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He raised the question presumably because it was difficult for him to interpret the rural land configuration here on the basis of the customary patterns of observation within the more closely knit forms of coexistence developed in Angolan culture. The relativity and mutability of modes of observation is, of course, experienceable everyday. It is thanks to the rapidly changing tempo of the various modelling and communications technologies that observation is also continually undergoing reorganisation. Not only here, but in Africa as well. The English anthropologist Nigel Barley relates just such an account: when a bottle-filling production line was put into operation in an African city, the local residents watched in wonderment for hours on end as the empty bottles entering the conveyor belt reappeared after a time from the machinery, filled. A few months later, the empty bottles appeared on elevated altars to pay homage to the ancestors of the locals. The new production technology transformed their communication metaphors and modes of observation: the bottles which had served until then for the storage of beverages now lended themselves to the transmission of messages between living and dead souls, and their observation became important consequently not only with regard to thirst, but from the perspective of the spirit world, as well. Incidentally, a similar account regarding the interconnection between the nature of tools and technology and the methods of observation and communication may be read in Herodotus: in relating the customs of a warrior race, he alludes to the fact that they communicate with their gods in an extremely peculiar way: if they wish to make something known to them, then it is conveyed to a chosen one by his companions. Subsequently, this chosen one is thrown high so that upon falling back down onto the points of their spears, he is mortally wounded – thus, the limitedness of his sojourn here no longer hinders the message arriving to its destination. It is indisputable that in comparison with the preparation (and application) of the spears, we employ a slightly more complex military and communications technique. The practised effect on our observation and metaphors, however, touches all of us in the same manner that it did the Scythians in their time. At most, the evolution of the velocity of development (and obsolescence) surpasses all historical examples. The reorganisation of our observation follows the reorganisation of the world. It cannot be any other way. The evolution of our antennae has lent itself to this for millennia. It unceasingly directs attention to the movement of figuration. The winds of the savannah. The undulation of the waters and the grasses. The impact of rustlings. Meanwhile, the constantly changing countryside of migration. Not only in the beginning, in the depths of the forests, but also since then, in the urban wilds, in the chaotic public spaces, among the swamps of information. Certainly, essential differences also derive from the direction and sharpness of our observations. Moreover, this does not depend only upon the constitutional circumstances. The divergence between value selection and situation evaluation leads to various observational patterns. There are those who, with the acceleration of reorganisation, rise to competition, running three Machs above the real world. And there are those who are increasingly attentive to the new constellations. Their observation sharpens to relations and projections which, in the course of their earlier conjunctions, were either manifest not at all or in an entirely different way. The metamorphosis of the acoustic environment and music technologies did not only predispose to the concrete music of rustlings, the works of Cage or techno, but also to the hearing of the new colours of the great music tradition. I consider the Goldberg Variations more listenable today on guitar – in the performance of Kurt Rodarmer – than on Gould's piano; it is true that even originally Bach did not write it for piano. In the case of visual art, this is perhaps even more obvious. The history of the art of the last decades has referred not to the change in styles and media, genres and trends, but rather first and foremost, to the shifting and reorganisation of modes of observation. Real art renders evident this ubiquitously experienceable insight – moreover, in its own place: in the street, in public places. There where – in fact, far from evident – reality acquires palpableness. To be found in the sea of artworks throughout the city, now and again each significant masterpiece distinguishes itself to an attentive gaze. The creator-collectors of real art render these scattered objects viewable in a new system of interdependence. baldanders* cull one of the most peculiar types of window: the glass eyes cast to the pavement, which, day after day, with the changing of the times of the day, demonstrate the translocation of emphasis between outside and inside, as well as the visible plays of form and light. The principle of inversion of the exterior and interior relations is more „windows", as well as new identifications in the case of display windows and cut-outs: the display window mannequins lead to the insight of identity-photo-identity. Mária Chilf accentuates the extensive „maps" of the urine-stained sites of the city streets – the stratifications, the „local colour" of the flow-contours – and puts these incidental flow-charts into the base of their own images. Gábor Erdei reveals prominent sites as an „open gallery", a self-exhibition space where not only the artwork, the unintentionally produced industrial-architectural ready-made, but also the emphatic-exhibition space of divergence is self-derived – alongside the original „work of art", its „aura" called into being, as well. Tamás Ilauszky thematicizes the meeting between the technological and the plebian plastic formative power. He visibly captivates the way that the creative power of folk-industrial art is able to lift towers before the tire-clinics, or is capable of disposing surrealistic plastics into packing material. In the plastic foam, however, he unintentionally brings to life the latent possibilities in his own work: he empties it out, he refills it with something else – he regenerates it. Gyula Július has discovered the charm of the forms and institutions of shutting in/shutting out – boarded-up windows, doors, a row of balconies; the changes in the minimalism of constructive/destructive art – he has equipped a zone with the watchmen and alarms of „protection systems". Gyöngyi Kámán's found objects are really found objects: the left-behind gloves demonstrate the unmatched institution of appendage, as apart from these extremities, no other characteristic is called to general attention to the extent that it registers and is fixed prominently. (Would some sort of hunted/hunter-atavism be engaged in this – the antler-moulting/discovery?) The aesthetic of the wearing-out of objects lies at the center of Endre Koronczi's interest. He methodically elaborates the richness of basic events, which are sometimes composed of a labyrinth of scrapes and scratches exposed on the wall of a parking garage; other times, of a traced ring of keys. This stratification of time overlaps with the precise cartography of the wounds, and is accompanied by refined graphical solutions. Andrea Schneemeier discovered the unsurpassable mark of authentic art on the wall of a building built in 1892 (and judging by the signs, unrenovated since then): inside the richly decorated eclectic (false window) frame, the bullet-holes and schrapnel lesions of the wars and revolutions of the century. Dezsõ Szabó approaches with a sharpened eye the meeting of materials, media and composition techniques distant to each other, and he observes that the two „genres" of the surface-treatment of public space – advertising (billboards) and graffiti – when overlapping, lead to a new type of image. György Varga is the attentive observer of the „enaychess (National Health Service) aesthetic", of the public institutional flooring aesthetic. The multi -coloured and -patterned sheets of floor-tile representing various layers of time – and occasionally, style and ideals of beauty – reveal the strongest tendency of „the art of the real" in this direction. That is, that peculiar folk art which the stonemasons, floor-tilers and every kind of bungler masterfully refined throughout the Eastern countries of the era. By now it is impenetrable to what extent technological innovation, deficit-economics and the taste(lessness) of the contracted craftsman – alongside the undeniable styles of the era – was instrumental in its development, as well as chance – which historically, in the case of a broken pipe, could become definitive in the evolution of the final aspect… Varga struck upon one of the undebatable gems of the ceramic- and concrete-sheet-culture of the Socialist era: it is the colours and forms which provide the enthralling interplay to that NHS-flooring, created on the verge of refined taste, in which is the unintentional meeting of at least three stylistic epochs (and of course, at least that many manufacturers and contractors). According to the Op and Pop Art categories of the epoch, it is equally interpretable that all at once those far-beyond-belief masterpieces beckon us to look with increased attention in front of our feet. Because at any time, it may transpire that even in the most ordinary place, chance puts real art before us. |