Christian Zillner: Beyond Modern and Postmodern

Christian Zillner

Beyond Modern and Postmodern The work of Hungarian Artist László László Révész

POINT OF DEPARTURE "Like the doping-corrupted sports system, the art system also stands at a crossroads. Either it will continue on the way of corruption with an imitation of extra-artistic effects and thus explicitly designate art museums and art collections as a playground for the last men and women on earth. Or else it will recognize the necessity of bringing creative imitation back to the workshop and reintroduce the question of what is worthy of being repeated and what is not worth of being repeated."

Peter Sloterdijk: You Must Change Your Life

PROLOGUE In the end, everybody is cleverer than in a preface. But it's here that the author's secrets are divulged, something that in the following sentences (although not altogether unintentional) were often just a matter of coincidence. My choice of Pincio (that is, that hill in Rome that does not count as one of the seven most important ones) as the scene of action, was a little jab at overtouristed Rome and a bow to Thomas Bernhard who’s last novel, Extinction, partly plays here.

My text is also about extinguishment, though in the sense of: the last one to turn off the light.

The last one here, it should be noted, is me. And I would like to dedicate myself here to the last light bulb of modernity, to whose extinguishment, I must humbly admit, nothing but a single weary gesture is required. But have no fear; the future will be made bright by EU-compliant energy-saving lamps.

It's shouldn't be too difficult to figure out that this introduction is for a book about the Hungarian artist László László Révész. And knowing that, one has also discovered the book's pattern -- namely, that Révész always arrives late in the game. Because being the cunning technician that I am, I only bring in my star player when the others are exhausted and his refreshing achievements can really and finally be appreciated. Full of energy, he goes to bat for me so that we can continue on with our neostructuralistic discourse.

I can promise the reader this much: one would have to look long and hard to find a similar book about art. Whether that speaks for mine or not remains to be seen, but that doesn't change the fact that one would have to look long and hard to find an artist like László László Révész. And that does say a lot about him and the quality of his work.

At the danger of getting a little ahead of myself here, I would have my well-educated detractors understand the following. I will have them to understand that I consider myself a personal friend of László László Révész, that he paid me 35 million Forints (i.e. nothing) to write this book, and that I'm all for oral sex with dead animals (i.e. I eat them). I hope with this outpouring of my heart that I've succeed in painting a clear enough picture of my relationship to Révész, the aim of this book, and of the world in general.

Lastly, I've purposely spared the reader every detailed account of the artist's background and work. For one thing, he's still alive and, for another, I firmly believe one should look at his pictures instead of reading about them. My intent was to show what sets Révész apart from the majority of contemporary artists, and why I see in him a model for a new era of art.

Whoever holds this to be utter nonsense can confidently lay this book aside and silently thank me that I helped him conserve the best moments of his life. To the others, I can only offer the words of the Austrian artist, Franz Ringel, who says: "If you read this, you've got no one to blame but yourself."

Rome - Vienna, November 2009 - February 2010

Chapter 1: Ascent Through Modernity Rome, November 13th, 2009. On the Spanish Steps, the fall of the Berlin Wall on the 9th of November, 1989, is being commemorated. Two gray barricades, in the form of that legendary cement wall, block the first two landings. These function as add-ons to the other installations, which carry the title, "Twenty Years of Freedom", and they really go to show just how ugly memory can be.

Down from the Spanish Steps, in front of the Furla shop in the Piazza di Spagna, stands László László Révész. He originates from that part of Europe that until 1989 was (as a result of the Iron Curtain for which the Berlin Wall was an example of first-class German workmanship) locked away in the "Eastern Bloc". The inmates of this "bloc" lived for decades in a highsecurity zone with a high number of security personnel. Since the collapse of the Bloc, they feel freer and their neighbors feel relieved. And for special anniversaries, eery spectacles like this one serve as a reminder to those who either can't or don't wish to remember.

László László Révész is lucky because the year is 2009 and he's standing in front of the Furla shop. The worst is over. The worst that can happen to him now is that he has to meet me. A few centuries earlier and just a few paces from here, in the Palazzo di Spagna, his mere presence there would have automatically qualified him for recruitment into the Spanish army. In Europe, even a thing like hanging out may be considered a crime.

Together we climb the Spanish steps. How flighty memory can be! Under normal circumstances we'd probably have dropped an irreverent comment or two about those Berlin Wall decorations, but they've already gone and slipped our minds.

Behind the steps, on the street leading up to the Pincio, we find ourselves in front of a procession of Italian communists: red flags bearing the hammer and sickle among smaller ones in green, white, and red -- the Italian tricolor. It looks a lot like the Hungarian flag although in Hungary, László László Révész informs me, the police would have stepped in and confiscated them on the spot. In Hungary, red flags are the insignia of a dictatorship. This, of course, does not enter the minds of the happily-marching Italians. For them the red flag constitutes an entirely different history; for them these flags have little to do with the Berlin Wall and its replicas and even less to do with the Communist dictatorship that ruled Hungary. And just what might this mean for our European historical conscience? Does it mean that our history is made up of identical symbols or that identical symbols mean different things at different times for different people?

We follow the procession for a while before László suggests that we stop and make the narrow climb to Pincio. We then leave the communist parade only to end up in another one. On both ends of the path to Pincio are stelai of famous historical figures. The names are in Italian so it's hard for someone who doesn't speak the language to recognize them. Who can tell a bust of Socrates from one of Galileo? He, like the artist who made them and no doubt tried very hard to lend them authentic features, has never seen either of them before in his life. But all that is irrelevant now: passersbys only attach importance to the statues because, grouped together as they are, they seem to exude a certain dignity.

A fake wall on the Spanish Steps, protesters marching for something that they would surely reject the moment they were forced to live it; an avenue spread with statues of people who, based on their sheer number, convince the tourists that they were once important figures... Is our little stroll on Pincio Hill not, in fact, a kind of museum tour of modernity?

As we make the climb up the Roman hill, our surroundings already begin to take on a museumlike air: dilapidated walls, forgotten or warped human ideals, the serial production of meaning via onlookers (known to modernity as "context"). But if it's museum-like then it must also be "modern", because the museum is the center point of "modernity". The philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk calls it a "semantic state bank" -- a bank, in other words, where a nation-state warehouses its identity and from it awards credit.

A museum removes a thing from the spheres of action and influence of its rulers -- be it a work of art or a collection piece from a Wonder Room or a library book. Autonomous and on display, it becomes a thing in itself -- a concept that, since Kant's time, is right up there with God. And it works the other way around, too: any thing -- as Marcel Duchamp demonstrated with his urinal -- becomes a thing in itself the second it lands in a museum. Modern man has learned to accept this fact. Anything that stands, hangs or lies in a museum is automatically viewed as art or something of scientific value, of some level of importance. (One asks oneself how it's possible for museum visitors to use the bathroom; shouldn't they be scared of accidentally pissing on a work of art?!).

In an attempt to dig up historical references, especially here in Rome and on Pincio, one could be tempted to speak of the museum as a modern temple. This, however, would be false.

Museum items don't point to some higher power, they know no gods. A museum only lists things. It creates an environment from which everything, completely autonomously, receives its aura.

A sign of the victory but also of the end of modernity, is that it has succeeded so well in museumifying everything. Everything has come to be stored in these semantic state banks; there are even museums for the future now and the museums themselves -- their buildings -- have come to take on even more significance than the things exhibited in them. On the same day that László László Révész and I made our way up to the Pincio, Zaha Hadid's new museum nearby was having its grand opening. In keeping with modernity's infantile nature, it's been called MAXXI (and whoever actually thinks of the Roman numerals 21 has completely lost touch with contemporary culture). It's to be the new Italian national museum, the National Museum of Twenty-first Century Arts, and it stands completely empty.

With the advance of the 21st Century, the MAXXI will naturally (a nice modern word) acquire Maxxi art for the coming generations of Italians. Just as naturally, however, these additions will only serve to harm the museum's perfect form -- i.e. its current emptiness. The museum item, once elevated to the thing in itself, becomes in this new museum of the Eternal City, this seat of God's representatives on earth, a thing of the past. In short, God (the thing in itself) is dead and Zaha Hadid built His mausoleum. It's a space that opens up all the possibilities of virtual reality while causing all of the objects therein to shrink. Put simply: the second his artwork arrives at this museum, the artist will want to beg forgiveness for having ever created it in the first place.

High above the empty museum (that mausoleum of infinite possibilities) and beneath the statues of expressionless white men of a mostly forgotten cultural history, sits László László Révész and I on the Pincio drinking coffee (him) and beer (me). We would very much like to escape museumification, the enshrinement of our existence and our work in the Mausoleum of the Modern, but how exactly can do that? For modernity promises us, in exchange for what it calls in big call letters "AUTHENTICITY", a museumified aura, money, fame and a BMW. And László László Révész is an artist.

Perhaps a phenomenon discovered by the philosopher, Robert Pfaller, could help us out here, out of the modern museum and mausoleum. He calls this phenomenon "interpassivity" and he first used the term to mean the opposite of "interactivity" in art which demands one to be completely oneself and never unauthentic. "Interpassivity", on the other hand, is a strategy: people escape into self-oblivion via the safe arms of some illusion.

Let us get a closer look at this strategy. We've been sitting on Pincio Hill talking about art and modernity, but now we're prepared to let both of them pass us by in order to come to an understanding that one can talk about art without ending up in a museum, in that empty semantic bank of a bankrupt nation-state.

Chapter 2: How a Hungarian Artist is Born -- the Prehistory We're now sitting in a park on Pincio Hill, and although it looks like a natural landscape, here everything for at least the past two thousand years has been made by human hands. Further on, the garden of Lucius Licinius Lucullus is followed by villas, dense construction and palaces, but in the here and the now, above the hectic city, we get to sit back and enjoy the tranquility of nature.

The park was modeled on English landscape gardens, gardens which had their origins in the idealistic Roman landscape paintings of Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. And so here we are, surrounded by some nature invented and designed by foreign painters working in Rome.

It's a modern idyll: small and self-contained like the nation-state and "history" itself.

Yes, history itself is a man-made idyll about as new as this park. Having begun as a scientific discipline and originally known as "historicism", it began in 1910 with the reforms of Wilhelm von Humboldt in the prototype of all modern states, Prussia. It was with Barthold Georg Niebuhr's History of Rome of 1912 that it would go into effect for the first time.

