The
Art of the Opening
Minyó Szert's opening at the
Liget Gallery
There is nothing unusual
about someone hopping on his bike, turning on the dynamo and riding away
into the dark. This everyday activity becomes unusual when it takes place
in the closed and darkened interior of a building, and if the bicycle
is really what it is (and not a work-out machine, an exercise bicycle).
Yet the interior cyclist does not go round and round, but pedals on a
bike mounted on a stand, which keeps the back wheel above the ground to
facilitate its free movement, allowing the dynamo to work and the headlight
to illuminate the space ahead. A somewhat different light is thrown upon
this action when carried out at the opening of an exhibition. A further
distinctive colour is given to this image by the fact that the light so
generated is cast upon a wall, through a negative placed before it, to
light a surface treated with a photosensitive emulsion.
All these elements were already present in earlier works of Minyó
Szert. He has coated various objects with the emulsion of his own formulation
for almost a decade, to have images appear on them. They include simple
pieces of wood as well as stones, though the most common carrier is the
usual paper and canvas. Yet the images do not give the impression of photographs
because what dominates the surface is the tool with which the emulsion
is laid on: the brush - unlike photographs, where the representation seems
ab ovo perfect (sharp outlines, uniformity, geometric basic shapes, etc.),
these images are ruled by the thready strokes of the brush, the contingency
of the strokes, slips and the resulting misses. Consequently, defining
their genre is no easy task: they are halfway, as it were, between photographing
and painting - which is of course more or less the result of the artist
being at home in both fields.
The bicycle itself functions not only as a light-bike, but a basic motif
in Minyó's pictures. This vehicle is no longer a gentlemen's hobby
or a form of diversion (like a multi-geared mountain bike) but a workaday
means of transport. The bicycle (the two-wheeler [bi-cycle], the cycle,
the bike) is the modern steed of European nomads who were the last to
settle. Back in the saddle after such a long time spent away from horses
- or riding. Not a nobleman's prerogative but an almost rural privilege.
Yet under the saddle there is no longer a living being but a factory-made
object, not a horse but a "donkey." The mount of the poor, like
elsewhere and at other times the donkey. Which is why Szert could find
them at every step in the last quarter of the last century, by country
taverns and fences.
And this wasn't the first time either that he coated the wall with the
photosensitive emulsion; he did so first in 1991, at his exhibition in
Tuzoltó Street, in one of the lateral rooms. Back then, however,
there was no light-bike, nor was the opening particularly emphatic.
The opening
The opening is a step of great importance not only in a game of chess,
: it can determine even the outcome of the game elsewhere too. In the
gallery, this most peculiar of media for modern art, Marcel Duchamp was
the first to point this out - and he was no amateur chess player either.
With his installation A Mile of Strings (1942) he used the space of a
gallery to show how significant, or even inevitable, the art of opening
can become. For a group exhibition he wove a web by pinning strings to
different points of the pictures, walls, screens, the ceiling and the
floor. Duchamp's mesh actually made it difficult for visitors to get near
the exhibits. This exhibition in New York (First Papers of Surrealism)
became famous not because of the works exhibited, but because of Duchamp's
contribution.
His gesture, which made the exhibition room almost impassable, while promoting
the space to be part of the exhibition, aimed primarily at the opening.
It wasn't the only work by Duchamp to gain its inspiration from, and to
be aimed at, the institutions of art. Just like his ready-mades, this
too revealed his acute understanding of the spirit of the place and scenery,
the habits of exhibition-goers, in all, the "operation" of art,
of the decisive nature of openings - of the fact that his installation
would gain its force from the originality of the moment. You cannot start
the same fountain twice. The perplexing power of enmeshment can be felt
fully only at the opening, after which news of it goes round, it is expected
and thus abates, dies.
"The history of the gallery from the 1920s to the 1970s is as characteristic
as that of the art it introduces," says Brian O'Doherty in his essay
on the white cube. The exhibition space and the opening are fundamental
institutions of modern art, the celebrated place in which it can appear,
and the central event of its medium. Duchamp took notice of this, and
his works were the first to reflect on this. His Fountain is an early
and well-known case, of a factory-made object, the urinal, elevated to
the rank of work of art by its context. The legendary example of this
shapely "fountain" is one of the myths of origin of modern art.
