HOME - IMAGES - EXHIBITIONS - PUBLICATIONS - TEXT - RECIPE - LINKS - CONTACT
= TEXT ENGLISH & OTHER LANGUAGES =
ANNE WAUTERS
19th century positivism believed that science could resolve and explain all the riddles of the universe. But, as admitted even by contemporary scientists, technological advances continue to stumble over "a certain nucleus of resistance", an inexplicable concealment of the very essence of life. This mystery runs through all of Gabor Kerekes's works made up of photographs of animals, minerals, human fragments and objects preserved for scientific purposes under conditions that can only be surmised from the picture - formic solutions or some other presentation, somewhat outdated, by natural science museums of bygone years. The use of unusual technique enhances, in view of beauty from another age, the affinity of sepia print and old photography. However, a certain doubtfulness persists in efforts at identifying most of the objects, even though the names of the works be known, is this pearl in the jewel-case of precious tissue truly an eye? is this desiccated, profuse ramification truly the residue of a lung? And this rock salt with metallic lustre? And this ear which, by its transparent tissue, ribbed like the leaf of a tree appears to derive both from the vegetal and the scupltural? The miraculous thus breaks into that domain of science which is reputed to be so rigorous and objective. This irresistible beauty is revealed by photography renewing contact with the distant, so-called "archaic" period, so dear to the artist, when art and science were intimately interconnected, when subjective essence - intuitive to the former, served as a method of research to the latter. The irrational is precisely given by that world which has to be explored, a world science does not understand (and never will) a place ontoiogicaily unattainable. Gabor Kerekes now sublimates it by centrings - playing with the original exposure of elements already underlined by the museum framing, at other times by closing in tighter on those "oddities", refusing all connection with an environment that generates trails. This vision of "natural phenomena" likewise raises metaphysical questions induced by this quasi- transparent profile, this unreal branch as if endowed with an autonomous life, this face of a nurseling with closed eyes, or this mummified and petrified head -human fragments floating thanks to their being enframed in the limbo preceding and following our passage on this Earth, It is thus that Gabor Kerekes leads us, beyond all sensuality of matter and form, from the ambivalence of the pair Art-Science and the indestructible link between man and nature, to the dizzy complementarity of life and death. by Anne Wauters
Brüssel 1997
BARNABÁS BENCSIK
Agnes Eperjesi & Gábor Kerekes
VAN ZOETENDAAL GALLERY AMSTERDAM OCT/NOV 2004
The two Hungarian artists in this exhibition are representing two completely different artistic positions though both are using photography as the medium. Ágnes Eperjesi set out from the usual photographic processes shows an experimental and innovative attitude in its technique and a deeply personal expression in the content. In his works Gábor Kerekes uses the whole scale and allvarieties of the chemical processes of the traditional photo-technology, ever invented throughout the history of photography – with erudition and obsession of an alchemist. In his photographs this rare professional skill and craftsmanship amalgamated with a dispassionate distant observation theorized by the 19th century positivist science. The title of Agnes Eperjesi's work is Family Album. The family albums collect the most personal and memorable moments of one's life. It is an inventory which links succeeding generations to each other and keeps the family legendary alive. The photos and the narratives of the family album are one of the most important catalyst and binding agents for personal identity. Presenting more than a million examples the iconography and the compositional scheme of snapshots catching accidental situations, the serious portraits, and the solemn family group-photos are in close interaction with the mass production system of advertisements, fashion, travel and magazine photos, the so called 'image creation-industry'. There is a mutual effect between the triteness and visual stereotypes of the amateur photos and the sophisticated methods used by the image creator professionals to catch the substance. The Family Album of Ágnes Eperjesi is based on this visualized tension between the personal and collective, the individual and the common entities. The artist tells her most personal narrative, her own family's story through the most banal forms of mass produced images - using the visual language of the pictures appearing on wrapping papers, nylon bags, candy's packing cellophane etc. She has been collecting these invaluable paraphernalia for several years now, focusing on images designed for disposable purpose. Her collection is working as a special imagebank. Ordering these pictures in series, she can create an impressive visual encyclopedia. The schematic pictures, pictograms, drawing instructions, and simple photos appearing as silk screen or off-set prints on the transparent packing materials are used as negatives during the photographic procedure. The blow up photograph created from the small picture, becomes a monumental image, full of details that one could never have seen before. The Family Album - as a limited edition handmade photo album, designed and produced by the artist - can be thumbed and short comments provide information next to the photos while huge scale blowups from the series are hanging on the walls. The photographs of Gábor Kerekes evoke in the early age of photo-history coinciding with the separation of the disciplines of natural sciences. For him using the esthetics of sepia print and old photography is not a nostalgia or superficial fashion, which enjoys the pseudo-antiquity and the never-existed constructing past. Kerekes through his photographs is looking for the startingpoint of the process which leads to the understanding and authentically represents reality. He is looking for the principle of order, what he found in the images of scientifically ordered displays of insects and mineral collections, in natural history museums. He takes photos of objects, outdated scientific experimental equipment, natural phenomena, human and animal anatomical specimens preserved for scientific purposes. He is looking for orientation points, still showing the former connection and coexistence between the art and science, between the intuition and rational logic. Kerekes found the most authentic forms of expressions for this artistic position in the historical, manual photographic techniques. This way, he can control every step of the photographic process and resulting in a more perfect image than the one what are made by the nowadays technology. The photographs made using salted paper, kallitype, silverbromid paper, albumen, silver chloride printing-out paper etc. technique, have a completely different character from the usual one. Their resolution is higher, they render tones more subtly and since mostly they are contact copies the rich details are conveying the object more directly. To take a step further. Kerekes in his new series, called Over Roswell put together these traditional techniques with the methods of digital technology. He made aerial landscapes based on subtle compositional principles by using satellite transmissioned images from Internet, about the territories which are considered since the 50's as the landing area of UFO's. Between the two extremes of the directness and the technologically instrumented indirectness, the artists can count only his sense of orientation as it quoted in the title of his selection of works.
BARNABÁS BENCSIK
UFOs Fly Off
PHOTO EXHIBIT
Andreea Anca
The Budapest Sun
THERE are two things one needs to know about the Nessim Gallery; this is a venue where the photos of some of the most established Hungarian contemporary art photographers can be both seen, and their work is for sale. Since it opened in December last year, the owner, Mihály Surányi, has chosen the work of important artists such as Zsuzsana Kemenesi, Minyo Szert and, most now, Gábor Kerekes with the conviction that these are currently among the most important names in Hungarian photography, that their work will stand the test of time and, in the long run, will prove tobe a good investment for lovers and collectors of photographe Kerekes's images, entitled Fly Off, are selections of this 62-year-old artist's latest work, marking the third stage in his development as a photographer. His 1970s black-and-white images of desolate places and dreamy recordings of daily life brought Kerekes recognition as a pioneer of Hungarian photography at the time. After that Kerekes worked at press photography. Now he is tackling, bravely and with technical perfection, his most experimental task so far to transpose digital satellite images onto the photographic paper using a traditional technique developed more than 100 years ago. What sparked his imagination was a computer program called USA Photomap, which he could use to download satellite images of any place in America, simply by typing in the geographical coordinates. Kerekes cast himself in the role of an alien UFO pilot, recording images of Earth from above. The artist uses, as a pretext for this virtual journey, the most famous (alleged) UFO incident, when the US military supposedly covered up the remains of a crashed alien aircraft near Roswell in New Mexico in July 1947. But Kerekes's alien watches the world beneath from a very safe distance. The views he sees are compelling. The orderly patterns of an aircraft cemetery," or a military barracks, an airport runway or a crowded human habitat, confer an unusual visual experience of lines, circles and squares, simultaneously beautiful and eerie.
IMPRECISE SCRIBBLING
The sight of planes is playful but somehow frightening, the shapes of the landscapes often look like precise geometric patterns, or the imprecise scribbling of a child, or like an abstract work of art. What messages could these symbols on the Earth carry? How can we orient ourselves in time and space when the world is forever moving and changing? What do we use to help ourselves? There are many questions Kerekes seems to formulate from high up in the sky, with masculine objectivity without poetry. He has created an abstract, quasi-scientific world, but sensitive and philosophical in the same time.
Images exhibited at the Nessim Gallery can be bought for Ftl 35,000 -150,000 ($725-806).
