Tag Archives: installation

Public Art, Bathroom Music: Mlynárčik’s Toilet Manifestation

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“In 1966, on the occasion of the international congress of AICA, which too place in Prague and Bratislava, [Slovak artist Alex] Mlynárčik created another ‘permanent manifestation,’ which he placed in a public toilet in the center of Bratislava, with mirrors bearing inscriptions that referred to famous artists: Hieronymus Bosch, Michelangelo Pistoletto, as well as his friend Stano Filko. He also included the term: ‘CO (NH2)’–the chemical formula for urea. The installation had a musical component in the form of Johann Strauss the elder’s Radetzky March and a comment book for those who visited the toilet and encountered the installation. […] Mlynárčik’s radicalism, which rejected museum-bound painting in favor of an installation in a public toilet, certainly revealed the presence of a consistently critical approach.” –Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta, 226-7.

It also revealed the Communist authorities limits: because of the unorthodox location of this public commission, they quickly seized the installation itself and subjected the artist to psychological evaluation. Mlynárčik’s participatory works in the later 1960s tended to be physical, visual and collective such as this bathroom project. Mlynárčik referred to these events as ‘permanent manifestations of joining art and life’.

Countering the traditional monument placed in the midst of a public space, such as Vito Acconci references  and Giacometti’s sculpture so well embodies in the previous post, Mlynárčik toilet installation uses the most ‘private’ utility available for public use. In doing so, he uses what David Antin calls “discard or transition” spaces, spaces that nobody had previously thought were worthy of that kind of attention. However, Antin felt squeezed out of public space by the mechanism of capitalism, while Mlynárčik was working in a totalitarian system.

Imre Bukta: Another Hungary at the Mucsarnok

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The House, 2012

Imre Bukta: Another Hungary, a large show at Budapest’s Mucsarnok (or Kunsthalle), takes you through the Hungarian painter’s well-known  older works as well as new paintings, installations, and videos. Themes of rural life, of a Hungary outside of Budapest, run through his work with an emphasis of agrarian life, for example through the incorporation of common farm materials, and local community, thus the title. This exhibition shows the skill and distinct vision of an intelligent artist that it would be incorrect to dismiss as ‘merely’ a folk artist. As an exhibition, it would have been stronger for a better editing of the works. It felt as if everything the artist had ever made was thrown up on the walls, but that’s another story.

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Grandmother, grandson (Photo via Pontoldal’s photostream. More here.)

The presentation of these themes is highly sophisticated, whether it be in the integration of video into an installation or in his complex, worked-over board compositions, whose sophistication belie the rustic materials (straw, nails, corn) and aesthetic. Perhaps most of all, I liked how Bukta combines both a real feeling for the people and world he presents with intellectual distance. This can be seen in the irony of the word “Nostalgy” carved into the knife balanced on the plain country table with its video image of meat beneath.

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While it uses symbols of rural Hungary, this is no glorified folk art, but something very contemporary and intelligent. In both the older, iconic work of the artist above and the recent work below , there is (ahem) a certain edge to his work, but any coldness of dry irony is softened by an honest, sympathetic portrayal of a place that resists stereotypes.

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Hungarian Landscape, 2010

Sewing with Plywood: Istvan Csakany’s Ghostkeeping

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This realistic model of a sewing factory workroom could almost be frozen in time, if you disregard the material. The shot above shows Istvan Csakany‘s Ghost Keeping (2012) installed in the Ludwig Museum, who recently acquired the piece after it was commissioned and shown at dOCUMENTA in Kassel this summer.

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The work consists of a slightly larger than life-size wooden model of a sewing workshop, aligned in two rows. Csakany, together with two carpenters, spent almost a year making this. Ever piece from dangling electrical cord to sewing machine bobbin was made by hand with meticulous care and with an eye to historical accuracy.  The typically raw, simple, and cheap materials, here unfinished plywood, contrasts with the care taken in fashioning it. The “do-it-yourself” workshop aesthetic present here can be connected to the identity of the Central and Eastern European region.

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Similarly, there is a contrast in the figures who face the sewing room. The suits are made of delicate, expensive material, but the style is that of a worker’s uniform. Notably the suits are empty. Csakany arranged the positions after monumental Social Realist figures of the Soviet period, thus the active poses draw a parallel with the workers of the past, now gone.

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Between the empty suits and the empty sewing room, the most notable feature of the atmosphere is absence. Csakany examines the value of work and the position of laborers in society, and through his own care in creating such a non-functional wooden replica of dated machinery he also conflates  physical and artistic work. The historical past, like this dated representation of labor, now serve an aesthetic purpose as they are recreated and re-remembered, perhaps an example of how culturally we perform an act of ghost keeping.

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