The baffling potential of the exceptionally famous urinal is still effective
after almost a century, which somewhat dims the source of this fame. For,
by it, Duchamp first made conspicuous the power of context to create content
within the medium of art. His later similar gestures (Bottle Dryer, etc.),
as well the works of other artists who chose the gallery space for their
themes, made it obvious that the gallery is far from being a neutral space:
it is quite saturated. "The sensible force fields within this space
are so powerful that outside them art could fall into profanity and vice
versa: an object becomes a work of art in a space in which powerful thoughts
about art are concentrated. The object in fact is often only a medium
through which these ideas can become known and offer themselves for discourse"
(O'Doherty).
Duchamp in his later and less-known installation, 1200 Bags of Coal (1938),
covered the ceiling of a gallery housing a group exhibition with coal
bags. By this, he made visitors raise their eyes. By raising what has
always been down, he emphasized a part of the gallery that has been ignored:
an up till then unused surface which spans above the floor and doors -
and caps them. "By this inversion," says Doherty, "an artist
for the first time submitted the whole space of a gallery to a gesture.
Once he had discovered this context, a multitude of gestures followed,
which developed the gallery as an integral whole and a manipulated measuring
instrument of aesthetics."
Others later made works that concentrated on the exhibition space and
the opening event. Arman filled a gallery to the ceiling with common trash
(La Plein, 1960). Yves Klein made emptiness the centrepiece of an empty
gallery (La Vide, 1962). Daniel Buren covered the door of a gallery with
a striped canvas pattern and thus made entry impossible (Galleria Apollinaire,
1968). The paradox of the gallery was brought into the sharpest relief
probably by Robert Barry, when he published his concept for an exhibition
entitled During the exhibition the gallery will be closed in a journal
(Art and Project Bulletin 17, 1969), and realized it a year later in a
Los Angeles gallery, which was kept closed for the duration of the exhibition,
three weeks.
Parallel with more and more works choosing for their theme the gallery
space and its quality of being a medium, performances and art actions
from the 1960s on made the event itself in the context of the gallery
a form of art.
The focus of attention
Compared to its predecessors, the absolute novelty of Minyó Szert's
opening is that the event and its effect, the production of the work of
art coincides with its reflective exposure. The most important of the
questions that arise at this point is just what it is that he reflects
on with the light of his bike.
The light of his bike - and together with it, attention - is directed
at the wall. Though this wall happens to be a partition in a house on
an avenue named after Dürer, it is also the wall of a gallery, which
makes the building more than a building in the avenue. The wall bathing
in the light of the bike lamp is also part of the metaphoric construction
of European culture. It stands on foundations which grew out of western
Christian art five hundred years ago. This cultic zone includes not only
its origins, but the beginning of its development as well: the phase when
churches became the cathedrals of pictures (J-P. Changeux). >From the
16th century on, the cult of sacred images is increasingly superseded
by the cult of images considered works of art. From this time on art "has
either a place near religion, or is excluded from there, but it is no
longer a phenomenon that is part of actual religion" (H. Belting).
The accelerating departure of the visual arts from the Christian religion,
then their complete break with it, by no means implies that art has ceased
to have religious qualities. The sacral traits of art, which has moved
out of sanctuaries, live on in the sanctuaries of art, the museums. The
first museums resemble churches not only in their architecture, but also
because of the cults they are home to: museums are the cultic places of
art-religion, : they have become the real "cathedrals of pictures."
A new institution is added to the sacral archive of art in the middle
of the 19th century: this was when the first galleries, like so many side-chapels
to the naves of museums, appeared. "They have something of the sacredness
of churches, the austerity of court rooms, the mysteriousness of research
laboratories, something that, together with stylish designs, makes them
unique cultic places of aesthetic," says O'Doherty.
The light-bike
in the darkroom
The beam of light projected on the gallery wall illuminates darkness.
This light generated on the spot directs the attention not only at the
wall but also at the process taking place in the darkness. Darkening the
gallery space in this case is not meant to heighten expectations or to
augment a devotional atmosphere, but is a simple and functional move:
it is essential for the development of the photograph. But by Minyó
Szert's offering the process of developing a photo for common reflection,
all elements of the event - the darkening, the generation of light, the
exposure, the development - gain a new significance.
The coming into being of the photograph, its visible taking shape out
of nothing, despite our familiarity with the rules of photochemistry,
still has an aura of mystery. The profoundest knowledge of the natural
sciences cannot dismiss the feel of magic. This process of photochemistry
which has always taken place in dark and closed chambers is surrounded
by the mysteriousness of alchemy and (now "black," now "white")
magic. (Though this atmosphere was somewhat weakened first by automation
and then by digitalisation, it hasn't disappeared completely.)
