photograph. This series of
Halász’s is remarkable because it demonstrates the change how photography
became the primary medium of the conceptual and performative works in the
sixties and seventies; it is also remarkable because through these works the
presentation of new problem fields was made possible such as the body and the
new forms of self-presentation, the montage, the cinematic perspective, various
instances of media consciousness as new kinds of aesthetic-cognitive fields of
concepts. Halász
uses photography as a medium for such identity constructions that give an
account of both his individual disposition and his medial competence and the
possible functions of the photo.
This study undertook neither the complete critical
adaptation nor the monographic processing of the activity of the workshop.
During the presentation of the characteristic tendencies of the activity of the
group it was intended to present instances of how different transitional types
of works may be met in the specific verge of eras in the seventies. I also
tried to show emphatic points that make visible the parallel quality of the
activity of the group in the seventies with the domestic and international –
including in the latter primarily the Central European – trends. From these
activities and tendencies I set the focus of my investigations on the land art
activity and media use of the workshop. In connection with both I wanted to
emphasize the way the two areas may be presented in specific contexts of
interpretation and along particular social and cultural practices, which all
show the ‘uniqueness’ of the Pécs Workshop within the Eastern European entity.
I
tried to point to the dissimilarity originating in individuality with the help
of many areas of concepts well-known in the social sciences. The relation to
nature that was made visible in the land art works was to be updatable and
emphasised because of the lack of ecological discourse of the time. This
typically post-modern phenomenon also reveals that the Pécs Workshop, as the
representative of the second-generation neo-avantgarde in Hungary, may clearly
be connected to post-modern trends. The western ecological endeavours appeared
precisely in the first half of the seventies on the borderlines of social study
thinking. Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975) in utopian literature,
Arne Naess’ ecology-based moral philosophy and nature-centred society concept
of deep ecology (1973), Ernst Schumacher’s ecology-based economics theory
(1973) are only indicative milestones of that ecology-based social theoretical
discourse that was developed in Hungary only in the eighties[14].
The activity of the Pécs Workshop becomes really exciting in this area due to
the mode in which they express similar sets of problems – isolated from the
contemporary ecological discourse – in their own way, with their own visual
tools. It is a special feature of the situation that they perceived their own
activities as a question of semiotics and not one of ecology.
A
similar state of conceptual and material vacuum characterises the relationship
of the workshop to the contemporary media and the media culture. The use of the
different mediums may be primarily interpreted as a pseudo phenomenon; i.e.
amid the limited technical conditions they deal with each new medium from
principally cognitive-conceptual aspects. This is a typically Eastern European
attitude, similar to the one that the "affordable", the photo becomes
the number one medium for medial creative practice. Despite this restrictedness
some opportunities arose such as in the case of Pécs Workshop the land art
movies made with standard 8 films, Pinczehelyi’s video performance of 1975 in the
art colony in Graz, or just in 1977 the Pécs Workshop movie recorded in
the Pécs Regional Studio of the Hungarian National Television.
Until the end of the seventies no serious possibilities occurred on the field
of motion picture for the members of the workshop. It is interesting that the
encounter with this form of expression essentially disrupted the unity of the group
that was not unified anyway. And, although among the workshop members at Halász
we encounter some sort of systematic program of the performances carried out
before the public – albeit Szijártó also had performance-actions[15]
– the performance as a form of expression was mainly limited to
photo-performances in the workshop activities.
In my dissertation I attempt to understand along what ‘timely’ concept of art
may the works of art created in the Pécs Workshop be interpreted, and along
which divergent and/or similar concepts can these be connected to either
western or domestic neo-avantgarde aspirations. Can an art concept, artistic
practice and identity exist on the periphery if it is immanent and moves on an
internal path of development, and if so, what features of it can be identified
in the activity of the Pécs Workshop. Throughout the study I only tried to
display emphases that were considered to be characteristic, and I strove less
to give a thorough, inventory-like analysis of the activity of the workshop.
Pécs, 2013
[4]The Medium is the
Medium. WGBH, 1969 (27’50). Director: Fred Barzyk. Electronic Arts Intermix;
http://www.eai.org/title.htm?id=1443 (2012.07.12)
[5] See the work in:
Gábor Bódy: Négy bagatell, 1975. (27’40). Balázs Béla Studio.
Bódy made a presentation of the
problems that are introduced here also on a semiotics conference in Tihany in
1974 with the title Végtelen tükörcső (Infinite mirror-tube), which he
published later entitled Végtelen kép és tükröződés (Infinite image and
reflection) (Bódy 1978, 295-299).
[6] Although they could try out the “action in front of
the camera’ genre in 1977 in the Pécs Regional Studio of the Hungarian
Television, it was this meeting that brought the direct use of video technology
for Halász. See the work in: Pécsi Műhely film, 1977. Pinczehelyi 2004
CD.
[7] . See the work in:
Karoly Halasz: An Indian in Holland. 1978 (33’23min), De Appel
collection, Netherlands Media Art Institute, Amsterdam.
[10] The use of the term
public art for these works that were realized in urban medium I think to be
misleading for historical reasons, so I chose Tamás Aknai’s “urban land art” term in
my dissertation. (Aknai 1995,
25). On the definition of the concept of public art Franciska Zólyom’ study Nyilvánosság.
A köztéri szobrászattól a társadalmi felelősségvállalásig (Publicity. From
public sculpture to social responsibility) gives - among
others – an excellent overview. (Zólyom 2010).
[11] Lynch - among others - examines the kinds of elements
of spatial organization along which the city becomes “readable”, to be
interpreted by various groups in society. What elements and modules make the
main units of this "text". Lynch considered these to be a sort of
reflections, while he tries to define the conceptual conditions of the city –
especially the US metropolis – on visual basis: paths, edges, districts, nods
and landmarks make up the emphatic elements of the city's imaginative
repertoire. Lynch’s specific mapping studies, which were conducted in Los
Angeles and Boston opened the way in the direction of the mental mapping, among
others in the field of behaviorism, and – among other things – gave answers to
issues like the types of mental mapping-images, space and symbol uses that are
present in the visual consciousness of the users of space (Lynch 1960). On Guy
Debord and the reception of the Situationist International see Merrifield 2005.
[14] The first studies related to the problems of ecology
in Hungary are to be connected to the name of Pál Juhász-Nagy, whereas the interpretations of
the international ecological movements belong to Máté Szabó from the
mid-eighties. See also: Juhász-Nagy 1984; Szabó 1985, resp. Callenbach 1992;
Drengson – Naess 2005; Schumacher 1991.
[15]See the work in: Átváltozások. 1980. Kálmán
Szijártó’s performance in the Fészek Klub in Budapest. Photo-documentation
(Pinczehelyi 2004, 287).
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