"Modern history", like "modern nature", started with Rome. And just as modern nature was a reaction against French baroque gardens so too was modern history directed at a French phenomenon: the Napoleonic idea of state. Incidentally, the second Nobel Prize ever awarded went to Theodor Mommsen in 1902 for his History of Rome (the first went to Frenchman Sully Prudhomme the year before).

Even with the word "Roman" on it's cover, modern history is really only about one thing and one thing only: it's self-created myth of nation-state. Because it's only through history that the

nation-state can maintain that its fictitious unity is organic in origin. The mask of Rome was designed to lend the childish grin of the developing nation-state an illustrious demeanor and give intimations of its coming greatness. The state obtains its perspective from history and history obtains its focus from the state, or to quote loosely from Immanuel Kant: History without the nation-state is blind and the nation-state without history is empty.

Beneath the park on Pincio lies the debris of generations; beneath history we find their putrefying dead and with the dead their respective cultures, which, at first, are nothing but the emergence of a death cult. In many cases, modern culture itself appears to be nothing more than a death cult, that of a nation-state which likes to keep the mausoleums of its fictive history in museums.

The Communist regime in Hungary can be regarded as such an instance. It proclaimed all deviations from its own derogatory death cult terminology as hostile ideology. One result of this process sits here with me now on Pincio drinking his cup of coffee: the Hungarian artist László László Révész. His passport verifies him to be a member of the Hungarian state, his professorship at the Hungarian art academy binds him to the national culture, and his artistic work is a part of Hungarian history. Everything perfectly modern and shipshape. In any case, it's not only with fall of the Communist regime that history is taken into question; some female scientists view history as the deceptive ploy of "old, white men".

This doesn't necessarily mean that the connection between nation-state and history is broken, it has much more to do with newly defining what we mean by nation-state. Is the state its administrative elite or a product of its women, children, workers and employees? Does the state consist solely of its power structure to maintain a monopoly of violence or is it a community of caring persons? Does it need a "dominant culture" -- a death cult -- to bind it together or can it tolerate other cultures within itself?

These are exactly the types of questions that spring to mind with regard to artist László László Révész as we sit on Pincio. They come up both in his life and work alike, so in order to get a better understanding of his work I really must stop and ask them.

My first question, of course, has to do with what it means for a living artist who was brought up under Communism to be a Hungarian artist? And I might add that Révész was brought up in that area of Budapest where the Communists bigwigs lived -- on a hill in Buda. Like Pincio, it has a remarkable history in which the Turks play a significant role. From here on in I'm going to call it "The Hill of the Elite". Even though László László Révész’s ancestors didn't belong to the Communist elite, that hill stills seems the appropriate place for a future "ideological worker", as artists under Socialist rule were labeled.

Naturally, the majority of the nomenclature did not come from this Hill of the Elite. This leads us to believe that there was life in Hungary prior to Communism, even though the Party did everything in its power not only to forget that life but also to undo its very structure. Structures enter societies through people and that means that any attempt to undo earlier societal structures affect people. One such person was László's grandfather, and it wasn't only the Communists but also, of course, the Nazis before them that tried to undo him.

He, a Viennese Jew, met his wife at an orphanage. After they married, he worked as a photographer and optician and went to Budapest to found a chain of stores called Just Optical.

The yields from this enterprise enabled him to buy a large house on the Hill of the Elite. Soon after, the Nazis tried very hard to undo his Judaism by putting him and his brothers in concentration camps. He himself escaped from a camp in Hungary and returned to his home on the hill only to discover that his brothers and sons had been killed in a German camp.

And now it was the Communists in Buda who were waiting, waiting to undo the capitalists who got away. László's grandfather was dispossessed and put in a labor camp, where his asthma would have killed him had it not been for a soviet specialist who, voluntarily practicing at the camp, cured him. By 1956, he had not only survived the ordeal but also got his house back. To make it clear to the other residents, he -- together with all his offspring -- were officially registered "enemies of the people". Even his grandson, under Sippenhaft laws, was required to carry this title amidst the communist nomenclature on the hill in Buda.

So what then is a Hungarian artist? After such a family account, one suspects that the answer to this question may be rather complicated. And that was just the tip of the iceberg, for the grandmother was originally from Brasov in Transylvania, and László spent a portion of his childhood there.

Transylvania? Hungary? Yes indeed. During the Second World War, Hungary reacquired some of the land, which had been confiscated, from their part of the dual Habsburg Monarchy after 1919 by the Treaty of Trianon. Brasov is a very pretty city, hundreds of tourist pictures of it can be found on the Internet, and Brasov is now located in Romania.

Vienna (in other words, Austria) and Brasov (in other words, Romania) were both once more or less a part of Hungary; the roots of a Hungarian artist run deep. This now brings us to László's father. Though Protestant, he baptized his son in the Catholic Church. As an engineer and specialist of computer-run machines, he was free to travel extensively (something highly uncustomary in a Communist land) and receive guests from around the world, especially from Lebanon and from India and Cyprus. Two such guests, as László would later recall, were Britons named Abbot and Makepiece who would spend long hours in their garden.

Some of László's father's ancestors also stem from the highly mysterious corners of Hungarian prehistory: the Seklers and the Zipsers.

The Zipsers live in Zips, a territory in the northeastern part of present-day Slovakia. It too was once a part of Hungary and Zips is the name of a former Hungarian county or comitatus.

Before they were Hungarians, they were Slovakians. Hungary conquered Zips in the second half of the 11th Century and from then to around the middle of the 12th Century and again until 1918, it would be ruled as a county.

In spite of this history, the majority of the Zipser towns are really of German origin. Devastated by the "western Mongolian tribes" in 1242, (a fate that the rest of Western Europe was spared through the death of the Great Khan Karakorum and their consequent retreat for the purpose of electing a successor) German craftsmen and mine workers from Silesia, Saxony and Thuringia were summoned to Zips by the Hungarian King. Thirteen of these towns were pawned to

Poland by King Sigismund (a Luxembourgian) in 1412, whereby the German towns in Hungary that had been pawned to Poland were populated with Slovakian subjects and would experience an economic boom. The rest of the eleven towns degenerated into villages.

László's father's ancestors were, in other words, German-Hungarian-Polish-Slowakian, and last but not least, Jewish.

That brings us now to the Seklers. Where exactly they come from no one really knows. The name Siculi appeared for the first time in 1116, and we know that they served continually throughout the Middle Ages in the armies of the Hungarian king and the Translyvanian, Wallachian and Moldavian princes. In the year 1599 they fought in the army of Mihai Viteazul, an ally of the Habsburgs, against the Hungarian cardinal Andreas Báthory, a briefly-ruling Prince of Transylvania.

Until 1867, the Sekler territory in eastern Transylvania enjoyed the same internal autonomy as the other Translyvanian Saxon territories as well as serving as border guards for the Kingdom of Hungary. Today the Sekler territory is inhabited by more than half a million Seklers, somewhat less Romanians, and considerably less Romas, Armenians, Jews and other so-called minorities.

The term "minorities" (a proud achievement of the modern age) reveals its problematic nature here. The modern fictitious nation-state, formed from a group, is forced to divide itself into majorities and minorities. The majority will determine the nation of its states and the minority must then submit and adapt itself accordingly. We experience just how difficult it is to maintain the fiction of the "Hungarian citizen" in the person of artist László László Révész.

Chapter 3: How a Hungarian Artist Came into Being -- a Parallel History Modernity has a hallmark and László's ancestors carried it on their bodies, had it stamped on their skin -- it's called a serial number. In technology and trade, the serial number is used for the individualization of similar materials or equipment, is something that is used to set them apart as unique. By tattooing serial numbers on its victims, the Nazis wanted most of all to denigrate them to the level of objects and then to make them distinguishable from each other through numbering so that this series of "individual items" could be kept track of.

Whereas the concentration camp issued only a single serial number per person, the modern state (at least in its now so-called developed form) demands a bundle of them from every one single one of us from our passports and driver's licenses and social security numbers down to our cars and bank accounts and credit cards.

Stategists, for the sake of standardizing the administrative process and perhaps with that ideal -the camp serial number -- unconsciously in mind, attempt to reduce our numbers down to a single one, and modern science, with its attempt to identity the genetic code of every individual, compliments their efforts.

These, similar to the equipment identity numbers of the industrial world, makes it possible for each individual item (i.e. human) to receive the right spare part (i.e. an organ). They help people make the crossover from nature and culture (the death cult) to an artificially controllable series of devices. In other words, the serialization performed on Lรกszlรณ's ancestors is something we've since come to mass-produce.

Parallel with the serialization of "human material", modernity pumps its artwork out by the series. Instead of pre-modern masterpieces (whose craftsmen were assigned to appropriate guilds) for a rich or powerful client, the modern (or autonomous) artist's "works" are designed for the enlightenment and edification for the-more-the-merrier. What was once "work" is now "production". The language of modern art, like modern industry, makes no distinction between process and result.

The modern work of art (ideally a serial product) is missing an aura that would set it apart from other industrially produced consumer goods. No longer a "masterpiece", it's forced to look elsewhere for an aura. It's got to offer us a "brand name".

Originally a randomly-selected name for a manufactured product, a name becomes a special addition to the brand, something which one gladly remembers because it's unusually durable or functional or easy to use or especially pleasing.

This reminder of its special qualities is what makes the name of a product into a brand name. In best-case scenarios, it takes on a life of its own and becomes a metaphor that loans the product a special aura, even when the product fails to live up to its original standard of quality (as, for instance, when the Nazis boasted about their youth being "as hard as Krupp steel").

The process in which a name morphs to become an object, in which it begins to serve as a metaphor or even a symbol, is known as marketing. The most successful marketing made a "Third Reich" out of a dictator and gave a repulsive and unjust regime the aura of a metaphysical and political superpower.

Marketing serves for the identification of modern art, whose serial products will only be recognized once they've acquired a brand. It can be a family (i.e. "Makart") or a fictitious group name (such as "The Impressionists"), but one thing is certain: that it will only reach the public eye through marketing.

It's in this that modern art differs fundamentally from its predecessors. Where pre-modern art brought religious, philosophical, or political ideas to an illiterate public, modern art has to rely on reading material to explain its mass-produced products to an educated audience.

Pre-modern art presented viewers with ideas they wouldn't have been able to get without a "picture" to help them. Modern art has to explain why some mass-produced products such a urinal or a box of Brillo is art. It's a triumph for modernity (and cultural tourism, as well) when people visiting a church or museum have to rely on the mediatory help of a museum guide in written, electronic and even human form because they can no longer trust their own eyes (and this applies to pre-modern artwork as well).