Expanding the darkroom to the whole of the gallery space opens the walls
of the alchemist's laboratory, makes its seclusion "translucent"
and reveals the processes that take place within. This is given a special
emphasis during the opening as, while Minyó is engaged in developing
and fixing the photo, a speaker reads out a section from Fox Talbot's
classic history of photography, The Pencil of Nature: "The little
work here introduced is the first attempt to present publicly a series
of plates, or pictures, which were created completely by means of the
novel art of photogenic drawing, without the artist's using any drawing
instruments. The plates of this work were generated by the influence of
Light upon a sensitive paper. The picture is produced or painted solely
by optical and chemical means, and no other instruments known to the art
of drawing were present. Consequently it is needless to say that they
are in all respects, to the greatest possible extent different from the
usual types of plates or clichés, whose existence is due to the
joint craftsmanship of the artist and the engraver. These plates have
been moulded by the hands of Nature; as for what is wanted for the perfection
of their fineness and finish
"
Fanum and profanum
The darkened exhibition space and the activity taking place within recall
not only the alchemist's laboratory and the darkroom, but the most ancient
"studios," caves and funeral vaults. Yet in this case this happens
without the appearance of a freely chosen "spiritualistic" background,
so common in postmodernity. The artists of the classic phase of modernity
sought to avoid the use of direct religious references. Though many of
them believed in some form of esotericism (e.g., Kandinsky in anthroposophy
; Mondrian in theosophy), the general interest lay in archaic cultures
and cults outside the Jewish-Christian and Greek patterns of culture,
in a more "primitive" ethos. Anti-classicism was the rule in
the modes of figuration just as in "psychic constructions."
What was coarse, straightforward or simple was favoured against what was
sophisticated, intricate or well-balanced. This is why primitivism could
become such a fruitful trait in the art of the 20th century, to be the
reviver of traditions before (and outside) the European tradition which
had congealed into a set of conventions. This wasn't restricted to representation,
but had its effect on the whole medium of art. In this process art turned
out to have cultic traits even without direct links to religion. These
qualities are characteristic not only of the exhibition space, but the
whole of the late-bourgeois art industry, and its basic institutions.
The opening of an exhibition with its vernissage is essentially a community
event. O'Doherty's observation that "the object is often only a medium"
for the discourse on art, can apply to a broader social field as well:
not only the object, but art itself and its various institutions function
as a medium for lovers of art who walk their own way.
The opening of an exhibition is one of those few events in city life where
"the initiated" (those who have been invited or know about the
event) can partake of food and drink as gifts. Etymologically speaking,
visitors gathering round breadbaskets and wines are not very far from
Christians celebrating over bread and wine. The first phase of participation
in both cases is regulated by ritual rules, ; the second is a more relaxed,
social-personal interchange. (For early Christians bread and wine were
present not only in symbolic quantities: they gave a real feast.)
At this opening at the Liget Gallery, a new feature of this sociality
appeared. By making the generation of light and the production of the
photograph part of his performance, Minyó Szert gave a new dimension
to the opening. He is not exaggerating when he writes in his note for
the exhibition that on his light-bike he "cover[s] light years within
minutes. [He] bridge[s] cosmic dimensions, ride[s] to another dimension."
This cross-dimensional ride is at the same time slightly comic, just as
Minyó Szert's pictures and gestures are not without humour and
(self-)irony. The image of an artist cycling in a gallery - no doubt crossing
the borders of dimensions - is rather far from the ideal of a creator
probing the universe with ecstatic eyes. An artist on a stationary bike
in a gallery is about as common a sight as the one described by the informal
Hungarian phrase for such situations, a monkey astride the grinding stone.
The coexistence and contemporaneity of the cosmic and the comic appear,
of course, not only at Minyó Szert's opening, as such a conjunction
of the "sacred" and the "profane" is one of the paradoxical
characteristics of modern art: "The modern artist," says aesthetician
Hannes Böhringer, "unites in himself the iconoclastic heretic
and the orthodox believer. The first half calls attention to the fact
that whatever happens in a circumscribed, quasi-sacred environment is,
if only because of its frame, a cultic activity, and as such, open to
doubt. That is why he wants to dissolve the alienation of fanum and profanum
in "real life." The second half points out the reinforcement
everyday life gains from forms, the external props of institutions. Art
is the capability to reconcile the two sides; to create a relaxed relations
between relativity and the absolute."
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