GYÖRGY DALLOS /GERMAN
Katalog:ZEITGENÖSSISCHE FOTOGRAFIE AUS UNGARN AKADEMIE DER KÜNSTE Verlag
György Dalos:FESTHALTEN EINES BLITZES
Alles, was sich bewegt, ist vergänglich; die Geschwindigkeit, mit der die Dinge geschehen, verwandeln jede Gegenwart - ob wir sie nun um uns herum oder auf dem Bildschirm beobachten - fast gleichzeitig in Vergangenheit. Selbst diese Beobachtung ist ein ephemeres Phänomen, weil sich nur wenige die Zeit nehmen, auf etwas oder aufeinander wirklich neugierig zu sein. Die Literatur und die schönen Künste wetteiferten jahrhundertelang miteinander, ihre Welt zu verewigen: „Zum Augenblicke mächt'ich sagen: Verweile doch ! Du bist so schön l" - die Faustsche Aussage enthält diesen Wunsch des Künstlers in reinster Form. Mono Lisa lächelte uns den zweifelhaften Genuß der Unsterblichkeit vor. Dann kam das Daguerreotyp und mit ihm die Momentaufnahme. Je perfekter jedoch die Technik der Fotografie wurde, desto mehr entpuppte sie sich als Reproduktion von etwas bereits Gewesenem; zudem wurde sie sehr bald durch ihre massenhafte Verbreitung zum Hobby, und schließlich verlor sie mit der Computerisierung jede Individualität. Neben der vollkommenen Nachahmung der Realität verblaßt diese selbst; die Schärfe des Objektivs grenzte das subjektive Moment allmählich aus. Gabor Kerekes versucht offensichtlich auf eine frühere Phase der Fotografie zurückzugreifen; er macht Lichtbilder und begrenzt dabei das Moment des Technischen auf das minima Notwendige - eine durch und durch konservative Geste, die er noch um die bewußte Auswahl seines Gegenstands und die künstlich geschaffene Distanz zu ihm ergänzt. Sein Laboratorium, oder besser gesagt Observatorium, konzentriert sich einzig und allein auf Details; selbst wenn diese mit Menschen zu tun haben, gibt es bei ihm keine Porträts; wir bekommen höchstens ein Ohr, ein Gehirn oder einen Schädel zu sehen. Noch wichtiger erscheint mir der Hang dieses Künstlers zur Paradoxie. Sein Bild „Festhalten eines Blitzes" ist nichts anderes als ein Versuch, das unverhofft Erblickte im Bruchtei einer Sekunde zu fixieren und gleichzeitig die Eitelkeit dieses Vorhabens einzugestehen. Die Umrahmung, die bei anderen Fotos die Form eines Medaillons, eines Quadrats oder Kreises annimmt, hat hier etwas Ikonenhaftes. Mit dem Blitz wird auch unsere kindisch-abergläubische Angst vor diesem Leidenschaftsausbruch der Natur festgehalten. Und das ist das Plus der Selbstbeobachtung, um die uns die Fotokunst von Gabor Kerekes bereichert.
1999 Berlin
Hungarian photograpy: focusing on life
In 20th century art , no other sujet had such expressive power like images, let it be motion picture or photographs. Artists no longer followed their phantasy only like painters did before the impressionist revolution. Using film and camera, they created icons of art by capturing moments of real life. These images reflected the life of their viewers themselfes, creating dreams and following contemporary history by the very moments. In the past century, the main media of the emblematic images was printed press which were directed to readers living in a certain geographic area, mostly with the same cultural background and language. It would be logical if the images reflecting the good and bad things in a society had been made by people who are born members of it and know it well. However, among authors of the great images published in all the "trendsetting" famous magazins of that time - Life, Du, Paris Match, Stern, to name just a few - almost every European nation is represented, yet there are many Hungarians among them, some of the finest photographers ever. Photographers like André Kertész, Robert Capa, László Moholy-Nagy, Brassai, Paul Almásy had very different interests and character and turned to different photographic subjects as well, but they had in common their Hungarian roots and this influenced their work considerably in one way or the other. Of course, one cannot say that Hungarians have something that gives them extra talent for photography. As poor immigrants in France and Germany, they had to start over from the scratch as artists or journalists. Photography was at that time a very popular job among Middle-Europeans trying to make a living in Paris or Berlin, because it was not language-dependent, did not require special studies and expensive equipment but a lucky photographer could make a fortune with original pictures that no one else had made (the latter remained fairly unchanged in photojournalism to this day). Based on their influence on artistic photography and photojournalism, it is justified to say that Hungarian photographers were the most successful. On the technical side, this success is probably due to the special status of photography during the Twenties and Thirties in Hungary. Photography was the only media that could literally shed light on the hardships of poor people - workers, peasants - who lived on the periphery of a society that had its base in the bourgeoise and aristocracy. Photographers were allowed to cover such lowish subjects like bar-footed peasants on condition of making them appear picturesque. Today this seems quite hypocritical but the photographers' efforts were fruitful as they developed the "Hungarian style" of photography. They liked to take ordinary life as subject, with a hint of pictorialism and very skillful use of light, thereby creating powerful images of everyday subjects like coal-shoveling workers, horse-taming peasants or cooking peasant girls. Abroad, Hungarian photographers had to find new ways to see their new country, and thus discovered the world with a different eye. They succeeded, let it be Brassai's famous photos of Paris night-life characters, Robert Capa's dying soldier in Spain, or the plays of light and structures in André Kertész's Paris city-scapes - they all mark new ways of photography. We have chosen a more recent photograph as illustration, even though it was shot in Hungary by contemporary photographer Gábor Kerekes. The picture shows a memorial, a Soviet tank on the site of a World War II battle. At Bastogne in the Ardennes, there is a US tank on display as a similar memorial. But while that tank stands for liberation, the Soviet memorial - just referred to in those days as "The Tank" became a symbol of oppression. It stood close to one of the biggest tourist attractions, the "Nine-holed Bridge", as if it was there to remind us to political reality even while enjoying a break from the everyday life in Socialism. Only a photographer could show it as it really was: a war machine of the far and blurred, yet ever-present opressive machinery, and only the photograph revealed its true nature: that it was there to be gone one day.
IMAGO
HUNGARY
The festival Contemporary Hungarian Photography will be held at Pécs on September 5-7, 1997. The event will span exhibitions of emerging young talents - the show of works from students of the Academy of Applied Arts in Budapest - and well-known contemporary Hungarian photographers - Gergely Papp, András Bozsó, László Törok, Gabriella Csoszó, Erno Tilai. A conference will take place under the title -The Crisis of Art Photography - the speakers will include Tamás Aknai, László Beké, Péter György, Károly Kincses. The foundations of Hungarian present-day photography arose in the seventies -eighties as a result of ideological movements. At that time, various trends not corresponding with socialistic conventions, efforts for stylistic innovations sprang up and personalities with a strong subjective view turned up. They were predecessors of the later political and social changes. Smaller groups as well as initiative personalities tried to break loose from the control of the cultural policy of the time through innumerable events. The cultural policy was forced to give way to those pressures and instituted - made legal - several creative groups hoping that in this way it would keep at least the right of "free/soft" control, (the Club of Young Artists, the Photographic Studio of Young People). Events realized outside institutions were considered illegal. Thus, the group Documentum, which organized one of the most progressive series of photographic exhibitions in the course of 4 years, provoked a big outburst. Only officially controlled and censored photographs could get abroad. Despite that, numerous shots by Hungarian authors appeared in three volumes of the renowned photoalbum DU-MONT, using an illegal way - evading all restrictions and proving our dignified place in contemporary international photography (in spite of our isolation!). At the same time, the official exhibition activity abroad comprised conventional collections, of a salon character, untidy "representation" without originality and new ideas. After the change of the political and economical system these restrictions disappeared. A free flow of information came and finally we had an opportunity to travel as cosmopolitans. At that time the interest of the West turned more to the eastern block. The exhibition organized by the Musée d'Elysé in Lausanne was a very important event. Among 100 East-European photographers there were also 10 Hungarian artists. Our participation in festivals in Aries was also very important. The personal introduction of artists, meetings and establishment of contacts with gallerists, collectors, personalities of contemporary photography - known so far only through their works. It is necessary to mention several really representative presentations, for example the participation in the Triennial in Esslingen, in the exhibition called 100 years of avant-garde art in Eastern Europe in Kunsthalle in Bonn, as well as participation in exhibitions of the I.C.I. Photo Awards in London and Bradford. Thanks to those presentations we can find many photographs by Hungarian artists in collections of galleries, museums and private collectors throughout Europe as well as overseas (for example: Stuttgart - the Town Museum, Paris - Bibliotheque Nationale, Strasbourg, Bradford). In the period following the change of the system, new cultural institutions and professional organizations were institutionalized. Although the ideological pressure has stopped, problems of a different character have appeared - the lack of state grants has caused financial problems and the restriction of functioning. In order to overcome these difficulties as well as to expand the possibilities for the presentation of artistic creation, several very active artists have found a group called The first creative group, which is a section of the Union of Hungarian photographers. Many domestic and foreign exhibitions, which were organized with the help of different foundations and competitions, prove that their activity is successful. (Biennial in Ostrihom, the Month of Photography in Pécs, the State Biennial, exhibitions in Bologna, Denver, Paris, Brest, the Month of Photography in Bratislava, etc.). In order to eliminate the inequality between the East and West it is necessary to introduce the culture and world outlook without limits. In accordance with this idea, new galleries are gradually opening. For example the photogallery Pajta Gallery (Salfold), Bolt Gallery, Gromek Photogallery (Budapest), which have come into being as specialized galleries. All these galleries are private, with their own management, stragling with finan cial problems, but their spiritual effect is in dispensable. Thanks to them, photography, regarded as marginal and worthless, has become the bearer of important spiritual values. It is a work of art and it is handled in this way. Artists - photographers, for whom the words "east - west" are really only geo graphical expression, associate around these galleries.