If one is to believe Harvard professor Louis Menand (and there are a lot of reasons why one should) it was the descendant of the Hungarian half of the Habsburg monarchy, the child of Slovakian emigrants to the U.S.A. by the family name of Warhol, that changed this basic rule for understanding art and thus helped lead modernity to victory. This Andy Warhol, during his training years as industrial designer at Carnegie Tech, expressed great interest in a book called Vision in Motion.

The book's author was yet another László and another Hungarian: László Moholy-Nagy. Nagy taught at the Bauhaus School in Dessau in the 1920s and began his career as professor at the New Bauhaus School of Design in Chicago in 1937. His slogan was: "art and technology – a new unity". In his theoretical writings he called the elevation of art and arts and crafts over mass-produced goods into question. What's more, he stopped signing his own art work and spoke for their mass distribution by way of suitable technologies.

Warhol put Moholy-Nagy's theory into practice with his screen prints of famous American women and "Most Wanted Men" (all of Italian background and by the time of printing given back their status as upstanding citizens). In contrast to other artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Allan Karpow or Jim Dine, he depicted not only "everyday" things -- things which Moholy-Nagy considered to be unworthy of art (his Tomato Soup pictures and wooden Brillo box sculptures were originally installations or parts of installations), but also pop icons: Marilyn shortly after her death, Liz Taylor before her near death, Jackie Kennedy at J.F.K.'s gravesite. He later produced commissioned portraits of celebrities and by the 1980s was earning as much as two million dollars a year for them. It was during this period that he declared that money making was the best art of all, and Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst went on to be his successors in this art form.

When the best art is making money then making little money is a lower art form. In the 1980s, the amount of money that could be made by art -- From Los Angeles to New York to London and eastwards -- gradually dwindled, reaching its zero point at the Iron Curtain. East of that, art (as our late Warhol understood it) came to a complete stop. "The most beautiful thing in Florence is McDonald's," he said in 1975. "Peking and Moscow don't have anything beautiful yet."

From the viewpoint of the West, art behind the Iron Curtain ceased to exist, and the avant-garde behind the Curtain accepted this view. They too found themselves in an art-free zone, even worse, in one wherein art as the West understood and practiced it, was both suppressed and antagonized.

Strangely enough, the people in East equated the Western art of making money with freedom.

They believed that Western art was all about the joys of individual freedom, even when it was only really about decreasing the chances of the many in order to increase the chances of the few to hit the jackpot. Who did end up hitting it was of no concern to the art world; the main thing was that everybody got his chance.

Schooled in the fear of failure, artists to the west of the Iron Curtain (there were, of course, none to the east anymore), exploited themselves in order to finally give up and realize that they just weren't good enough to win the same jackpot that their colleagues of the same rank had

won. For the winner to announce that his winning had been a matter of pure luck was something nobody, especially the loser, was interested in hearing.

That art is not about happiness is something that artists learn in schools and academies.

Art is the fruit of despair, work and marketing and has nothing to do with happiness. A happy artist is an absurd idea and not a good role model for anyone. Nobody would want to buy happiness from an artist, be it in the form of a proclamation or a painting. And how could one possibly grasp the fact that an artist who makes money is just some lucky dog? After all, all rich and happy artists swear in the end to how little their fortune has had any effect on their work.

During the '80s, while the people living behind the Iron Curtain looked to the West where apparently happy artists got to wallow around in their art, those Western artists were in fact frightfully unhappy and saw their unhappiness reflected in the oppressed Easterners. Rich and poor, West and East, were united by the feeling that there was just simply no happiness to be found in art.

With the fall of the Iron Curtain, art enthusiasts in the art-free East, those who pined so badly after the happy freedom to be found in art, would come to see the Western art world for what it was: a place where one had to fight desperately for a mere shot at the jackpot. The joy that seemed to have existed before the fall of the Curtain took on almost mythic proportions now.

Many would have gladly returned but it was too late. Modernity had already seduced and devoured them, and modernity leaves none of its prisoners.

Chapter 3.5: The In-Between World of Happiness In 1966 Richard Farina's novel Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me was published. The title could be a motto for those who, blinded by modernity's headlights and deafened by its loudspeakers, long for a happy moment of silence.

In the shadow of the Iron Curtain, with an almost infinite expanse and the terror of modern history spread out before it, with modern art as little more now than the echo of a wish -- the image of the world fell apart under the brush strokes of Picasso, form starved under the hands of Giacometti, man was reduced to glass, clay and dumbness in the colors of Morandi, and the horror-struck spirit climbed, step-by-step, up Brancusi's endless column to a godless heaven.

Paul Klee, toward the end of his life, painted over a thousand pictures here.

But these works, which seem to be the products of a different time, just go and disappear into that modern mausoleum we call the museum.

This makes their works seem fully out of place. They require no museumification and whoever peeks at one of those museum guides to ascertain their meaning is instantly turned into a zombie, an undead.

Such an evil spirit has allowed his own sight be driven out and stands trembling before that car

wreck of a painting: what if the museum guide is right and this truly is a great work of art?!

That sacred glimpse, that playful moment, in which we find ourselves exposed to something utterly foreign to our own experience, is something that the modern education system often succeeds in driving out of people and what keeps them from being able to enjoy art.

No one's allowed to trust his own eyes anymore, because that could lead him to experience a freedom so beyond anything he's ever encountered before that he might drop dead then and there from happiness instead of living to increase the GNP. In the modern era, one learns to hate oneself for one's undeserved misery, and to carry on in that misery. Modernity has injected the accidental survivors of the Holocaust with guilt for having survived it and prescribes extended work on the GNP as the best possible medicine for that guilt.

To understand and to purchase art, goes the modern adage -- looking has nothing to do with it.

But it's only through looking and not through foreknowledge or reflection that one can experience the joy of freedom in the works of Picasso, Giacometti, Morandi and Brancusi. And the works of László László Révész connote a similar joy.

Chapter 4: How a Hungarian artist Comes into Being -- In Front of the Folding Screen We're still sitting in the cafe on Pincian Hill. The modern has moved on like a heavy thunderstorm, and the sheet lightning of the Postmodern flickers weakly. It is over -- we managed to survive them, though we still tremble a little in our bones and cafe chairs.

When something is over, one mostly wonders how to proceed. One quickly comes to the realization that he must have something to connect to. But must he really? Modernity makes the leap to an earlier era impossible. As the late ugly twin of the Renaissance, it's done its job so diligently that any connection with history is no longer possible except through irony, kitsch or farce.

The romantic pining of a Johann Friedrich Overbeck (a German painter who lived in Rome) remained hopelessly enmeshed in the post-medieval central perspective -- a perspective that Renaissance art used to get the whole world's attention. Pre-Raphaelite or Nazarene, nothing they tried to create could ever get beyond that perspective.

Nobody escapes modernity, not even he who believes to have overcome it. Any attempt to get on top of the modern age lands him in the barbed wire and laughter of its well-educated caretakers. Well, but even if one can't completely escape modernity, isn't it at least possible to evade it? Can a new type of art succeed in getting beyond modernity by assuming the attitude that Robert Pfaller calls "interpassivity"?

For that, one would have to find that space in which interpassivity has become a lifestyle.

Thankfully, this is something that the former Eastern Bloc (that, at least from a Western

perspective, art-free zone) can offer us. It was here that a culture of interpassivity was cultivated over decades in the subtlest of ways. The Hungarian novelist, Péter Eszterházy, describes this in his work, Harmonia Caelestis. That ultimately everything is a lie, even in his novel, he states in his Revised Edition.

In the lie, however, we suddenly feel something again that modernity and its constant cry to "Be a subject, be authentic, stay true to you!" would make us forget, and that is the element of disturbance. The lie allows us to experience the fact that the world isn't as homey as we'd like very much to believe, that strangers with strange intentions are underway. Among these strangers are artists. What they portray has nothing to do with our desires, feelings or selfaffirmations. They work as oddly as the paintings of László László Révész, especially those painted on a folding screen.

The folding screen is a remarkable device, the remnant of an era that was as elegant as it was duplicitous. In the West, modernity has parted with the folding screen and its duplicitous world and replaced it with Playboy and Penthouse. But even these illusions are not enough anymore, for after one has peeked behind the screen and caught a glimpse of naked flesh, he wants to go deeper, he wants to penetrate under the skin.

László László Révész's screen paintings treat us to the privilege of not having to imagine what lies under the skin. Then the screen promises unspeakable things to everyone who stands in front of it -- a head, possibly even a pair of naked arms. He never makes good on his promise but holds to his lie which keeps the viewer at a distance. From the perspective of someone trapped behind the Iron Curtain, he himself looks like a folding screen -- he must indeed make clear that is what the outsider is being shown is nothing but a lie, nothing but the overactive imagination of the viewer.

László László Révész has painted the screen with a scene from a city. The viewer of this scene stands in a room, which looks out on a balcony and the window facades of the buildings opposite. What's especially interesting here is that Révész puts the viewer in an imaginary room.

To satisfy ones voyeuristic desires, one would usually want to look into as opposed to out of a room in which unknown intimacies are taking shape. This would be the case if, for instance, the viewer himself were to be involved in the scene and the scene were to show a young woman slipping on her stockings and a man beside her staring into space.

And this is where the happiness of that art-free era becomes clear, especially if we compare it to those modern flesh market paintings for which Lucian Freud is so famous.

Freud paints flesh on canvas -- nudes that like blood sausages lie tightly packed within the frame. His paintings demonstrate about as much discreetness as that of a butcher and his wares: nice and fat, bloody, clean and every muscle visible. The customer wants to know exactly what he's buying!

For Freud and for his colleague Francis Bacon (who, in contrast to Freud, couldn't draw) a work of art is ultimately nothing more than the flatware used to attract costumers. Like the Renaissance in its time and even when it labels them "autonomous", the modern age sets its artists up for business in the very same market as the butcher. The most important thing in this

business is the ability to attract customers -- the more naked, bloody and spectacular the better.

The artist has to be right up in the customers face at all times, has got to be able to capture his attention.

In László László Révész's pictures, though, we see a very different spirit at work. Clearly inspired by modernism, somewhat resembling the art of the 1920s, one recognizes in them the decades-long break in commercialization. The spirit we see here is definitely that of an art-free land.

