H u n g a r y
Ten Years After; Blood Sweat & Tears etc.
by Tibor Várnagy
History in Eastern and Central-Eastern Europe in the 1990's has made all too real forms of anachronism which we, the generation which grew up in the 1960's and 1970's, had only until now known in books and films from previous eras. During this decade, however, we have had to learn that the primary values of the previous regime would not survive fundamental societal reorganization. Perhaps these ten years have been too short for something particular to take shape. Sadly, though, in this respect it has become clear that the hopes and expectations originally harbored by most people in relation to systemic political changes have been lost. It could not be more poignant for anyone still deluding himself in 1999 than to have these hopes crushed by the fact that within a few days of the Visegrad countries becoming part of NATO (and subsequently 'becoming part of Europe'), NATO began its bombing of Yugoslavia which, at the time of writing, has lasted for more than fifty days. Budapest is not really so far from Belgrade, not as far as Chernobyl. This can be heard by those living in the southern regions of Hungary, neighbors to Serbia, as the bombs explode over the border in Vojvodina. It appears that central European history in the 1990's has unfortunately not been characterized by success stories of states progressing towards change, but by the atrocity of the war in the land inhabited by southern Slavs.
I would say that concerning the development of Hungarian art, the art of the 1980's came to an end in 1986. From then on began then the period which was to last until 1995-96. In the light of this, I would now like to present the pictures of Dezsõ Szabó, and the project of Dominic Hislop and Miklós Erhardt entitled 'Inside Out'.
Dezsõ Szabó is 32 years old and thus belongs to the generation of young artists whose era began in 1990 and ended in 1995, thus running concurrent with the political upheavals starting at the same time. This generation's artistic undertakings were therefore shaped by the changes taking place in society around them. Although Szabó was a student of the Academy of Fine Arts' painting department (and has not, until now, exhibited his paintings), the course in monochrome and radical painting taught under Zsigmond Károlyi proved to be decisive in Szabó's studies. His objects are made from metal, and his photography also utilizes for example bulky metal sheets installed with screws or works presented on bases of alloy sheet metal buckets.
Szabó made the photos on exhibit here between 1993 and 1999. The collection, which originally comprises of hundreds of photographs, is in the form of diary notes. It represents the culmination of the artist's work from five different solo exhibitions to date. Similarly, the work that was previously shown in the Liget Gallery is in part constructed by repainting, enameling and gluing, together with adaptations of standard postal greeting cards. Among the photographs shown here are certain pictures, the tableaux or variants of which demonstrate Szabó's part-meditative, part-conceptual landscape series or large-scale fictitious landscapes. Along with these are also a large number of pictures not directly connected to his other exhibited works to date. This collection is therefore a uniform study, the collection of photographic codes employed by Szabó.
The Scottish artist Dominic Hislop, also 32, was a postgraduate student of the intermedia department at the Academy of Fine Arts. All of his earlier works while at the Academy such as the site-specific installations and series of stickers mimicking those of the nationalist and chauvinist extreme right in Budapest, directly reflected their primary societal environments. The 'Inside Out' exhibition was realized together with Miklós Erhardt, 32, also a student of the Academy's intermedia department, and introduced us to the lives of Budapest's homeless.
In the catalogue of the exhibition, which took place in the spring of 1998, Hislop and Erhardt wrote the following:
'The 'Inside Out' project began in July 1997. Between then and February 1998, around 40 homeless people living in Budapest were given simple disposable cameras and invited to take pictures of whatever they found important in their everyday lives with the knowledge that their pictures would later be viewed publicly as part of an exhibition.
The participants, found in the various shelters for the homeless or on the street or met by chance on the street, had their photos exhibited together with text commentary in their own words. All income from the exhibition posters and catalogue, as well as the accompanying series of postcards, has gone to and will continue to go to the homeless people who took part in the project.
"For us, the 'Inside Out' photo project was an artistic statement of a provocative nature," write Hislop and Erhardt in their notes, questioning the role of the artist as the sole legitimate producer of culture. "In fact two artistic projects took place concurrently in such a way that they were indistinguishable from each other. The homeless people participating handled the tools which were directly necessary for the production of the art - the camera was the- ir medium - while our medium was the person of the participant, the social and moral situation, the context and the process itself."
Budapest, May 1999
Galleri Image ©1999 Toldbodgade 8, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark.