He lives in Budapest.
KEREKES: OVER ROSWELL
OVER ROSWELL
The town of Roswell lies in the state of New Mexico in the United States at latitude 33.4° N and longitude 104.5° W. In 1947 locals found three dead aliens in a crashed UFO on the outskirts of the town. The FBI and the CIA kept silent and hushed up the incident. The murkiness surrounding this mysterious case has been a source of scandal and controversy ever since. I came across a computer program called "U.S.A. Photomap". With this program you can download a photo-quality satellite image of anywhere in America by giving the geographical coordinates. The maximum resolution is 1 metre/pixel, so on a 17 inch monitor with a resolution of 1,024 pixels you can see 1,024 metres. This sparked my imagination. Casting myself in the role of the Roswell aliens, I wondered how this place would look from space. I gave the coordinates. Slowly, square by square, the monitor was filled by the full image. What luck! I overshot the centre of the town, ending up about 600-800 metres away from the inhabited area. A curious, exciting sight greeted my eyes. Lines, circles and squares in a geometrical, abstract arrangement of symbols. You couldn't help but think that these geometrical symbols on the surface of the Earth were intended to convey a message or information. The sight offered an exceptionally varied and almost undecodable configuration. If I were an alien, I'd land here! I cut out details of the picture by "screenshoot", added pixels due to the low resolution and printed them. I photographed the print-outs by Polaroid P/N process, and contact printed the negatives on gelatin silver paper. This is how this Roswell collection was made.
From digital - analogue!
Gábor Kerekes
KEREKES: SCIENCE.......
"Science and Art, or The Phenomena of Nature"
In my works of the last ten years, I have tried to re-joint the forgotten relation of "Science and Art",or archaically saying "Crafts and Art". I am not alone in doing this. Recently the absence or necessity of this relation can be found in the works of more and more scientists and artists, or in their phylosophical studies. The aims and methods of science and art are different, the first one requires objectivity, while the second one is inseparable from subjectivism. Once the archaic sciences objectivity had been parallel with a strongly intuitive, subjective researc method. The scientists of the old times had tried to cath the unknown in its base, they had been sure it could be defined using their own subjective systems of symbols /e.g. alchemy, medication,astronomy/. They did not care too much of the details,they searched for meaning and essence in an abstrract way, man's full dissolution in nature, alchemic conjuction. History has transformed science. A new system of weigths and measures was worked out, abandoning subjectivity, and finally disregarded it. The reletion of "Crafts and Art" has wasted away. However, there are trends in recent years to retrieve again this sort of absence, the lines of forces keep together.The quantum theory or the hypothesisi on the orogin of the universe, both characteristic of the present developement of science , cannot go without "artistic",that is highly subjective approach. And that is what inspires me in my own work.
Gábor Kerekes
1995
L’alchimie de l’espace
Aux États-Unis, au Nouveau Mexique, il existe une ville qui s’appelle Roswell. En 1947 quelques habitants ont découvert un OVNI écrasé et trois extraterrestres morts à la frontière de la ville. Le CIA et le FBI ont vite fermé le territoire, mais internet et les nouveaux softwares, comme le USA photomap, permettent encore aux yeux curieux d'y pénétrer virtuellement, même depuis la Hongrie », raconte le photographe Gábor Kerekes. Cette histoire l’a incité dès 2002 à se mettre dans la peau de ces visiteurs de l’univers et de créer la série Over Roswell qu'il présente actuellement à la Galerie Nessim, dans le cadre de son exposition au titre évocateur: Fly off .
L’artiste, qui a débuté sa carrière en tant que photographe technique dans les années 70, est désormais devenu l’un des photographes contemporains les plus reconnus en Hongrie. Il a par ailleurs exposé en France, où ses oeuvres font partie d’une collection privée à Strassbourg et une galerie à Arles présente ses tirages très régulièrement. Attiré par l’alchimie, la médicine et l’astrologie, il est à la recherche de “l’élément premier” qui constitue le monde, qu'il a souvent cherché à photographier dans des laboratoires de chimie, aux sommets des montagnes ou encore dans des chapelles mortuaires. Cette approche philosophique est à la base de son oeuvre et des deux séries photographiques exposées à la galerie Nessim. Pourtant, cette fois, il a conçu et réalisé ses images depuis son fauteuil, devant l’écran de son ordinateur. Les sofwares USA photomap,qu’il a utilisé pour observer les alentours de la ville de Roswell, et Google Map, grâce auquel il a créé la série Fly Off en 2007, lui ont permis de faire le tour du monde en observant le sol par satellite. Il est typique de la vision de Kerekes de ne pas s'intéresser aux être-humains, ni même à l’actualité. Il se concentre au contraire sur la beauté abstraite des paysages vu du ciel. En examinant certaines régions de façon systématique, kilomètre par kilomètre, pixel par pixel, il a découvert l’esthétique de ces formes géométriques, dont il a entregistré l’image. Les champs de blé se transformaient en girouettes, les cimetières d’avions en jouets pour enfants ou les ennuyeuses cité-jardins américaines en broderie. Les titres insignifiants des photos cachent la provenance des images et soulignent cette volonté pour la dématerialisation des objets. C’est à nous de deviner, et de ressentir la force des photographies sans pourtant connaître l’histoire qui se cachent derrière elles. Grâce un système de signes particuliers, aux frontières de la science et de l’art, qu’ il a dévéloppé depuis plus de trente ans, les compositions denses et le « message sentimental » transmettent l'impression d'une aventure spaciale aux spectateurs.En transformant ces images virtuelles en tirages analogiques, il mêle la perfection rigide des formes géometriques à la nostalgie de la photographie ancienne. Le procédé particulier qu'il emploie mêle passé et présent et aboutit à des tirages qui évoquent l’esprit de Paul Klee, de Magritte ou de Malevich, tout en posant la question : quel est le rôle du photographe à l’ère de l'informatique? « Je voudrais toujours me surpasser, me surprendre moi-même et surprendre la photographie. », souligne Gábor Kerekes pour qui un photographe peut aujourd'hui, grâce aux nouvelles technologies, créer tout à partir de rien, comme un peintre. Un retour aux origines de l'Art en quelque sorte.
Zeisler Judit Fly Off Exposition de Gábor Kereke Galerie Nessim (10 Paulay Ede utca)
LEO DIVENDAL /NL
THE FOURTH WALL Exposition
Netherland Amsterdam
By: Leo Divendal
1978
From picture: BRIDGE"/1978/ by Gábor Kerekes
De foto heeft niet meer dan een aantal vlakken. Bovenaan een witte baan: horizon, lucht, alleen wit. Onderaan enkele vlakken wit, als brede planken, een podium. De grootste baan in een foto ligt in het centrum van het beeld: een wit vierkant en eraan grenzend: een zwart vierkant, geleend uit de werken van Malevich.Alle vlakken maken ruimte, verschillende ruimten met elkaar verbonden: een universum. Onder de brug is 'niets', geen weg, geen rivier. Toch zet de brug ruimte om in tijd. Van de ene naar de andere kant gaan vormt geschiedenis, al is de tijdsduur kort, al is het het oog en al gaat het in één oogopslag. Toch is die snelheid in tijd beperkt en begrensd. Het is niet te zien waar de brug vandaan komt, dus weten we niet waar te beginnen,. Het is ook niet te zien waar de brug in eindigt en in overgaat. De horizon ligt op het hoogste punt en wat er achter ligt is onbekend. Ruimte en tijd 'worden gevormd door het verlangen de lege brug te betreden en naar het hoogste punt te gaan: om te kunnen zien wat voor wereld er zich voor onze ogen uitstrekt, en waarom.
Past Perfect Photos
Photography's Antiquarian Avant-Garde: The New Wave in Old Processes, by Lyle Rexer, New York, Harry N. Abrams, 2002; 160 pages, $49.95.
BY LEAH OLLMAN
Reading the history of photography in the way it has largely been written, as a narrative of technological progress, one gets the impression that the medium may well have reached its climactic moment. Digital technology delivers on all that has counted in the dominant storyline: speed, clarity, reproducibility, convenience and afford-ability. The drive toward expediency demanded sacrifices, however. Along the way, photography lost the heterogeneous surfaces and textures of older processes, and regard for the photograph as an object crafted by hand dissipated. Photographic history can also be written, then, as a story of lost possibilities, which is how Lyle Rexer tells it in Photography's Antiquarian Avant-Garde: The New Wave in Old Processes. The mirror acuity of the polished silver daguerreotype: gone. The diffuse romanticism of the calo-type: gone. The mysterious power of the ambrotype: gone. And so on. What Rexer, a freelance New York photo historian and critic, likens to "technological Darwinism" has driven these once-dominant methods to extinction. In the name of standardization, the rich Babel of photographic languages has been reduced to a soulless, placeless Esperanto. Rexer laments the losses, while celebrating the redemptive efforts of a growing number of photographers who are reviving 19th-century processes. Their efforts constitute something of a grassroots revolution. Resisting the "antiphotographic" forces that have stripped the medium down to its function as a carrier of visually coded meaning, the antiquarian avant-garde reasserts the photograph's status as a tactile presence in itself. These artists restore to photography its original sense of the miraculous, reminding us of what inventor Fox Talbot recognized from the start, that the photograph is "a little bit of magic realized."