We find in them a devout earnestness and reverence for form at work, so that the thing becomes something beyond itself. To quote from Rilke's Duino Elegies: "...As the arrow endures the string, to become, in the gathering out-leap, something more than itself..." -- transl.: J. B. Leishman).

The modern has done away with the old bow-and-arrow game and replaced it with the atom bomb, something so highly complex that only experts can grasp it; something hideous, brutal, efficient and terrifying. There's no more trace of joy or enthusiasm here, no more of that sense of freedom that the arrow feels on leaving the bow; no more of that devout earnestness that once defined the natural relationship between bow and arrow and content and form.

It's only the art-free East and its belated artists that bring this subtle play between revealing and concealing, foreground and background, from that which one sees and that which one only believes to be seeing, back into the spotlight again. These are things that modernity has turned into a formal recipe, something that, in Freud and Bacon's work for instance, finds itself reduced to a humorless check list.

Standing in front of one of Révész's screens, in his imaginary room, the viewer is suddenly seized with the joy of being witness to a scene that he really shouldn't be allowed to see at all.

The screen reminds him that he's not supposed to look.

The picture on the screen then shows him something that refers to a scene that he also shouldn't be allowed to lay eyes on. He's there to witness that moment when some strange joy is beginning to crumble into everyday unhappiness. He senses the freedom of these strangers -- a freedom that isn't his -- but he also feels relief knowing that what so clearly and immediately awaits these strangers, doesn't await him. He is free both from their pleasures and their concerns and enjoys a moment that they can no longer enjoy.

With this screen, Révész has achieved a body of work that is beyond the modern. He shows the viewer that not knowing exactly what's going on but simply being able to see it can be a real blessing. Art that is neither about popular enlightenment nor about self-realization but functions like a reference room. Art that is like a stranger one simply puts up with (and allows in) because he looks nice -- there's no appeal here to the kind of tolerance that overcomes its fear in the face of less attractive strangers. It's very rare to come across something from the art-free zone that reminds us of what art was meant to be: namely, art. Something for which the modern world hasn't a clue anymore.

Chapter 5: Modern Art and Finance Capitalism Among its many detractors, modernity also finds itself to be the hub of complaints from many educated persons: complaints about the fact that its art is unsightly, even ugly or (in terms of completeness) nonexistent. Complaints that they can't understand its products, that they don't fill the need for beauty and diversion but rather demand effort and education from the viewer.

The modern artist demonstrates an unsettling irony with regard to his roll and his work, such as when the Austrian painter Franz Ringel tells us that he was forced into becoming a painter because as a ceramicist he couldn't produce a decent coffee cup. It sounds like a good enough joke, but the question remains as to why we should pay someone like that heaps of money?

What of it, then, when people pay a lot of money for a Ringel painting? Well, first off, one could say that those who hold his works for inferior know better than everyone else, but that simply wouldn't be true. But what these elite are secretly ticked off about is the fact that someone like him makes heaps of money "for such pieces of crap" and that they -- people who really ought to know which kind of aesthetic forms and what kind of art appeals to their society -- missed the mark.

Now the modern world has taken refuge in the theory that its works represent nothing but the complete autonomy of the artist. Ringel corresponds to this idea when he says that he really couldn't give a damn what the others think of his paintings. When they buy a picture from him it is, so to speak, their own damn fault.

In fact, modern artworks represent the stock market mentality of modern society. They're options on future speculative gains. Sometimes, as in Julian Schnabel's case towards the end of the 1980s, this may mean losses for imprudent investments. Usually, however, they flow with the times.

For a while, the Austrian artist Franz West tried to exchange his warrants, i.e. his smaller graphics, in Vienna's "Wunderbar", for a glass of wine -- an offer which many of the bar's guests rejected. Twenty years later, they could have kicked themselves because West has gone on to become one of the highest-paid artists in Europe. Whoever was clever enough to stock up on some of West's warrants, can now sit back and enjoy the benefits of his willingness to take risks.

Modern artwork, then, doesn't represent the nobility, Church, or wealthy bourgeoisie as previous artwork did. Instead, it's a mindset that theoretically anyone can acquire -- that of the stock market broker. We call them members of the financial world in order to differentiate them from the lower earthlings, and they take big risks so that, if worse comes to worse, others will take the blow for them and they can have, like the banker legend J.P. Morgan, experienced curators to look after their artwork for them.

By proclaiming the artist's autonomy, modernity represents the members of a likewise autonomous financial world. It's a world that is constantly on the move, an uninterrupted process of accumulation. As a result of this, artist are not called to create "works of art" but rather to feed the art market's never-ending transaction process with an ever-new series of options, concepts and futures. Whoever removes a work of art from this process to hang it on

the wall of their home is putting the system in danger, for it wouldn't take long for all its earnings to run dry. To prevent this from happening, a never-ending series is pumped out onto the market -- a market, as we all know, where only the financially fittest and boldest win out.

The mentality of the financial world is something that gets on a lot of people's nerves. They don't understand what it's all about; just that it serves to make a few people extraordinarily rich.

Most of the time they don't let it get to them too much, but during a so-called financial crisis they'll suddenly get the uneasy feeling that they have to somehow answer for the mistakes of world financial experts.

This is precisely what annoys them about modern art: it seems to make no sense to them and yet makes a handful of artists exorbitantly wealthy. And although they normally don't lose much sleep over that either -- being the upstanding middle class members of society that they are -they feel obliged at times to donate a bit of their time to modern art. On such occasions they get vexed about the fact that such things, namely flawed works that were brought together out of necessity, are displayed in institutions for whose existence they're forced to pay taxes.

The most successful modern artists recognize which mindsets their art appeals to and endeavor to market them to the appropriate financial representatives. The less successful ones try to glean at least a spiritual profit from their work. As instructors at art institutions, they can be heard selling modernity as an emancipation project for the oppressed. In the case of artists like Damien Hirst (who went from a nobody to millionaire) is this theory correct -- but this is not how it is understood. The ideal art world (as opposed to the one in which successful artists live) wants to bestow freedom and happiness on as many people as possible...usually the small joy of owning a not too expensive work of art. Even a not so high-priced artist must make some kind of living.

The tragedy of the modern artist and theorist is that they help to perpetuate their own oppression. Incapable of grasping the logic of the modern age, they defend a failed sociopolitical concept. Instead of doing away with the poverty of the dispossessed, modern politics relocates them to countries that usually don't have much of a clue about modern problems.

In spite of all modernity's bluster, however, real property conditions in Europe and the USA have managed to remain surprisingly stable. From the beginning of the modern age to today, the latifundia of Henckel-Donnersmarck, Hoyos, and Eszterhรกzy in Carinthia, lower Austria and Burgenland have hardly changed at all. In former Communist countries, pre-modern property conditions are being reestablished and though the gap between the rich and poor in American shrank from 1945 to the 1960s, it has since begun to steadily widen again.

Modernity is unable to change real conditions regardless as to whether these are earnings and acceptable wages or the equal rights of women and men (which expresses itself primarily in equal pay for equal labor). For this reason, it pours all its strength into the symbolic realm and into a fight for every new word and concept of individual freedom, for every chance to promote itself.

And now we find nothing but free individuals who spend their lives in self-promotion. When

everyone listens and no one speaks, we call it instruction. When all speak and no one listens, we call it modern.

"Everyone is an artist," said Joseph Beuys and thus brought the modern controversy to a head.

This enforced the idea that no one needs art anymore (in the sense that the illiterate population of the Middle Ages needed art as a way of explaining philosophical and religious ideas and as a ritual spectacle for the purpose of edification) because everyone is busy producing it.

Even the visitor of a museum gets to be an artist the moment he stands before an unknown work and makes it clear to himself how little it speaks to him and his personal needs because it doesn't gel with his particular concept of art. With the help of some museum guides he then proceeds to work out his own theory about this work that does not gel with his concept of art.

Should anyone tell him that a work of art has nothing to do with himself and his world view, not to mention with the artist's hidden intention, he would be scandalized. Modernity has taught him to reject this as an assault on his rights as an individual. Modernity fights for the autonomy of the individual, the rest it could give a flying fig about.

Chapter 6: Naumann Strikes and RĂŠvĂŠsz Tells In the middle of the Campo del Fiori (the so-called "Flower Market") in Rome, stands the statue of the philosopher Giordano Bruno. He's considered a modern martyr avant la lettre because of the fact that he was burned at the stake there. Had he been a martyr of the Catholic Church, his body parts would have been venerated as relics throughout all its entire domain. But the Church still regards him as an enemy and especially good Catholics vilify his memory and the things that we remember him by.

Modern people find relics (i.e. adorable dead body parts) repulsive. Only the living body deserves adoration. On it they bestow not only the modern counterparts of frankincense and myrrh, but also provide body parts to replace those that are missing. High esteem for body parts is something modern people only allow when it involves the reparation of a body.

Such reparation could be in the form of a future project. That means that bodies or body parts might be kept for future repairs. The receptacles used for this purpose, though reminiscent of old reliquaries, are filled with liquid nitrogen-cooled cylindrical containers in institutions such as the Cryonics Institute in Michigan or that of Alcor in California. It's there that MIT researcher, Marvin Minsky, on the event of his death, will have his body frozen.

Also to be found there is the head of the famous baseball player, Ted Williams. Detached from the rest of his body, it is currently looking forward to a time when it will be thawed and attached to some younger body. One can detect here some easy parallels to the Christian resurrection, by which the bodies of dismembered martyrs rise up from their graves fully intact.

Medieval art depicted dismemberment just as often as it did the resurrection of the scourged body. The goal of this portrayal was to elevate the human soul -- which they held to be the "real" thing -- to those who looked at it.

Modern art, too, has its severed heads -- for instance in the installations of Bruce Naumann (although nobody could confuse them with the ones that are stored away in refrigerated containers waiting for their resurrection). "I give a lot of myself away," says Naumann in an interview in the German weekly, "Die Zeit". "I put something personal in an impersonal room -a museum. (...) I want my art to say something direct and alienating, so that it leaves the visitor either stone cold or swept off his feet. What I like the best is when it catches us completely offguard, like a blow to the back of the neck." (Yes, so the head can then be cryogenized at Alcor!).

Artistic blows to the body are something László László Révész doesn't perform on his audience.

That shrill and non-stop media hype that surrounds a lot of artists and those who report on them is completely foreign to him. His paintings and drawings, even his films and videos, are works of silence.

