Consider this a temporary reprieve from another post about Hungarian art. For a change of pace and scenery, check out my belated video chronicaling my trip to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, its lukewarm exhibitions and its nice developing collection of contemporary art.
There’s more on Richard Misrach here.
And yes, exhibitions can be described as lukewarm…I just can’t think of another adjective right now…they’re all being used on this stupid attempt at a novel.
Stupid novel.
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Q: What is a “Portable Intelligence Increase Museum”?
A: A laptop.
No, this isn’t material from a dated Sci-Fi novel. Nor is it part of some absurdist imaginary critique of Communism that the main record of Hungarian ‘unofficial’ art had to be gathered and held surreptitiously on one man’s laptop. It might be absurd, but it is true. The main historical record of Pop art/Conceptual art/Actionism in the 1960s came from non-artist Tamas St. Auby‘s laptop.
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Tomas St. Auby was born in 1944 and has lived in Budapest, save for a 20 year expulsion by the Communist government. He ‘quit’ his art career early and begin to establish himself as a non-art artist, arranging the first Fluxus happening in Hungary (which the secret police came to and actively detailed in their notes). In 1968 he established IPUT, the International Parallel Union Of Telecommunications, a fake organization in which he has held and still holds a series of positions. His confrontational approach did not go down well with the communist authorities and St. Auby was forced to leave Hungary in the mid-70s.
He returned to Budapest in 1991 and joined the newly-founded Intermedia Department of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts. In 2003, he established the Portable Intelligence Increase Museum, an interactive computer-based exhibition that expose the gaps in official accounts of Hungarian art of the 1960s and 70s which he had documented. Over 1100 works by about 70 Hungarian artists have since been shown throughout Europe.
“St. Auby has recently been doing what Hungarian and international art historians might have yet to do. In 2002, St. Auby founded the Global Front of Anti-Art History Falsifiers of the Neo-Social Realist IPUT (NETRAF), in whose name he presents the Portable Intelligence Increase Museum. This interactive object makes the Hungarian avant-garde (from 1956 to 1976) accessible for the first time through objects, photos, films and documents.”
The most obvious person to foray with into contemporary Hungarian art is probably the country’s representative at its pavilion at the Venice Biennial. 60 year-old Peter Forgács remembers living under what he calls “Communism-lite” pre-1989, and his multimedia art installations go back in time to reuse older film footage to tell stories in new ways. This is true of Col Tempo, his project at Hungary’s pavilion.
Col Tempo takes film footage from a Third Reich anthropological study that attempted to discern the differences between how Jewish prisoners and Germans looked. Forgács turns all the footage into head shots, so the people are stripped of identifying clothing, and includes footage of people like himself and Rembrandt. The video head shots are placed in gilt frame and placed on a grid on the walls, like a macabre Victorian gallery or Hogwarts. People make their way through rooms of disorienting portraits staring back out at them.
Via Art in America,
“The allusive then gives way to the factual. In large-screen projections, visitors will see Wastl measure and film shirtless subjects on swivel chairs and assistants make plaster masks of the subjects’ faces. Monitors arranged in a triangle will show footage of prisoners on the ground and wrapped only in blankets, guards marching in formation and village women chatting. The anonymous faces from the earlier rooms become recognizable here in their real-life roles and settings, underscoring the uncertainty and contingency of our routine assessments of one another. A man with a warm smile, for example, turns out to be a Nazi guard. As a farewell to visitors, Forgács himself makes a series of absurd grimaces that are projected across three screens”
Forgács wanted to make his installation less about the holocaust and focus more on individual people’s identities and question snap judgements.
His previous projects also question memory, time, and identity through real footage stripped of its original intent and repurposes it. The Danube Exodus, done in conjunction with The Labyrinth Project, takes original footage and represents it in an immersive environment to tell three different stories of displaced minorities. On view through August 2 at the Jewish Museum in New York, you can see Forgács work here even if you don’t make in to Venice. This might just be in the cards for me today.
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