The artists that Rexer tracksómostly North ï American, with a generous sprinkling of othersó embrace the very qualities in the old processes that led to their obsolescence: quixotic materials, ritualistic processing and printing procedures, frequent accidents and irregularities. Antiquarians, Rexer states, return to photography's origins in "darkroom alchemy, coterie secrets, and tactile fascinations." While the biggest names in photography nowóAndreas Gursky, et al.ómake images that aspire to the scale and condition of the movie screen, the artists identified by Rexer often work quite small, their images more akin to the pages of a book. France/Scully Osterman's ruby ambrotype of a papaya and Gabor Kerekes's carbon dichromate image of shells both hardback to a taxonomic tradition in photography. Jody Ake's ambrotypes recall 19th-century studies in physiognomy. Jan van Leeuwen's staged kallitype titled The Meal at Emmaus is a sober update on the fictive composites of Oscar Rejlander. Artists of the antiquarian avant-garde, writes Rexer, seek "the most fruitful play between past associations and current intuitions." Several artists Rexer discusses ally their adopted processes to subject matter of the same period. He tells of a tintypist named John Coffer who traveled the country by covered wagon in the 1970s and '80s, photographing Civil War reenactments. Robert Shlaer retraced the route of an 1853-54 expedition west, creating a set of topographic daguerreotypes to replace those made on the original trek and later destroyed by fire. Straddling the 19th and 21st centuries, much of this work generates sublime disjunctions, delicious anachronisms. Deborah Luster's tintypes of prisoners in correctional facilities resonate with the same stark, haunting presence as portraits of Civil War soldiers made using the same method 140 years earlier. Like their predecessors, Luster's pictures bridge the gap that circumstance (incarceration, conscription) can impose between the subject and the viewer of the image. Jerry Spagnoli's daguerreotype of the World Trade Center towers billowing smoke before their collapse disarms not only because of its subject matter, but additionally through the friction between the immediacy of the image and the process's associations with the pace, technology and politics of another time. Rexer does a fine job describing the motivations and practices of the antiquarian avant-garde. There's poetry to his approach, which reads less like a treatise than an evocative series of inquiries ("can nature or a camera
Rexer does a fine job describing the motivations and practices of the antiquarian avant-garde. There's poetry to his approach, which reads less like a treatise than an evocative series of inquiries ("can nature or a camera have a memory?"). His plea to restore value to the idiosyncratic over the streamlined, the physical over the virtual, touches a sensitive cultural nerve.
The book has just two clear shortcomings. First, Rexer asserts that the evolution of photography as an expressive medium does not follow its technological trajectory. Its mixed nature as science, magic and art accounts for its ambiguities, and for "its habit of continually calling itself into question," a quintessentially modern activity. Nevertheless, he falls back, unimaginatively, on technological categories to organize the book, dividing artists according to which process they use (daguerreotypes, paper negatives, glass plates, etc.) rather than finding other, perhaps deeper resonances between them, having to do with the ways they conceive of their workóas a tool of memory, for instance, as historical fiction, as a probe into issues of decay, time, evidence. Second, most of the 60 artists featured get short shrift. (That there are others who fit the bill but aren't includedófor example, John Brill, who makes elusive, whispery images using paper negatives, and Raymond Meeks, who created an intriguing study of the athletes and events of the 2002 Winter Olympics in ambrotypeómerely
proves the vigor of the movement, larger and stronger than any single interpreter's take on it.) Of those illustrated in the book, most get a paragraph or two in the text, but some get no mention at all, and no additional biographical information is provided. The exceptions are separate sections in which Chuck Close writes about his attraction to the daguerreotype process and Sally Mann, who has been working with collodion glass negatives since the late '90s, is interviewed on "the lure of the poured image." With wet plate processes, she says, she not only found an esthetic equivalent to the time-warped southern landscape, but a process that, in itself, defies neutrality, becomes reverential, a memorial act. This is not the first antiquarian avant-garde, Rexer hastens to point out. Members of the Photo-Secession, under Stieglitz's patriarchal lead, struggled to redefine the photograph as a handmade, expressive object in the early years of the 20th century, when hobbyists and commercial tradesmen were first capitalizing on its new-found mechanical ease. Stieglitz eventually damned "crooked" methods involving manipulation of the negative or print in favor of the straight gelatin silver process. That, the Photo-Secessionists claimed, was truest to the nature of the medium. The depersonalizing methods of the mainstream sent them back to photography's beginnings, just as digital technology has secured a place for the current antiquarian avant-garde at the margins, where they cling to the medium as they believe it was meant to be. Theirs is the alternative course, but alternative is a relative term. "In the not-too-distant future," Mann forecasts, "as the world moves toward filmless image making, anyone who picks up an ordinary camera and spends time in a darkroom will be classified as an old-process photographer. We will all be antiquarians.
Author: Leah Ollman is a critic based in San Diego.
Art in America 33
LYLIE REXER: GRAPHIS
GRAPHIS - 2002
Photography is a form of alchemy, Gabor Kerekes is its Paracelsus. His goal is not to capture the world in a frame but to transmute the unseen into the seen. Little known outside Eastern Europe, this philosopher with a camera is the most influential photographer contemporary Hungary has produced. In a career that has spanned the fall of Communism and Hungary's reentry into the mainstream of artistic culture, Kerekes, now 56, has put his stamp on every form of photography, from journalism to alternative processes. In his current work, he is using techniques born of 19th century science to express a vision of the universe at the beginning of the 21st. When I met Kerekes, on his first visit to the United States, I had seen only a handful of his images at Sarah Morthland Gallery. They were quiet disturbances that continued to cause tremors the more I thought about them: a hand; a comet; antique scientific equipment that seemed to hum with a sinister energy; a dark orb nestled in a hole torn open in a sheet of metal. The roots of these photographs were clearly Surrealist. They were images of the inexplicable. Yet they possessed a more palpable certainty than Man Ray's or Duchamp's photos. Kerekes seemed to have found that place in the soul where archetypes take historical form—the factory of dreams. Among his Hungarian contemporaries, the German-born Kerekes looks like a professor in a collection of aesthetes and revolutionaries. Regardless of their various styles, they all defer to him and freely acknowledge his influence. Kerekes has won the first prize of the Hungarian Press Show three times and been awarded the prestigious Béla Balázs prize. More important, as photographer and writer Sandor Szilagyi has pointed out, he has led "fatherless" Hungarian photography out of the shadows after decades of artistic repression and isolation. In the early part of the 20th century, photography was virtually Hungary's national art form. There were camera clubs everywhere, the first of them founded by Count Eszterhazy himself. It is impossible to speak of modern photography without reciting a Hungarian litany: Brassa'i, Andre Kertesz, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Robert Capa. In a long diaspora, all of them left their native country, as did others including Martin Munkacsi and later Sylvia Plachy. The authoritarian rule of the 1940s, followed by postwar Communism, suspended the great tradition of Hungarians making photos, publishing them and writing about them. Of those who stayed, many were just as talented as the expatriates but found themselves isolated and consigned to obscurity. "Official" photography was little more than soft-focus tourist photography that functioned as propaganda. For those artists willing to make their own images in private, everything had to be reinvented, from actual techniques to aesthetic ideals. This is the world Kerekes confronted in the late '70s when he began to make photographs. Looking at his reportage of the late '70s and '80s, it is hard to believe that he could have achieved such prominence. His images all of which he later destroyed graced more than 50 magazine cover images. His spare, pessimistic style was hardly suited to five-year plans and the myth of the glorious future. It unites a rigorous formal sense with an existential vision of social reality. Kerekes depicts factories isolated in empty, snowy landscapes. His buildings are sliced by dense, deep shadows and in one striking case, he reduces an edifice to a monolithic black form. Unlike contemporary German photographers Berndt and Hilla Becher or their precursor Albert Renger-Patzsch, Kerekes expresses no "joy before the object" in Renger-Patzsch's famous phrase, rather a foreboding and estrangement, as if the world were a language of antiquated signs that could no longer be deciphered. Everywhere Kerekes looked in the 1970s and 1980s, he seemed to find the traces of Hungary's departed economic, military and spiritual authority. A war monument is a tank aimed toward the sky,going nowhere. Likewise his people seem deposited in this landscape, in vaguely decaying cafes, neither defiant nor resigned, unadorned, expecting little perhaps but a long winter. In such pictures, Kerekes gave permission to other Hungarian photographers, including most notably Imre Benko, to use their photographic intelligence to tell complicated truths that don't fit political or journalistic formulas. And then he stopped. In the mid '80s, Kerekes gave up taking pictures for nearly eight years. In 1993, he renounced photojournalism for good and destroyed more than 5,000 negatives. He saved only 3 5 negatives, images made for his own purposes and donated them to the Hungarian Museum of Photography. His reasons were as uncompromising as his work. "I no longer found in reality what I wished to photograph," he remarked. "And I did not want to be bound by what others ordered in terms of an image. Just to work for money was too easy." He devoted himself to reading and thinking, studying not only philosophical and historical works but also works on alchemy and science. He also listened to music, by composers from Wagner to Penderezcki to Philip Glass "I realized," he said, "that certain themes can manifest my thoughts. It wasn't concrete, just a huge project around an intellectual center, like a black hole." The images he truly wanted to capture were those that occurred in sudden flashes, to his mind's eye. In spite of their journalistic quality the photographs Kerekes donated to the museum betray this inward search. The landscapes, the city of Budapest itself, its monuments, streets, traffic and people, seem to exist solely as manifestations of inner states of disquiet. Far