He portrays people in everyday situations. The pictures aren't charged with some immediate effect in mind, some technique designed to convey a sense of silence. They derive their intensity from the way in which they're depicted. In contrast to Naumann, Révész doesn't let us in very much on myself, thus opening a visual room that makes you feel that you're in another world.

The pictures may make you feel like an outsider or seem downright eery, but of bruising blows to the neck there is no risk.

Also unlike with Naumann, the viewer won't be pestered with the artist's narcissistic desire to utterly and completely captivate him. Naumann wants to pierce through that thin shell of civility that separates people from beasts. This tyrannical intimacy, this ghastly display of every human impulse, has no place in Révész’s work.

Révész's artwork shows us that the shell is not the only thing which separates us from the beasts, that art can be heartening and admirable as well. Even in those pictures and videos that deal with the harrowing experiences of his ancestors, he spares the viewer from Naumannian headbutts. His pictures don't yell, they tell.

And in this respect they resemble the notebooks of Sándor Márai, who in the rage of the battle for Budapest in which blows to the head were the order of the day, describes how lost people felt in that chaos and how he, through the civilized act of writing, was time and time again able to maintain a distance from the events around him. This is the exact opposite of Bruce Naumann's work, which delivers the jaded modern socialite a few swift karate chops to the neck.

Chapter 7: A Sovereign Gesture The Communist regimes in Eastern Europe were adherents of a death cult and thus mummified their living artists. Some of them, such as László László Révész, had the courage to move around anyway, and he was also lucky enough to spend a short time in a summer school in London at the age of 15. In a city that acts as a center of modernity, he found himself fascinated by 18th and 19th century artists such as William Blake, William Turner and the poet and art critic Matthew Arnold.

Back in Hungary he studied under Miklós Erdély. This architect, artist, poet, theorist and filmmaker functioned as a catalyst for the underground Hungarian art world from the 1960s to the early '80s. With his provocative appearances, especially those made right under the nose of Communist authorities, Erdély was hailed as the father of the Hungarian avant-garde movement and was highly admired to by younger artists such as Révész.

From 1975 on, Erdély led three art courses -- "Exercises in Creativity" along with Dóra Maurer and György Galántai in the first year, later the course FAFEJ: "Fantasy-building Exercises", and a course for interdisciplinary thought called "Indigo". It was out of this workshop that in 1976 an art group of the same name, one to which László László Révész would belong, emerged.

Up until 1986, Indigo organized exhibits and group actions. Sometimes the art medium defined the framework for a particular theme. There were exhibits of charcoal drawings, paintings, works on paper and watercolors, and avant-garde actions or experimental films. Other times the lead theme would an abstract concept like weight or avant-garde poetry or a personal experience like "My Best Summer Memory".

At first Indigo's members regarded their exhibitions as collaborative work but by 1980 it started to become more about individual artists presenting their work in unison. One such exhibit was called "The Personal and the Sacred", after a book title by French philosopher Simone Weill.

Weill was a thinker whose work stood somewhat at odds with modernity as can be seen reflected in the sentences: "In science, truth is sacred. In art, beauty is sacred. Beauty and art are always impersonal."

Indigo members responded with photographic work: each photo was placed in a 70 x 100 cm glass frame and the artists placed "personalized" foot mats on the floor below some of the installations.

Erzsébet Ambur shot her photos standing on her head, Bálint Bori displayed pieces of black, gray and white photos taped alongside each other, András Böröcz photographed a mirror with along with the objects on the shelf in front of it, and tile on which a dancing couple had been painted. Mária Czakó portrayed her husband, András Böröcz, and their son, alongside a drawing of the same photo. Dániel Erdély photographed a plastic bowl filled with food and a piece of bread, and beneath the picture placed two pieces of bread reminiscent of the soles of shoes. Miklós Erdély himself didn't photograph anything, choosing instead to refer to Weill in a text. Zoltan Lábas presented 16 photographs of shadows on a wall. In four different photographs, Tivadar Nemesi was shown taking part in a kind of shamanistic ceremony. János

Sugár showed two spotlights which resembled human figures facing each another, and János Szirtes’s picture carried the title: "Our Home is the Forest."

One also finds a photo from László László Révész in this exhibition (although it's not one he took himself) showing things that once inhabited his grandmother's living room.

As with the folding screen, the Indigo exhibition displayed Révész's unique sensibility for the possibilities that open when the artist doesn't push his intentions too far into the foreground.

The artist achieves a sovereign gesture.

First of all, by giving us a "ready-made" photograph, he escapes questions about whether or not photography is really art and thus an appropriate medium for a real artist. And yet he's the first one to raise the question by displaying such a photo, one shot without any artistic intention in mind, at an art exhibit. What, asks the viewer, is a "ready-made" image doing in a show where artists exhibit ones that they've taken themselves? Is it meant to be understood on some kind of commentary on their work or a jab at photography in which an artist would let it be known that it's impossible to really "make" a photo?

Of all the works at the exhibit, Révész's picture (again, one he himself didn't create) was by far the most impersonal, and thus stood above the others -- insofar, that is, as we share Simon Weill's view that art and beauty are impersonal. And if it's the most impersonal, then it also must be the most beautiful, but then it comes closest to Weill's ideal of art.

At the same time, it does also come from a personal place, from the familial sphere of the artist.

By way of a completely impersonal and unfamiliar image, he directs our attention to a very personal story, one that manifests itself not in the people but in the objects surrounding those people. An advertising slogan for Caterpillar shoes reads: "First we shape things, then things shape us."

Is it Révész's grandmother that we see when look at a photo of the objects that once surrounded her? Or does the photo create the memory, in other words the most personal thing that Révész can possess of his grandmother? Is a technical image made up of the most personal things a human being can experience? And just exactly what role does the grandmother's personal history play in all this -- the fact that she was the wife of a well-known Budapest photographer?

Even though the thing Révész chose to hang on the wall at the exhibit was nothing he'd personally created, he was busy doing two things: he was telling us stories and questioning the validity of those very stories. And this is what I call a sovereign gesture: the art of getting, with a seemingly trivial yet elegant movement, to the heart of a situation, while at the same time pulling back from it.

This curious elegance was present from the very beginning in Révész’s work -- perhaps a result of the fact that he only had access to the modern in homeopathic doses. He began his first performances at the age of nineteen. The second one carried the title: "Révész/Rimbaud" (Arthur Rimbaud stopped writing poetry at 21 -- the age that Révész was at the time -- and became a trader, of among other things, weapons). At a celebration of the official Day of Poetry, he appears dressed up as Rimbaud, and in the course of the event removes his costume. None of

the desperate flailing so characteristic of the Viennese Actionists, and nothing tragic or shocking. His government and its regime had provided more than a little blood and terror of their own.

Where the modern age hacks new people into existence with a hammer and sickle, art retreats back into civilization. Where the old stands jadedly on the look-out for new developments, it receives artistic karate chops to the neck. In agricultural and worker societies, bourgeois values are revolutionarily removed. In bourgeois societies, the country bumpkin becomes a symbol of freedom.

The modern age commands its farmers and workers to stay authentic and in no way take up bourgeois customs; modern citizens feel compelled to return to a grass roots, authentic lifestyle.

Modernity dazzles the worker and farmer with the memory of the intimate terror of their cottages, and frightens the bourgeois with the tyranny of intimacy like a long-deserted shed.

László László Révész’s work arose as a form of protest again modernity's forced intimacy, otherwise known as subjectivity. Even when it orients itself on its models, it does fundamentally avoid modern ideology. His work isn't geared toward the endless production of authenticity, but plays with the ambivalence of human life. As long as modernity rules unimpeded, his work will appear out-dated, but the moment it starts to creep whimperingly out of existence, Révész's work will begin to look as good as new again. And this moment is now.

Chapter Eight: The Law vs. Happiness Whoever looks at the artwork of László László Révész will observe that he's inspired by another spirit than the painters of the Leipzig School (and of that DDR defector, Gerhard Richter) whom the West promotes as super-artists.

Contemporary German painting is, above all, German. That makes it an irresistible attraction for rich Anglo-Saxon collectors. A pleasant shiver runs down their spine every time they hear the word "German art". On hearing the word, images from Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will” roll down the screen; U-boats, SS Totenkopf uniforms, Mauser pistols and Königstiger tanks start running through their minds.

"Café Deutschland", in a word, even though Jörg Immendorf's painting of the same name is populated with very different characters. The style and brushwork conjure very concrete associations for the Anglo-Saxon: the bleeding earth, the gaping abyss, and the unspeakable atrocities of a thousand years.

Anselm Kiefer the Arno Breker of Abstract Teutomania helped to create this leaden world spirit -- crouched in a long-forgotten and rubble-filled bunker near Berlin somewhere -- the most powerful historical German monument. From its smoke to its mirrors, the art of the contemporary German artist consists of serving up such associations convincingly.

Where did that come from? You ask yourself in amazement, especially when you compare these gloomy clichés with the elegant and fragile creations of László László Révész.

Probably from the usual suspect: Immanuel Kant. He was, of course, no more of a Nazi avant la lettre than contemporary German artists are, and yet his philosophical works exhibit the same tendency toward boring monumentality as theirs do. Although there are also silent masters among them -- the Lichtenbergs of art, so to speak -- who don't flaunt their greatness with colossal works, the spotlight tends to be directed on those who have Kant in their hearts and German history in their fingertips.

Kant goes with imperatives as Koelsch goes with schnapps. "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law," reads one of the categorical imperatives of the great thinker. It makes you wish that the maxim itself were made into a universal law. "Look, over there, oh no, look, it's a man from Germany," sings Rheinhard May. It wouldn't be half so bad if the German spirit would see that its pious seriousness could also mean playful fun. It has to do with experiencing more happiness, with realizing that holiness is neither field-gray nor moss-green and that whoever swears that he's about to cross his heart or hope to die should mean a gingerbread heart. Nietzsche tried to give the Germans a picture of holiness but they mistook it for categorical impertinence.

And so we turn back with awe (not be confused with German angst) to László László Révész.

A person acts with reverence when he's afraid of showing fear because he fears for his honor.

He strikes a certain pose for his superior in order to pay him tribute. This is an entirely different disposition than the one from which Kant demanded laws.

The devout person, not compelled by any law, shows his reverence to strangers simply because that's part of his nature and he deems it right.

And one sees reverence at work in the art of László László Révész. It strikes no German chords, rather one can hear Baruch Spinoza whisper: "Every man, from the laws of his own nature, necessarily seeks or avoids what he judges to be good or evil," (transl.: Samuel Shirley).