from abandoning his earlier work, the artist simply sought a new set of metaphors, in subjects as disparate as seashells and the heavens. His antecedents are not photographers but writers of extreme awareness. Kafka and Georg Trakl come to mind, as does Thomas Bernhard. To give expression to abstract intuitions through images, Kerekes feels that he must control every step of the photographic process. This has led him to the earliest photographic techniques, which require and register the hands-on engagement of the artist. He has worked with glass-plate negatives, non-silver processes such as kalli-type, and printing-out paper, which allows the latent image to emerge not in a chemical bath but over time, through exposure to light. Here, too, he has led a revolution, spurring one of the most active alternative-process photography movements in the world. Although Kerekes works without reference to other photographers, some of his photographs echo iconic images by pioneers Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot. In this sense, Kerekes's allusions to alchemy do not have a precedent. Talbot himself referred to photography as "a little bit of magic realized," and Kerekes sees it as the appropriate medium to represent the modern scientific consciousness, which has come full circle to the mysticism of the early Renaissance. Paracelsus and the other alchemists of that Promethean period sought, in Kerekes's words, "to catch the unknown at its base," to define and unite disparate physical processes using symbolic systems. Believing that all things originate out of the same matter, they sought control of nature through a metaphoric investigation. To the alchemists, language and consciousness could set physical processes in motion. Modern science, pushed by quantum theory to the limit of objective, mathematical descriptions, now seeks a new set of terms for understanding the universe, terms increasingly imported from the subjective realms of metaphysics and religion. At its birth, photography, too, adopted an ambiguous language of subjective and objective vision, of control and serendipity. Thus, in his art, Gabor Kerekes looks forward by looking back. "I have tried to rejoin the forgotten relationship of science and art," he observed. "That is my inspiration."
GRAPHIS 2002 by Lylie Rexer
LYLIE REXER: NEW YORK TIMES
Unshackled to Capture Their Country Again
by Lyle Rexer
The New York Times, Sunday, May 9, 1999, Arts & Leisure, p. 48.
After Communism, a new wave of Hungarian photographers tries to build on the legacy of Kertész, Brassai and Capa. At the turn of the century, Hungary was the most photo-obsessed country in the world. Princes and princesses of the Austro-Hungarian Empire frequented photo exhibitions and proudly displayed their own prints. From a nation the size of Indiana emerged many of the leading names of modern photography, including André Kertész, Brassai, László Moholy-Nagy and Robert Capa. But four decades of Communist rule isolated Hungarian photography from this artistic heritage, from the outside world and from many of its subjects. Now, at the turn of a new century, Hungarian photographers are struggling to rebuild that tradition. Free at last to point the camera where they please, they are creating an idiosyncratic amalgam of imagination and international styles dimly glimpsed. This combination may be the perfect vehicle to express their ambivalence about the world after Communism. "We have been forced to make up our history as we go along," said Sandor Szilagyi [Sándor Szilágyi], who has organized a series of exhibitions of Hungarian photography at the Hungarian Consulate on East 52d Street in New York. "There are masters but no movements, personalities but no trends." Two current exhibitions of contemporary Hungarian photography display the diversity of this improvised avant-garde: "Kind of Blue: Six Documentary Photographers" (organized by Mr. Szilagyi [Szilágyi] at the Consulate) and "Hungary Today: Five Contemporary Photographers" (at the Sarah Morthland Gallery in Chelsea). A self-taught quality pervades this work. Wheels are reinvented and continents discovered. But if this made-up modernism sometimes looks almost familiar, it is just as often unpredictable and daring. It is ironic that this generation of photographers should have to reinvent photography, because Hungarian photography once ruled the world. In the 1920's, Moholy-Nagy defined the Bauhaus photographic style with compositions that featured bold, abstract geometries. Kertész melded a sense of visual form and an instinctive feel for the meaningful instant. Brassai, whose Paris years are now the subject of a major exhibition at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, helped forge the myth of modern Paris as a place of hedonism and creativity. Capa, the prototype of the photojournalism provided the 20th century some of its most dramatic images of war. His brother, Cornell, went on to found the International Center for Photography in New York. In documentary and art photography, these expatriates bequeathed a many-dimensioned visual idiom we think of not as Hungarian but as modern. The current generation of Hungarians never had a chance to claim that inheritance. The upheavals of right-wing authoritarian rule, World War II and 40 years of Communism narrowed the scope of photography. The door to the West slammed shut, and official policy transformed pictorial realism into soft-focus folk clichés. Photographers could not view original prints by the great expatriate Hungarians, who remained largely just names. Other native experimental work was almost as inaccessible. One of Hungary's largest photo collections - nearly 400,000 images - was tucked away in a private apartment. Artists worked alone and met informally, sharing unsanctioned innovations. Photography deemed "conceptual" or "formalist" was taken off gallery walls, pulled from exhibitions and confiscated from private homes. The knowledge of basic photographic processes eroded. In this climate, today's photographers used whatever inspiration they could find to reinvent photographic tradition. In their work, opportunism constantly triumphs over orthodoxy. József Hajdú, represented in last year's Consulate group, taught himself about the history of the medium by working as an archivist of the photographs collected by the old Imperial Post Office in Budapest. Mr. Hadju's [Hajdú] roots are grittily documentary, influenced by the routines of factory life near his home. But he has read other lessons in the images he studies, and his black-and-white photos of his own grimy teacup transform a proletarian realism into a lyrical play of abstract forms and liquid textures. Gábor Kerekes has taken the most extreme steps to reclaim photography as a medium of individual expression. Mr. Kerekes, now in his late 50's, had been the premier Hungarian photojournalist of the 70's. His dispassionate, even icy style enabled him to convey in the image of an empty factory, for example, a guarded pessimism that was difficult for the Communists to censor and impossible to conscript into any campaign for a brighter future. His was a highly influential vocabulary of constraint. In 1982, he abandoned his career. "I had grown tired of making images ordered by someone else," he said during a visit to New York last year. He could have been speaking for his entire generation. He destroyed all but 20 or so of his images, which he donated to the Hungarian Museum [of Photography], and turned inward. "I couldn't see in the real world what I sought emotionally and spiritually," he added. For eight years, Mr. Kerekes immersed himself in the study of, among other subjects, philosophy, natural history and alchemy. Just as Hungary emerged from Communism, he emerged from artistic hibernation with a repertory of disturbing visions and an intense interest in old photographic techniques. His pictures, often salt or albumen prints, are richly toned nightmares: a truncated elephant's foot, antique and sinister scientific equipment, a murky, apocalyptic sunset, body parts. His closest counterpart in the West is probably Joel Peter Witkin. His work has inspired an old-process movement in Hungary. In part, the movement tries to make a virtue of necessity, compensating for a lack of money to invest in exotic digital technology. For Mr. Kerekes, however, repossessing the past and reinventing the present go hand in hand. Yet the work of Zsolt Peter Barta, a protégé of Mr. Kerekes, suggests that in the country of "masters but no movements," a movement may be taking shape. Unlike earlier avant-gardes, its members share no style but rather an attitude. They face the world after Communism with deep ambivalence. Mr. Barta's series of close-up black-and-white photos of preserved human cadavers, for example, can be seen, once the shock wears off, as an attempt to come to terms with the continuing impact of the political past. Free to depict any subject, he is drawn to those that suggest a perpetual inhumanity, preserved in the formaldehyde of memory. The ambivalence is most obvious in the work of the documentary photographers, who, perhaps even more than art photographers, feel compelled to make up a new tradition. So Imre Benko [Benko] has developed a monumental style to counter the heroic nationalism that was Hungary's cold war staple. His new Hungary is a series of incongruities. In one image, an impromptu barbecue takes place outside an enormous housing project. In another, a worker in a steel town looks up at the towering remnants of a dead industry that has just barely failed to squeeze the life out of him. Like so many Hungarians, Mr. Benko [Benko] seems suspicious of every political gesture, refraining from criticism and celebration. More partisan are Judit M. Horváth and György Stalter, who are doing for Hungary's Gypsy minority what the Farm Services Administration photographers did for the rural poor in the United States: asserting their dignity and calling attention to their economic condition. Renouncing official folk images of Gypsy life, Ms. Horváth and Mr. Stalter have forged a documentary style that imports the grandeur and drama of the Magnum photojournalists, typified by Robert Capa. The desperate search for a method has left its mark on all the photographers who came of age under Communism, but a younger generation doesn't feel the need to shoulder the burden of starting from scratch. To artists like Lenke Szilagyi [Szilágyi], the past and the world are available. Although farthest removed from the legacy of Kertész and least concerned about recovering it, she may be closest to it in spirit. In her black-and-white images of difficult rural lives lived in an unlovely Hungary, she orients herself toward a living presence, however minimized or despairing. She seems to say there will always be a need for the eye that can divine the essential moments of our humanity. In March, Hungary dedicated the House of Culture for Photography, in the renovated Budapest mansion and studio of the former Austro-Hungarian court photographer Mano Mai. It is modeled on New York's International Center for Photography. With a new museum and an international outlook, with the Internet and travel to Paris and New York, some Hungarian artists are beginning to wonder what will sustain their work when it leaves the shadows for the global glare, when idiosyncrasy gives way to international influence and the masters join movements. After his initial enthusiasm at visiting the Museum of Modern Art, Mr. Barta wondered if he had lost his innocence. "We need a context for our work, yes," he said, "but we also need to think we are inventing something new."
Lyle Rexer, an art critic, is writing a book on old-process photography.
MARIA BARTOLOMÉ /SPAIN/
El atlas universal. Del futuro al pasado
Sin duda Gábor Kerekes nos ha deparado un universo inédito e inquietante. Sus obras nos sorprenden con una suerte de recuerdos que tan pronto nos transportan hacia imaginarios escenarios perdidos de la historia como nos ilumina ion sus revelaciones actuales Él mismo se declara preocupado por la relación antigua y contemporánea entre la ciencia y el arte. Las imágenes que toma de la realidad son incorporadas a su trabajo como v fueran una obsesión «En mis obras de los die? último; a?os he intentado reunir la olvidada relación entre Ciencia y Arte, antiguamente llamada Artesanía y Arte. No estoy sólo en esto Recientemente, Fa ausencia y la necesidad de esta relation puede encontrarse en los tratajos de cada vez más científicos y artistas, o en sus propios estudios filosóficos. Los propósitos y los métodos de la ciencia y del arte son diferentes, la primera requiere objetividad mientras el arte es inseparable de la subjetividad». Objetos exóticos, maravillas de la naturaleza, aparatos e instrumentos científicos se reunían en los gabinetes de curiosidades de los erudrtos renacentisias, no sólo con fines estéticos, sino m,,, bien de conocimiento y estudio. Estos gabinetes reflejaban el espirflu de una época con una determinada visión del mundo en La que voluntariamente era difícil discernir lo natural de lo artificial, los aspectos científicos de los artísticos, los naturalistas de tos mecánicos, se trataba de una cosmovisión que pretendía articular una verdadera particular historia universal. El saber, la ciencia y el conocimiento fueron ios pilares que justificaron la acumulación de extra?os objetos para su estudio. Llegado el siglo de las Tuces, la Ilustración engendra una actitud racionalista, científica, objetiva e histórico-crítica. Se formula asi una revisión de la que nace el cientificismo y con él, e I estudio metódico y racional, Anne Wauters centraba esla realidad en el catálogo que documentó la exposición que Gábor Kerekes celebro en Bruselas, en el Espace Photographique Contretype, el ario 1997: “El positivismo del siglo XIX creyó que la ciencia era capaz de resolver y explicar todos los enigmas del universo, ahora bien, según el testimonio de Jos científicos contemporáneos los avances tecnológtcos continua ron tropezándose con la resistencia do una parte todavía inexplicable, escondida en el corazón mismo de la vida. Este último misterio atraviesa toda la obra de Gábor Kerekes compuesta de fotografías de animales, vegetales, de fragmentos humanos y de objetos, dirigidos con objetivos científicos y en unas condiciones que la imagen deja solamente adivinar soluciones en formal” Plenamente valorado en su país de nacimiento Hungría y en su lugar de residencia Alemania, Kerekes es un artista desconocido en Espa?a. A lo largo de la década de los anos 80 estuvo presente en las grandes colectivas europeas sobre la fotografía del Este: jóvenes fotógrafos húngaros en París 1983), Los Húngaros, en Amsterdam {1987) o en la revision realizada en el Musee de L'Elysee de Lausanne 100 fotógrafos del Este (1990), En la década de los 90, tras b caída del muro de Berlin, su obra comienza una excelente proyección internacional con exposiciones en Budapest Berlin. Nueva York, San Francisco, Nantes, Bruselas, Londres, etc Para Kerekes el punto de partida de un estimulo es la realización de una obra, a partir de los a?os 90 sale del mutismo en el que estaba instalado y reaparece públicamente con una nueva espiritualidad. Podríamos decir que la construcción de la vida es el espejo a través del cual buena parte de los artistas miran hacia la interioridad del ser. Indagan las condiciones y la materia de la que está formada la existencia para escrutar los mecanismos y resortes que explican los aspectos de su funcionamiento Kerekes nos transporta a su museo imaginario, a una eipe-rienda de irrenunciable circulación de estímulos.A modo de gabinete de curiosidades, de enciclopedia visual, —insectos, anatomías internas fruto de la disección, tubos ramificados torácicos que se confunden con formas orgánicas vegetales, piedras, fósiles— se presentan bajo una mirada basada en una profunda sujetividad. Prácticamente la mayoría de estas obras se resuelven formalmente envueltas en un halo de antigüedad, de decadencia propia de los museos de ciencias naturales de finales de siglo XIX.Es la naturaleza la protagonista ultima, su única presencia como elemento vertebrador de signos y formai que lleva a Kerekes s convertirse en artífice de una cosmogonía inédita y en buena medida reveladora de un macrocosmos y microcosmos observado, no sabemos, si a través del visor de su cámara, o asomados a la lente del microscopio. Kerekes recrea un atlas personal entre el cielo y la tierra. Andromeda y Perseida, nos conduce a través de cuerpos celestes, esféricos, igual que nos asoma A la célula originaria, al embrión. Incitado no sólo por tos aspectos visuales, sino también por los significados subyacentes, genera una amplia y radkal confrontación sntre el arte y la ciencia, en el recuerdo de espacios museisticos propios del ligio XIX, como una forma de medir, de afinar distancias, de estudiar las relaciones con la historia, las ciencias, la imaginería y el hombre. La pátina del tiempo cubre Jas cajas de colecciones de mariposas, los ármanos clasificadores, los mftrumentas de laboratorio que conservan las etiquetas de catalogación escritas a mano. Esta colección de rarezas rezuma un mundo interior cargado de sentimientos nostálgicos sobre la euforia perdida de los descubrimientos científicos del siglo XIX. Kerekes nos ense?a a leer el pasado; un pasado en un continuun abierto y en perpetuo cambio. Las formas temporales quedan en suspenso- No hay distinción entre lo nuevo y lo viejo, lo antiguo y lo actual, la vida y la muerte. Esta visión de la vida plantea profundas cuestiones metafísicas, nos conduce mas allá de fa sensualidad de la materia y la forma e la unión inextinguible entre el hombre y la naturaleza, como decía Anne Wautters; “a la vertiginosa compI ementan edad de la vida y de la muerte” Paul Virilo explicaba perfectamente esta ambivalencia en la percepción del paso temporal por la transitoriedad al filo del final del milenio: “Al igual que el espacio, el tiempo absoluto se ha disuelto, en materia de duración; todo depende de Id mirada que se dirija, de La naturaleza y de la época del punto de vista, y no ya de las condiciones supuestamente naturales de la expe riencia. Contribuyendo siempre la ciencia y sus tecnologías a modificar la observación, la medida, y finalmente, la apariencia misma de aquello que se observa. Para con vence mos de ello, resulta inútil pues remontarnos a Copernico y Galileo, o indusa volver a Einstein y Niels Bohr, para descubrir que, en materia de temporalidad, el tiempo ya no ésta entero”. El efecto milagro que supuso el invento científico de la fotografía en el siglo XIX, se mantiene en el espíritu de la abra de Kerekes casi intacto. La captación de una realidad convertida en un sue?o personal rituaJiza la capacidad de crear un mundo ilusorio tan convincente como el mismo mundo real. Elementos circulares y esféricos que proceden indistintamente del mundo animal, vegetal o mineral constatan que las fuerzas naturales son capaces de crear, a Jo largo de los artos, las estructuras y formas más complejas. De hecho el circuito de proceso de las comprobación empíricas de las investigaciones científicas comenzaba con la conjetura de artificios posibles y acababa con la afirmación de una nueva teória científica. El arte se manifiesta desde estas posiciones de Gábor Kerekes como contaminado y contaminador. Zsolt-Péter Barta, estudioso de la obra de Kerekes reafirma como su trabajo “se centra en su estrecha relación artística y filosófica con la ciencia, nuevos elementos se a?aden a la sensualidad de sus obras: La magia y el misticismo, la ciencia de la naturaleza, mejoradas con nuevas Técnicas. En iodo lo relacionado con su trabajo, se esfuerza en profundizar en la tradition para obtener resultados típicos y arcaicos. Busca paralelamente, innovar délas regularidades tradicionales; para crear sus obras, modifica libremente la dimensión de sus sujetos. Jos recorta siguiendo los contornos y los coloca a gusto de su inspiración. Asi pues, la fotografía, para Kerekes, ha llegado a ser el medio para descubrir una cierta realidad. Observando sus fotografías, nos rendimos ante la evidencia de que el micro y el macrocosmos se mezclan de una manera desordenada. El estallido de las partículas, la caída de las Perseidas, el material electrónico de los estudios, la tabla periódica de ios elementos químicos, el conjunto del alambique