Spinoza explains this to be a kind of drive which constitutes human nature. "Nobody can desire to be happy, to do well and to live well without at the same time desiring to be, to do, and to live; that is, actually to exist," (transl.: Samuel Shirley). This man from Amsterdam is writing about happiness -- the joy of doing, the happiness of a good life. Nothing about laws here.

And the man from Germany just shakes his head. "Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large part of mankind gladly remain minors all their lives, long after nature has freed them from external guidance... It is so comfortable to be a minor," (transl.: Mary C. Smith), scolds Kant. All those lazy dogs care about is their own happiness, instead of setting a good example for us and thus giving mankind laws that are so solid and reliable as to...aw, forget it!

László László Révész's pictures show us people who -- even if they are not sitting happily behind the steering wheel of the car -- are at least on their way to their happiness. Like the three

women clad in furs and fine attire, something that refers unequivocally back to a more elegant era. At the same time, however, Révész’s paintings and videos also transmit the sad knowledge that these are only illusions, and this again is the sign of a sophisticated artist.

In Révész and in Révész's work, sadness over the fact that beauty is only an illusion is free from every hint of nostalgia. At the same time, he insists that beauty is crucial in art for the very reason that it is an illusion. German artists approach their work as if, along with Kant, they believed that by a sheer effort of will they can lay down the laws of art. To this Révész only shrugs. His works insist that art can never become law, but that it must go on being created (and with devout earnestness, which is nothing really but a game of self-forgetfulness) in order to capture our fleeting moments of happiness.

Chapter Nine: Idiot Art "The criticism of digitalization goes hand in hand with the theme of photography's demise," wrote the German cultural philosopher, Heinz-Norbert Jocks in "Kunstforum" magazine. Some 150 years later, photography and film are right back where they started. Once a mere technical procedure that gave us a picture of the world without human intervention, it has once again become synonymous with painting.

With the exception of the self-proclaimed "purists", there's not a photographer left who doesn't remaster his photos on the computer or, to be more exact, paint with pixels. The most successful film in history to date, "Avatar" is by and large a computer-generated motion painting. Whoever stands before a billboard no longer sees a photographed face but a computer-produced portrait in the fine arts tradition. Who, at the end of the age of its technical reproducibility, would think to write an article about art?

That artwork still lends itself to technical reproduction is in no way a bad thing -- that is, if we're not still speaking of photography or film in the classic sense: the computer is also not an academic painter. Nevertheless, one can't seem to shake the feeling that something has come to an end; not the end of technology, which modernity uses to separate itself from all that went before it, but rather the belief that technology can still open doors to other artistic dimensions.

While we talk on Pincian Hill, an exhibition of landscape paintings by young Central Europe women is taking place in one of the city's palaces. At this show, which is curated by László László Révész and at which only paintings are to be found, we find some works that strongly resemble photographs. And even among those that are more painterly, which were, in other words, composed more freely, reveal how much painting has learned to copy the technical accuracy of the photograph. Today's painters have camera eyes. They show landscapes in a way that would not have been conceivable without the whole technical apparatus from airplanes and cars to the multimedia. But what looks like a victory for modernity turns out to be something different, something new.

These young women artists insist that what we see portrayed here is their inner lives, yet no viewer could possibly ever deduct this: all he sees is a piece of landscape. In this we see the influence of the romantic painter, Caspar David Friedrich, whose motto was to paint what you

see inside or, put another way, to refrain from painting what you see in front of you. In contrast to Friedrich, though, these youth paint like a camera. It means that the real intention of any one of their works is to not copy the camera. One can look at it with pleasure and see something comprehensible, but it won't give you any insight into what the painter was really trying to paint. Whoever thinks of it as a real landscape painting is on the wrong track although from an objective standpoint, from that of an observer, he's probably right.

It is indeed a landscape that one sees, even when the artist flat-out denies this. This is where modernity starts orbiting around itself. The artwork (that authentic expression of the self that the viewer can decipher by way of conclusions about artistic or political discourse) suddenly, without irony, appears as mimesis, as a photographic copy in the tradition of a particular artistic genre (landscape painting), only to be advertised as a very personal expression of her inner life.

If one were to use the term "Idiot" in the old Greek sense of the word -- that is, to mean a private person (in this case, a woman) -- then we could speak here of an "idiot art". This type of art pertains to nothing but the private sphere of its creator, regardless of how objective it may appear.

To call postmodern art idiocy would be to sound derogatory, offensive and misleading. But it would be good to stay with this idea for a moment because it is a very loaded one and because it touches on what László László Révész brings to expression in his work, however clever and marked his is by a diligent devotion to the study of art.

The idiot is an irritating figure as long as he doesn't display any real signs of mental illness. We not talking here about the way we use the word to describe a neighbor who says or does something stupid. We're not talking about a clinical case here either.

In the word "idiot" lies our amazement about the fact that somebody means, says, or does something totally different from that which we consider to be appropriate. He undermines rather than exceeds our expectations. Where the modern artist alludes to intellectual acuity with his discourse-oriented work and thereby often causes disturbance, the idiot shoots for the soul and gets astonishment.

The modern artist shows us a splotch of paint that is supposed to allude to a concept or a discourse that can explain her work to me, the viewer. But being ignorant of both the concept and the discourse, I suddenly start to feel intimidated and tell myself that I know nothing whatsoever about modern art.

The "idiots" tell me (and everyone else who looks at it) that the painting I'm standing in front of -- one I clearly recognize to be a landscape painting -- is in fact no landscape painting at all but an expression of their souls. Bewildered, I start to think that these ladies are not all there. I understand their work as little as modern art. But it's only my attitude towards the two that differs: in the first case, I feel intimidated by the arrogance of modern artists, in the other I feel superior to the childish assertion of the idiot artist. And they put me in that position of superiority! Intellectually I am able to rise above their assertion, but what good will it do me?

If I don't regard this idiocy condescendingly as an inferior form of artistic expression but rather as an invitation to examine my world view, then the world suddenly takes on a different aspect.

I know I'm not supposed to take instructions from one wiser than me, and yet somebody teaches me not to rely solely on my eyes but to ask what is actually behind the work. A totally different kind of loss of trust is at work here than that produced by modern art.

The cool intelligence of the modern -- whose artists often place the burden of their intellectual performance on their interpreters and public -- carries the legacy of the Enlightenment in itself, a legacy that many former students have bad memories about. Idiot art's surprising ability to soul see, nevertheless, achieves one of the Enlightenment's goals: the amendment of a certain prejudice ("one knows what one sees") without coming off pedantic. And besides there's absolutely nothing I can learn here; the artist's soul is her own private affair. The only thing I can do is changing my imagination. It's amazing to think of all the things idiot art is capable of.

Now that the concept or at least the modus operandi of idiot art has been made clear, we can let go of the term now and maybe even a better one will even be found for it. It is in this framework, in any case, that the art of László László Révész takes place. Its strength is not in the intellectual challenge it poses on its viewers, but in its power to change their way of seeing.

A first encounter with his work might give you a light shock. Who would have thought a living artist could still paint like an old master without coming off old-fashioned, i.e. unintentionally odd? One can imagine the paintings of László László Révész in a classical art museum without being overly noticeable there.

His paintings would, of course, stand out because they neither depict the Old World nor nostalgically attempt to duplicate it. They are after the modern and yet far beyond it, in that realm that I had described previously with a very unbecoming word because no better one sprung to mind. And so for the time being I'll stick to my term "beyond modernity" because it hints at Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil. And it's from this aspect of "beyond" that we want to observe László László Révész's art.

Chapter 10: At the dawn of an Unnamed Era "As the Mannerists toiled in the twilight of the Renaissance, so do we in relation to the modern age — the word “modern” having been torn from its roots to signify things that loom behind us," wrote Peter Schjeldahl, one of the most important art critics of our time, in The New Yorker.

"The old verdicts (conventional disdain of Mannerist art by art historians) suggest a proactive condemnation – of our own era – which, for all we know, future generations may come to endorse. Meanwhile, we are doing the best we can in the twenty-first century, things being as they are...”

A last glimmer of modernity dawns on Pincio: a weak light dashed against a gray sky. László László Révész points to this in "My Sky, My Sixties", the name of one of his former exhibits, which was filled with large drawings and not so large paintings.

"My Sky," he calls it. Why not "heaven"? For many in the West the sixties are (were), after all, a kind of heaven on earth, no? Oh, yeah, the East was godless, didn't have a heaven. At best one raised his eyes to the stars in a mostly black and empty universe. It's was also a cold one, no summer of love, the summer of love was "over there" in the West. It was hell, man: no jeans, Back in the USSR, and "no one bogart the joint".

Sure, the classic modernists in the West shook their heads over the sixties people at first, but they learned quickly (one is, of course, modern). And whoever showed reluctance, was denying a naked truth. On April 22, 1969, in a lecture hall at Frankfurt University, three female students surrounded the philosopher Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno. They showered him with flowers, kissed him on the cheek and attacked him with their bare breasts until he fled the room. Modern upon modern: one is in heaven. Révész has only a vague conception of the sky. It's a place where people have to be in space suits, where modern philosophers are no longer threatened by exposed female breasts. His exhibition showed what kinds of perspectives the Iron Curtain shut out.

Probably the most noteworthy of the collection is a drawing 1/12 meters high and 4 meters wide entitled "Archives Pictures 6". In the foreground we see two astronauts (maybe even cosmonauts) about to shake hands with each other. They are not in space, as would have naturally assumed, but standing before a giant machine with thick pipes which are more reminiscent of agriculture than they are of space travel. In the background we see stacks of wooden crates, barrels, and a space capsule that is obviously too small to accommodate the astronauts.

The first assumption you make is that this is Hungary's space program. It shows ambition but one that doesn't seem to be able to rise above a beet field.

At the exhibit are a number of other scenes also having to do with space. "Archives Pictures 2" shows three astronauts on a spacewalk somewhere near Saturn, and it recalls Kubrik's 2001 A Space Odyssey". If this is Révész's true recollection of the '60s, we all really ought to take care how we remember things.

Let's turn again to the previous picture, the one with the astronauts in the field. It's a good illustration of just how fundamentally the art of László László Révész differs from an artist from the breast-swinging modern side of town.

From what theory and from what perspective should one approach these pictures of 1960's space euphoria? They all seem to fail because, on the one hand, they are far too serious to allow for an ironic interpretation, and on the other too funny to contain a political message. Whatever psychoanalysis, critical theory, structuralism or deconstructivism could say on the topic wouldn't be worth the paper it was written on.

This work operates in a fine and elegant way according to that cultural code that our modernity -- setting its critical eye on this and that detail, pushing this and that detail to the foreground -roots out. In modernity, everything "superfluous" is swept out of view and we're referred to a certain message or context within which modern art is supposed to be read.

Révész's picture clearly plays on such a context (space travel, political competition among the systems, the triumph of technology and reconciliation, Velasquez's "The Surrender of Breda", and so on and so forth) and then pulls back. There's no context here that would really work.

The thing works according to its own logic, gives us the code by which we can read it but without explicitly telling us that the meaning lies elsewhere. To use a long-neglected term that modernity has brought back into use, we'll call this "sophistication".

Sophistication, as it existed before the First World War and especially in Eastern Europe, came about through interplay of all relevant forces, none of which were allowed to push their way too excessively into the foreground. They formed a coherent whole in which the parts were related -- not in a slavish way but through a self-willed independence. And it was only through their sophisticated arrangement that they could give the impression of being an ensemble.

A veil, like a varnish, hangs over all the pictures at the "My Sky" exhibition, regardless of whether they're paintings or drawings. Here is yet another of those now banned cultural assets and in Révész's work it recaptures the unusual power it once had, one fed not by nostalgia but by an understanding of an art beyond modernity.

The future is not a linear continuation of the present and its art can no longer be called post- or super-modern. Is it the art of the future or an art without a name? Is it possible to create a whole new age of art from mere fragments?

Why not? A name is only important if the mail is specifically addressed to you (i.e. with regard to a draft or a court summons). Whoever has a number in one of our many computer systems, can always be reached. Art can be created with anything, from anywhere on earth (or the universe for that matter) and get broadcast over electronic media to a virtual society where everyone has access at will. The art of the 21st Century is the online computer game -- nothing but a heap of breaks in tabu, media, and narration.

Those astronauts in the field, then, point not to the past but to the future. Either the world is so polluted now that it can only practice agriculture in a space suit, and the two astronauts are congratulating each other on a good harvest, or they're working on another planet and are greeting each other to a communal workday. Or they're performing a reenactment of the moon landing, like people today dress up on weekends as Confederate soldiers from the Civil War, circa 1863. Or they're acting out a virtual online game in reality. Then again, maybe the whole thing is really just a World-of-Warcraft scene with a couple of odd characters.

It's odd that an artist looking back at his past behind the Iron Curtain, depicts his memories as a glimpse into the future. With its strangely broken colors and brushstrokes, the painting appears to come from an era that lies simultaneously before and after -- in other words, beyond -modernity.

Now no one expects an artist to be able to read the future, merely to document the status quo and, if necessary, tell us something important about the past. It is Révész's peculiar luck (and what sets his art at the beginning of an unnamed era) that digging into his memories he comes out with something that is totally new. And this is despite the fact that it looks old, at least older than anything he could have personally experienced.

"When the sun of culture sinks low, even dwarfs will cast shadows," an advocate of modernity, the writer Karl Kraus, tells us. But what happens when a culture like ours has already sunk as low as it will go? Then one can't decipher shadows from the rest of the darkness; he confuses forwards and backwards, stumbles over old roots, startles at dwarfs and runs heedlessly past giants. In a word, one makes oneself at home in Mannerism. A small number of us, however, take the grave dawn that is coming seriously. And it is a grave thing, as gray as the veil-like drawings of László László Révész.

Chapter 11: The End of Surprise Toys Pablo Picasso claimed that as a child he drew like Raphael and from that time on his goal was to draw like a child. This sentence, whether it truly came from Picasso or not, clearly demonstrates the glitz, wretchedness and lies of modernity.

Let's start with the lie. That Picasso as a child drew like Raphael means that little Pablo already possessed all the artistic ability of a grown Raphael. This statement couldn't possibly be true because even Raphael the child couldn't draw like Raphael the adult. Years of practice were required for that. It was through years of practice that the talented kid evolved into the Master Raphael, an "art figure" whose authenticity got so overdeveloped (in other words, refined) during the process of training that it became almost impossible to decide where the original Raphael started and the sophisticated one ended.

This, as Picasso's sentence demonstrates, is an abomination to the modern. What modernity wants is radical: to go all the way back to its roots, to the child. A critic of modernity, the Renaissance expert Ernst H. Gombrich, complained that Picasso couldn't resist "the lure of regression".

The modern age views Gombrich's verdict as nothing more than a sign of cowardice -- an unwillingness to trust something that lacks the safety guards of education, upbringing, manners and reason. The child is unspoiled, the very essence of authenticity -- modernity seizes on this idea. Hence Picasso's defiant proclamation: "I-want-to-draw-like-a-child!" That sounds pretty modest at first, doesn't it? Until we learn that modesty is just a veneer, a veneer in whose glow modernity basks itself.

Modesty, as the philosopher Herbert Hrachovec puts it, is now a form of greed. Greed for the uncultured authenticity of a person, greed for the genius beneath the rubble of bourgeois culture and education. The raw, bloody, writhing and uncontrollable essence as opposed to a wellbalanced existence is the aim of all modern art endeavors. Which explains the sorry condition of formative establishments like art schools and academies, which have degenerated into poser institutions of childish non-art.

Modernity's stubborn and childish gesture in the face of previous generations surely undergoes an existential appreciation in value due to the nameless terror that it spreads among people in its various political forms. The blood that it sheds is real and abundant, it's power to destroy almost divine.

Every childish gesture of the modern artist takes place before the barbed wire of concentration and extermination camps; in every one of its still so wannabe primitive expressions, rises the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb. Through its repeated depiction of existential horrors, wannabe childish modern art achieves its seriousness.

It can be a little annoying at times, too, like the book Learning from Las Vegas, a kind of source text for postmodernism written by architects Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi in 1972.

The goal of postmodernism is to expurgate all existential seriousness from art; its protagonists and their public want to be able to enjoy its childish behavior undisturbed. Postmodernism is Picassoian infantility in its purest form.

The most famous grandmasters of this art form are Jeff Koons, Olafur Eliasson and Damien Hirst. Their infantilism has as much of an impact on their artistic development as it does on their admirers. Long have they, like their lesser-known colleagues, given up all craftsman-like activities to have more time to play with their thoughts which, by necessity (then they play this way on purpose), become more and more childish as time goes on. It's into this infantilzation system that they draw their public, which on seeing their work feels reinforced in its own childhood nostalgia. And despite the fact that it's not even their own childhood being depicted here but one put together by a skilled artist.

When the art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, foresees the coming generations' condemnation of the current art era, he must also know what the basis of that conviction is and what role his own work plays in it: we treat art production like a never-ending line-up of surprise toys.

Every exhibition now counts as a one-of-a-kind event. Nothing scares off the contemporary art world more than repetition. "Repetition," writes the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, "is the reality and seriousness of existence." And that's something that most art circles wish to hear nothing about. Koons, Hirst, Eliasson and their followers mystify us with a never-ending procession of children's birthday gifts. We stand before these colorful surprises with bright eyes and open mouths, waiting to get a peek at an aesthetic experience that will momentarily help us forget the tiring complexities of this life, waiting to glimpse an art that finally -- through its childish stubbornness -- dares to stand up and defy reality.

Artists furnish ideas and hand them over to skilled craftsmen. "The principle of craft," writes Sloterdijk, "is based on the coincidence of production and practice. (...) Whoever dismisses craftsmen, has no business talking about heroes either. (...) Whoever defends craftsmanship ipso facto comes to the defense of repetitive learning in all its slowness and lack of originality.

Such a gesture requires that one issue repetition -- so often slandered by the modern age -- a new badge of honor. Whoever attempts this, however, must demonstrate the compatibility between the repetitive-mechanical and the personal-spontaneous -- an undertaking that leads straight to the praise of embodied memory and to what Nietzsche calls "incorporation" or what we, along with Ravaisson, may call the system of acquired skills." Sloterdijk complains of "a plague of aesthetic genius afflicting entire populations of artists who are everything but child prodigies but use that as a way out of having to practice a craft."

Hero-worship and with it, a high regard for craftsmanship is characteristic neither of the modern nor the postmodern. Both work for the de-theorization of the world in favor of the impersonal --

of socks, underwear, excrement and ideas: in short, of the elevation of the banal in art. The most appalling thing about Beuys' claim that everybody is an artist is that it gets taken so seriously.

So many feel the invitation to cook up a feast for the eyes or bring their own surprise toy.

Whoever has taken part in one of these children's birthday parties, however, knows just how uniform the surprises become with time. Only the most child-like of minds can still be wowed by the third Koons or Eliasson exhibit.

I think that the path from modernity's child-like desire to postmodern infantilism has been pretty well covered; it's time now to make a clean break. And it's here that we discover the art of László László Révész.

His art surprises us first by the fact that it lacks every aspect of childishness, even in those works -- be they paintings, drawings or videos -- specifically dealing with his childhood. They stand out from the others precisely because they look adult.

In contrast to the storm of regression at large on the current art scene, the man maintains a sophisticated authenticity. It doesn't matter who the actual László is. His (assumed) double name points to the fact that there is no one authentic László, just one he's split in two. If Nietzsche was right and the style is the man then Révész's two first names tell us that no so-called real people can be determined from his work. The László from the Mount of the Elite in Buda becomes a figure of art, and the figure of art finds itself limited once again by the László from the Mount of the Elite in Buda and thereby determined.

It almost seems like an ironic gesture when the artist -- through some extravagant gesture like doubling his name -- can disappear from his art. One can't decide any longer how to connect a piece of art with a name. But by doing this, the artist shows us the way in which we're supposed to interpret his work: we must look to the work for answers. In it you find craftsmanship and practice, repetition and reality: the seriousness of life.

One would assume that someone with Révész's history of reality and seriousness would look to art for a cheerful way out. But just the opposite turns out to be true: with an almost unsettling persistence, Révész reveals to us his "individual embodied memory".

His efforts on finding a form (not in the modern sense of a "formal solution", and certainly not by way of postmodern items) furnish the viewer with a surplus of information that makes art attractive in the first place. Révész's work allows us to track a story, though one that is as complex as life itself and forces the viewer to live with the fact that he will be reading his own story into it. These works provide adequate reference material -- one can piece the story together without having to rely on external information.