alquimista dotado de auiocierres; todo supone una alegoría al fracaso déla ciencia moderna; miembros separados de cuerpos humanos yacentes en una solución de for mol; todo esto nos demuestra la voluntad heroica y la imposibilidad excitante de contemplar y de examinar este fin de siglo Heno de amenazas en contra de la euforia del mundo al final del siglo XIX caracterizado por la ciencia y la técnica.” Del mismo modo, en nuestro siglo los avances de la tecnología y las derivaciones de los nuevos experimentos biocieníifitos no son una fuente de indicios exclusivamente positivos para ef arte, como lo podían haber sido en épocas anteriores. De nuevo el en campo del arle se cuestiona la esencia misma de la vida. Crea seres duales con los que invierte las expectativas de rejteracion de modelos de la Ingeniería genética para referirse a las anomalías de la conducta humana. Las imágenes que Kerekes nos ofrece plantean de forma insólita una visión de la fotográfia con una iconografía turbador^ la atracción por lo extrano en el seno de la naturaleza, lo perverso en ocasiones, su carácter de patente subjetividad con lie re a su obra un aspecto de absoluta hibridación entre la ciencia y el arte, la metafísica y la física. Si analizamos algunos de los temas que aparecen en la obra que Kerekes presenta en Huesca imagen, observaremos como todos ellos —fragmentos de cuerpos inmersos en formo!, recién nacidos asfixiados fuera del seno de la madre y encajados en un encuadre que rompe loi limites de la rmagen en una grave den- sidad, aparatos propios de laboratorios decadentes— contradicen aspectos estéticos en los cuales la idea de la belleza se detiene ante el aspecto monstruoso de una realidad más perversa que la pura enso?ación. La creation de la imagen obliga a que los objetos sean sacados de su contexto para ser colocados dentro de unos contornos a veces definidos dentro de formas esféricas retomando ta idea clásica de fa esfera como perfección, como origen cosmológico. En ocasiones sus encuadres clausuofobicos son capaces de suscitar las fuerzas físicas y espirituales de un momento casi decisivo, una expresión personal que te lleva a decisiones estéticas de gran complejidad técnica en la resolución de las fotografías. Una duda subsiste en io concerniente a fa identificación de la mayor parte de Eos objetos, incluso, cuando se dispone del titulo de Jas obras. Utiliza un misterioso camuflaje al quebrar la situation habitual de un objeto familiar con el fin de que sea mes difícil su identificacion, sus imágenes están disfrazadas al incluir transparencias, zonas traslúcidas que complican la percepción. Dúdamos si esa abundante ramificación endurecida es realmente el resto de un pulmón, o si esa esfera oscura pertenece a un cuerpo celeste o a una preparación para el microscopio. Ese sentido irrational que la ciencia no llega ni llegara a agotar, es una parte ontológitamente imperceptible que Gábor Kerekes sublima EI fruto resultante es una obra armónicamente resuelta, como si estuviera impregnada por el doble componente de lo belfo, como si alcanrara la simbiosis entre lo eterno y lo variable.
MARIA BARTOLOMÉ
SÁNDOR SZILÁGYI: PHOTOMAGIC
Photomagic -Gábor Kerekes does an extraordinary thing with photography. He doesn't tell stories, he doesn't cite dramatic events, and neither does he document his own emotions and moods - he philosophizes. He makes ontological and epistemological investigations; he probes the bounds of human cognition. He seeks our place in the universe. He researches the characteristics of the human sensory organs - in particular those that help us find our bearings: the eye, the ear and the brain. But, above all, he explores the interrelationships of science and art. It is as if he was merely trying to recreate the cohesion of bygone times which in the 19th century, regrettably, disintegrated. Science fell apart into ever more specialised fields and at the same time became dehumanised, as even the need for an overall view was divorced from it. Art likewise became emptier and more self-centred, as it lost contact with all that can otherwise be known about the world - from the experiences of everyday life and the sciences. Kerekes expresses from the side of art the rediscovery - also acknowledged by an increasing number of scientists - that intuition and reason hang together after all. And meanwhile he explores the question of questions: can the world be known? What can the arts, in this case photography, contribute to what we know about the world and humankind? Here I'll quit this high-brow philosophizing - after all, we're only talking about a photographer, aren't we?
Role play -This may seem to be a trivial approach but it is not self-evident as Kerekes doesn't act like a photographer. He acts as if he were a 19th century naturalist who happened to take photographs in the course of his research. He uses the photograph as a scientist uses experimental equipment. An obvious indication of this is his penchant for photographing old paraphernalia such as test tubes, a lightning conductor, a dynamo, assorted measuring instruments and alike, and that he readily chooses the objectified results of the sciences from the past (human and animal anatomical specimens, and fine examples of insect and mineral collections) as his subjects. But we should all be aware that this is simply play no matter how seriously its maker takes it or how successfully he has managed to construct a coherent, independent visual world through this role play. We shouldn't be deceived by the subject matter of his photographs. Kerekes clearly deals with photography and not science. This immediately becomes evident if we know that many of his pictures are in fact sleight of hand. What at first glance we think is a planet bearing the scars of cosmic impacts is, it transpires, a ball-shaped lightning conductor; the shot of a planet in space at sunrise is of a rubber ball taken in a studio; the small planet surrounded by stars is a Starking apple, and so on. The illusion is perfect. These aren't comparisons. Kerekes is not saying that a lightning conductor is like a planet, and that a rubber ball or apple shot with the right lighting are like celestial bodies. No, through the means of photography he creates these heavenly spheres. He imbues everyday objects with cosmic significance. This is not natural history, but the purest photography, indeed photomagic.
The rediscovery of photography -Kerekes goes back to the 19th century not just in his subject matter but also in the appearance and processing techniques of his pictures. In itself this is nothing special. Around the world - and here in Hungary, too - many people use the so-called historical, alternative, manual photographic techniques. Only Kerekes goes radically further than this: the whole point of his role play is that he did not stop at the pictorialist aesthetic that almost automatically follows from the use of manual techniques. At the same time he wasn't swept away by shockingly upsetting taboos, nor has he been carried away by the intoxication of the digital manipulation of pictures. With his particular archaizing he has created for himself a very modern photographic language. His pictures of antiquated effect not only evoke the 19th century but also the first half century of the history of photography, the age of the naive and functional use of the photograph prior to pictorialism - the birth of art photography - when photography was a kind of discovery itself. And not only in the sense that it was used for geographical and scientific discoveries, as Kerekes reminds us with his subject matter, but also that photographers of that time had to discover the medium itself, its possibilities and limitations, and frequently even its fundamental techniques. No doubt, this is a kind of gesture of respect to our forefathers and foremothers - but it goes deeper than that.For one thing, together with the maker of these images we can relive all the charm of the first, hesitant steps of the birth of photography. It is not by chance that the perfectionist Kerekes almost provocatively accepts the flaws of photography - the blistering of hand-coated emulsion, the broken glass of the specimen of frogs' skeletons, a storage label spoiling a museum lithograph, the crookedness of the edges of the picture, and the streaking of astronomical images. These "imperfections" of his flawlessly executed photographs perfectly correspond to the form and content, the model and what you see in the photograph. Their role is to remind us of the fallibility of the world, of the medium of photography, of the artists creating it and of the viewer taking in the sight. Once again, leaving in the flaws is about visual philosophy and not pure aestheticizing.
The future of photography -Besides this, the radical step back in time has another consequence in terms of philosophy of art. Kerekes deliberately pushes aside the lot: today's, yesterday's and the day before yesterday's art photography. He deliberately goes even further back exactly because he is seeking an idiom that he knows for sure will be valid tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. That's why he doesn't stop at the pictorialist aesthetic although this once produced excellent results with manual techniques, which he too has used. However, Kerekes does not wish to indulge in nostalgia. As we've seen, for him the role of the naturalist is not immersion in the past, but on the contrary an intellectual link to the most modern scientific endeavours. This is how the role play, the subject matter arising from it, the chosen techniques and the artistic self-reflection blend into a perfect whole. At the same time, this creative gesture returning to the pre-artistic era of photography speaks of no less than the future of the medium. This is most simply expressed by a paradox: it is digital imagemaking that will truly turn traditional photography into art. And why? Because it will free it from a number of tasks foreign to art. Applied photography (the scientific, advertising and press photo) will sooner or later go over to digital techniques; digitization is also the future for snapshots, and the new techniques' independent artistic use is also developing - in multimedia and computer graphics. Thus the traditional, chemical-based, manual photographic techniques (including the nowadays already and still most accepted silver gelatin process) will become more valuable primarily because a photograph as a work of art can only be produced by them. (The proper form of appearance of multimedia and computer graphics is not the photograph as an object, the print, but a virtual picture displayed on a screen.) And obviously, it is also because there will be fewer and fewer people who know how to produce it, and thus the photograph will acquire rarity value.
Alt-chemistry -Kerekes knows this very well, but he didn't calculatingly set out to learn the old techniques from books at the price of many hundreds of hours of hard graft and experimentation. Most importantly, his already mentioned perfectionism and the aesthetic considerations closely connected with it led him to such obscure processes as salted paper, albumen, printing-out paper and alike. This perfectionism consists of the fact that these old techniques are in numerous respects more nearly perfect than their more modern descendants in use today. Their resolution is higher, they render tones more subtly, and as they are contact rather than enlarging processes, that is the negative is as large as the finished photograph, they are sharper and somehow "more real" than the raw materials of today.This in itself already has aesthetic consequences. In addition to this, salted paper - with only slight exaggeration - is like a living creature. As there is no binder, the picture develops on the paper's diaphanous matt surface, and under it every fibre of the paper almost palpitates. (Salted paper is paper coated with common salt - natrium chloride - and then a solution of silver nitrate which produces a light-sensitive, silver chloride layer. Essentially, this is Talbot's invention). Or if we look more closely at albumen (salted paper coated with egg white), it is subtle in a different way: it has a lustrous, shiny surface. Silver chloride printing-out paper also surpasses the capabilities of silver bromide enlarging papers in many respects. Moreover, we should remember the wonderfully deep, brownish black tones of all three photographic papers. This phenomenon is produced by immersing the photograph in a bath of gold chloride, as Kerekes the Grand Master is apt to do with them.
Universe -So Kerekes does something exceptional: he philosophizes with pictures. He doesn't use them to illustrate complete tenets of philosophy or religious philosophy, such as those of Zen, for instance, but through them evolves a personal visual philosophy. He examines the universe. He tries to make it talk. He looks at the world around him as if from above, but not as if he imagined himself as God. He wishes to separate the significant from the insignificant to create timeless works. This is why he doesn't photograph people, as they would only disturb the clarity of his vision. Each person is too incidental. Minute. Fallible. Like this, this world is cosmically desolate. He reminds me of the poetry of János Pilinszky and the world of music of Laurie Anderson. Will Kerekes ever reach the point where he communicates with the world, and about the world, through the human face, through portraits? I for one would be delighted if he did, as I would interpret this as the world at long last being ripe for Gábor Kerekes to forgive it. And who would not want to live in a world like that?
Note: Gábor Kerekes was born in 1945 in Oberhart in Germany, of Hungarian parents who had emigrated due to the war. The family returned to Hungary the same year. Between 1964 -73 he was an apprentice in the catering trade, then became a waiter. His photographs were first exhibited at a group exhibition in Szentendre in 1973. Since then he has exhibited regularly. Between 1986 -1991 he also worked as a photojournalist. But for eight years, from 1982, he took no art photographs at all. He taught himself astronomy, astrology and alchemy as well as the history of photography instead. Since 1990 he has made pictures of an entirely new kind: his changed style was characterised by large format images, and photographs processed at first by brown-toning and then by various historical processes. He destroyed his earlier prints and several thousand negatives. In all about 50 images and their negatives were spared. These he donated to the Hungarian Museum of Photography for safekeeping.
Kerekes's works are represented by the Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco, the Sarah Morthland Gallery in New York, the Zinc Gallery in Stockholm and the Csaba Morocz Gallery in Paris. Between 1993 -1999 he was connected with the Bolt Gallery in Budapest. No book of his works has yet been published.
Delivered at the exhibition opening at the Nyitott Muhely [Open Workshop] Gallery on 4 March 2002
by Sándor Szilágyi
SÁNDOR SZILÁGYI: TAKE FIVE
Gábor Kerekes (55) is playfully know as the "Master" by this small community because he is a leading figure or guru for younger generations.Kerekes used to be one of Hungary's best reporters,but he gave that up and did not touch his camera for eight long years. Instead he set out on a path of self-education. He read a tremendous number of books on art,techniques,myths,alchemy,astrology, astronomy and anything else that he believed was related to photography. After his studies, he destroyed thousands of his earlier images (saving only twenty photos which he gave to the Hungarian Museum of Photography) and started a new career as a large format photographer. In his new vision he produced wonderful brown-toned, old looking images on obscure themes like the moon,meteorites, the human brain, and other human parts preserved for medical studies.He recently turned to historical techniques such as salted and albumen papers and built a 30x40 cm camera on his own.Whatever he touches is full of the alchemy of photography, the most mysterious part of life: creation.
KEREKES Gábor
« Science et art » ou « Les phénomènes naturelles représentées par des photographies »
A travers son travail, Gábor Kerekes réanime la relation oubliée qui existait autrefois entre les sciences et les arts ou, avec une expression plus archaïque, entre « les arts et les métiers ». Il n’est pas le seul à faire de tels efforts. Dans les œuvres et dans le travail de scientifiques, d’artistes et de philosophes, la nécessité d’une telle relation s’avère de plus en plus évidente. Les méthodes des sciences et de l’art sont différentes. La première aspire à une objectivité sans conditions, l’autre est inaliénable du sujet, de la subjectivité.
Au début, cependant, parallèlement à « l’objectivité » des sciences archaïques, une méthode fortement intuitive existait également. On tenta de saisir l’inconnu en créant un système de symboles subjectif pour représenter ce qui est impossible de dire (l’alchimie, la médecine, l’astrologie). Ne se souciant pas des détails, on cherchait l’essentiel, l’abstraction, la dissolution totale de l’homme dans la nature, bref, la conjonction alchimique.
L’histoire a modifié l’aspect des sciences. Elle élabore un nouveau système de mesures, en s’éloignant de la subjectivité pour finir par l’omettre complètement.
Mais ces dernières années, cette lacune semble être comblée, les lignes de forces semblent de nouveau converger. La théorie de quantum caractérisant le stade actuel des sciences, les hypothèses concernant la création de l’univers n’omettent plus l’approche subjective, voire « artistique ».
Né en 1945, Gábor Kerekes est un photographe autodidacte. Il photographie depuis 30 ans. Au début de sa carrière il est photographe technique, puis devient reporter photographe. Ces dix dernières années, il travaille sur la représentation métaphorique de la relation des sciences et des arts. Son répertoire technique englobe la chambre obscure et différentes techniques photographiques, jusqu’aux procédés professionnels grand format. Il a obtenu le Prix Balázs Béla, et vit et travaille à Budapest.
UTE ESKILDSEN
Katalog:1.INTERNATIONALE FOTO-TRIENNALE ESSLINGEN 1989
Dramaturgy of Images
A second group in our context of "photomontage and dramaturgy of the images" brings the spectator to an additional principle of pictorial coordination. In the photographic work of this group it is not the construction of the picture which is essential but rather the placing of each single photo in its successive arrangement. But also Gerald Van Der Kaap, Robyn Stacey, Gosbert Adler, Bill Henson, Hans Scholten and Gabor Kerekes construe meanings using photographic images and objects, making them correspond with one another. The creative possibilities of the photographic process cannot constitute a base for pictorial vision but can supply a variety of possible combinations which make the spectacle possible. Hereby the selected photo does not function as an individual image at all - it is often banal, simply illustrative or aesthetically effective. The meaning of each single photo lies in its relationship to the photo next to it, as in Adlers and Henson's work, or in its set frame of vision, as in Scholten's work. With the exception of Kerekes, who pictures through the object he photographs - only then to turn it into an exaggeration in the laboratory - all the other artists place the dramaturgy of their work in the process following the photographic act. Hans Scholten, combines the two-dimensional photo with areas of colour or as in some of his work with drawings, but he almost always combines it with an object placed directly in front of or in the immediate vicinity of the photo. A new object is thus created which using a process, exemplifies the various forms of abstraction used in the media. Scholten's work is related to that of the installation the installation artists of this exhibition. But the Dutchman does not attempt to expand his work into surrounding space but rather guides the spectator straight to the single object in which spatial illusion and three dimensionality are combined. In connection with the metallic small sculptures, his photos and especially the animal photos, have an oppressive quality. The suggested vitality which also emanates from the animal images, loses its feeling of reality when it is confronted with the object. At the same time Scholten establishes the concrete photographic information as another approach to abstract sculpture, onto which he, among other things, mounts portraits. His work is at its most impressive when landscapes or animal forms are combined with abstract.......
Ute Eskildsen 1989