A work that is self-contained can often be impossibly abstract. It's strange to think that abstraction was once considered a major breakthrough for art, especially when the bulk of abstraction today is sick with the "plague of aesthetic genius". The breakthrough obviously provided no permanent foundation for further developments.

Abstract expressionist paintings (the equivalent of pictorial muscle flexing) now serve as ornaments in the houses of the rich or in museums and are dimly lit (Rothko's glaze can’t suffer

light any longer). These muscle-bound works now -- at a time when representational art is put on megaboards and for all advertising purposes blown up to the size of houses -- only survive as extracts from a concrete presentation. Contemporary media has turned abstraction into cute design environments in advertorials and furniture catalogues -- even a De Kooning doesn't stand a chance anymore, and Rothko's paintings serve their time as upholstery fabric or wallpaper for decorous Porsche owners.

Révész's work, for the time being, has been spared such a fate. Someone (someone with a trained eye for the abstract, someone who would make certain it went with the sofa cover) would hardly think of hanging one of his paintings on the wall, and that's even if didn't contain the kinds of messages which could spoil a person's appetite. If one does decide to hang it up, it will only be because he's bored and wants to tell himself stories.

Concrete representation resists being marketed -- as the visual equivalent of department store music or the white noise of electronic media -- better than abstract art does. Technically robust and with a story to tell the viewer, Révész's work opens up the way for a new era in art.

Hopefully one in which surprise toys will be only get passed out to the kids.

Chapter 12: In front of an Empty Arena We stood up. Having come to a lookout point, our gazes fall on a twilit Rome under a November sky. It's all very picturesque.

And yet, here again, we've been tricked. The old ateliers in the Via Margutta, below Pincio, no longer house artists. In the galleries, abstract pleasantries pander to the good graces of the public. Among the guests at the opening, at best only a handful of zealous young women gaze around in wonder at the line-up of surprise toys. The rest of the crowd stands around chatting like adults at kids' birthday parties about weather, women, and world.

"When the sense for wonder gives way to the sense for wonderful," writes Sloterdijk, "modern 'culture' is born. (...) On the eve of the wonderful the society of the spectacle makes its debut."

This Rome that lies at our feet is good example of this. Whoever, like Sloterdijk, regards museums as "semantic state banks", stands on the Pincio and feels like he's standing before a kind of world bank of art: teeming with bad credit, dizzying options and futures, and a heap of gold. It's timeworn and must constantly be scrubbed clean, a process that consumes all or most of the city's energy.

These cleaning activities themselves are staged as spectacular events. Down the hill, near the town hall and through a shop window, one can make out a giant Caravaggio being restored right under the eyes of the passersby.

With the picturesque gone from its restorations, Rome has turned itself into one of her own cleanly-executed paintings, one of those "living paintings" made by her contemporary art staff to resemble old ones. With almost every historic trace of usage erased from them, these colorfully renovated facades look like a Legoland of yesterday...and yesterday wasn't really even that long ago.

Rome sparkles for her international tourists, who come here to take up cheaply woven designer clothes and personal souvenir photos of the Coliseum. "What appears to be a vanity fair is actually a state treasury of prestige and excellence -- the nucleus of a new economy of cultural value," writes Sloterdijk referring to museums (but then what is Rome if not a museum?). "The fact that a secular collection can compete in rank with that of the Church treasury speaks for the attractiveness of the new value system."

In short, the word is tourist money. Rome cleans up its act in order to attract better customers -i.e., those so very culturally-interested "post-materialists", i.e., those who have everything and yet still never have enough.

Even when modernity experienced the initiation of its own fame through the crowning of Petrarch as poet laureate on April 6, 1341 -- the praise of modern-day Rome is only there for the benefit of the tourists. That childish form of travel, in which one dresses a foreign town in his own fantasies. Picturesque Rome has turned into a Potemkin village for dollar-a-day charter flight travelers. And wherever the tourist retinue goes we find freshly painted facades.

We turn away: László László Révész wants to show me an old Amphitheater on Pincio.

On our way there we pass the marble stele of modern martyrs killed for their enthusiasm over an Italian nation-state. "Martiri": the word sounds especially perverse in view of the present Italian State, one in which female ministers' preferences for male ministers immediately becomes a matter of public concern.

It's obvious that modernity has so corrupted the term martyrdom (through Islamic self- and mass murders, i.e. suicide bombings) that it can even be tweaked to mean the opposite of what it originally did: to be killed for God. While we pace up and down this parade of martyrs, I think about how Révész deals in his art with the martyrdom of his ancestors. There's none of that escape into bombastic abstraction or the uplifting of souls via large cement blocks of "eternal memory", but rather a quiet handcrafted working out of his memories. Minus the Chagallian kitsch, there's something of Chagall's schtetls in his narrative portrayal.

After Auschwitz, one more poems could be written, wrote the philosopher, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno. But since everything goes on in life, even the writing of poetry, one can either write this sentence off as nonsense or interpret it another way. Révész's work provides a way to this "other interpretation" -- one that is different from that which novelists attempt to install in us with their fictional storytelling.

The Russian author and concentration camp survivor, Warlam Schalamow, refers to this when he writes that the novel is dead and the task of today's writer is to draft documents. They demand the highest precision of language and presentation of facts (since life is still, as always, a matter of life and death). Révész's pictures are similar to documents in a way as they are not pathetic or critical portrayals of his memories or of everyday Hungary. After looking at several of these, one comes to recognize the style of an artist that through constant repetition has managed to achieve a peculiar beauty and a narrative density.

His modus operandi is not to retreat into some pre-modern ivory tower from which he can observe our crazy human race from a safe distance. Instead it's a come-along-for-the-ride trueto-life mode of being. Accordingly, it's not simply a different and better art world that he shows us. No, it's the world -- the one he lives in -- that he shows us better through his art.

In doing so, he rejects the gaudy metaphysics of the abysmal that come through in so many of the paintings from the form Eastern Bloc, or the clever attempts at world consumption we see in Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexander Vinogradov, or the hide-and-go-seek of Neo Rauch.

Révész's pictures captivate us by their elegantly muted colors, which evoke a wistfulness for splendid festivities beyond that of contemporary glam pop. The women in his pictures wear furs, whereas the ladies of our society would rather parade their smooth bare skin at special events.

In the twilight in which we seek out the amphitheater, the atmosphere is a little milder. Modern and postmodern appear in a softly transfigured light. What the heck, even modern and postmodern artists must carry their finely colored skins off to market. And, like their predecessors, they too will tormented by ignorant clients, fall victims to disregard and prejudice, and long to be respected and regarded for their work alone. A lil' money couldn't hurt either.

Just as the brightest talents go to Hollywood in hopes of finding fortune and fame, new possibilities, especially financial ones, are opening up for artists with the gradual establishment of the new art form of the 21st Century: the online computer game. Why, then, this weighing of the was, is and will be of art?

Finally, art itself continually avoids such distinctions and challenges anyone interested to a hare and hedgehog race. The panting hare pushes on, always thinking he's about to reach the appointed spot ahead of the hedgehog, only to find his enemy already standing there, grinning smugly. To outsmart the hedgehog (meaning art) is something nobody has ever yet succeeded in doing. It's better when one just settles down in a particular spot and gets down to work; at the very least, it will create a fixed point for the other hedgehogs.

After some time of searching (I've long given up even thinking about but László doesn't give up) we actually arrive at the old amphitheater. That was a small triumph in itself and the structure is nice to look at. Here is where life and death battles were fought long ago, but the now empty oval clearly suits our modern and minimalistic taste better; we're glad there's no longer a need for bloody spectacles here.

Perhaps this is a sign that the really tough battles of art too are now fought elsewhere, maybe even in a virtual Rome where World of Warcraft prevails and the visual worlds of future online artists are presently being shaped.

Whoever wishes to compete as a traditional artist in today's world is fighting a losing battle.

Armed with some pretty outdated equipment, he climbs into an arena where lightning-fast super weapons bore (as in tire) their bearers to death (although this doesn't make any difference, because other characters in the game will slip in to replace them: their avatars live on in their place).

Whoever, like artist Erwin Wurm with his one-minute sculptures, captures the Zeitgeist, cannot look at all as fast as they are absorbed by the electronic media, spun around, and spat out. It is not the artist's fault, but merely the fate of every work that can't withstand such applications.

Make no mistake, the new art form of online computer games will succeed where all "new" mediums (photography, film, and TV) have failed until now: to absorb art. In contrast to these -- which after their brief era would be conquered by painting (and now electronic painting) again -- online gaming won't substitute painting but rather incorporate into its system.

Besides being a lot of other things in addition, the design of online games is also that of painting. In the future, one will have to search as laboriously for the "analog" painting as we did for the amphitheater on Pincio Hill. This is in spite of the fact (one which I hope has become clear to the reader) that a difference between painting and that "plague of aesthetic genius" which ruins our public buildings, our apartments and our taste, exists.

Remarkably, it's works such as those of László László Révész's that will remain beside these online games. They satisfy, on another level, the same needs as online games by telling ambiguous stories in which the viewer must assert himself.

Of course, no cursor is needed to get you over cracks in the story; one can simply trust his eyes and thoughts to get him through. And that demands (as the term "trust" implies) courage. Then like in an online game, there's no way of knowing for sure what is happening, what's wrong or right, where the exit is, or what leads to the next level.

The combatants in the arena on Pincio fight with brutal earnestness for their art and practice, practice, practice because it is after all their technical skills that will decide their fates. In contrast to the art world, this is how the artist views the world: it's about everything and his own existence. And that's something that can be observed in László László Révész's body of work.

The present baffles us with its changed arena: instead of warriors, show-offs appear and those who, through nice gestures, distract the audience from the fact that everything at every moment has to do with its existence. It's very good then when someone like Révész holds up for us those essential things that memory retains -- something, we learn, that doesn't necessarily always have to be blood-stained or knife-sharp.

It's almost dark now and we leave the arena. There's still a lot more to be said about László László Révész but my wife is waiting for me below, at the foot of Pincio Hill, and I'm too late as it is. That's a bad omen that seems to point to the fact that I'm late for everything the I undertake.

A revolution has long been underway, a kind of revolution which those marching Communists (now strolling along the Corso past the fashion boutiques) have hardly any inkling. On the job market, a vast number of us men wake up to find ourselves in an inferior position: women now predominantly occupy future-oriented jobs and this is true of the academies and universities as well. A new history is underway -- the history of women. What that means for art I haven't the faintest idea, only the suspicion that László László Révész's art will work just fine there as well.