Zsigmond KÁROLYI | OLDNEW 1975–2015 by Paksi Képtár

ZSIGMOND KÁROLYI OLDNEW 1975–2015

Z SIGMOND KÁROLY I Old new 1975–2015

PAKSI KÉPTÁR | 2015

DEZ SŐ TA N DOR I

Invariables for Subjects (My Zsigmond Károlyi E.K.G)

Man of heart Beats life away from himself. („I beat myself off I beat away.”) * I’m not the nearest. Only the nearer. Beat, Conceptual contras: to the minimalistic Matters not where I’m neither going;

Nor I beat. There is N.-emes N.-agy Á.-nes:”…growing heart-beat spaces”. *

There is Gertrude Stein: Conceptual geometrics rose: A rose: a rose = a rose There was: a rose is a rose… etc. Meant to me is wider this way. My contra-plus: “The subject is not An absolute anything: need not to be complicated it any further.” Spindled Mosaic laying in our good self: my writing. This much apperception – in the Heraclitus eternal-beating!must be (E.K.G.) allowed

to ourselves. That Herac is always different? This=that Herac is always color-shaped Heroic battle. until silence * “What is already finished in the head of the artist, it only needs to be made.” (Based on Zsigmond Károlyi’s basic bases appr. Imre Bak.) SUCH water of Heraclitus is the otherness of the universal inequality, = equality ~=

Heraclitus is the identity of this equality ~= This is that („Among the rampant structures it breaks – E.K.G. – a path to himself.”)

Color-studies (Some comes to my mind.) (What is.) (In my mind.)

* Ah, the geometric concept of imagination! (About Zsigmond Based on Bak). Ah, the imagined conceptuality of geomatry! (sic!) Ah, the imagined concept of geometry! Dropp upwards? Away downwards? Forget downwards? (appr.) as a cubic: „half of it”. Half ~= wards.

The half of anything: is always: wards! (And that is: backwards) * Yes, let’s insist!

Multiply The never needed concept is the eternal one! „At least minimally insist on the structural space of sensual picture-surface.” (by Imra Bak: very much based on Zsigmond Károlyi.) * Listen up: neither Duchamp nor Artaud knows imperativus. Next to Erdély Miklós: my good self. (Listen up.) Multiply the eternal one with the ephemeral one!! Multiply it! Is it good to be alone by myself? Non-thematically? Is it good to be alone by my good self? Constructively, Circa, etc. See. below here. * Ah, painting a house “is theoretic”. Absolute constructivist (or rather conceptualist, sorry.) “The woods from the trees”. IF YOU KNEW ME NOW YOU WOULDN’T RECOGNIZE ME! You multiplied. “What happened?” Getting inspired. “It’s a mere shape of a letter.” Yet these closing in on the translucent Zs. K. “artifacts” are neither symbolic. Nor picturesque. There’re independent in esse, with their impulse they’re existentialities these E.K.G.s! Heraclitus ~= is the beyond-concept of treading along the border

on water, its system of whirlpool evened out. How many times Herac steps inside himself? Shaping?

( )

Existentiality: unthematic. (Where, from the stove?) Ah, “saint subjects.” But? Conceptual fine art

beats away and back life like this. Color-beats. Construction-beats. If there is more no-subjects beat together that still can be existentialistic. What else should it be?! (Note, in order) The real dematerialization of Zsigmond Károlyi E.K.G.’s art works, its conceptual sensuality and its inspiringly sensual conceptualism: painted forms towards a touch of minimal translucency, irregular color-surfaces, true, sensual heart beat measurement (sorry for the poetry), occasional beating off-boundaries! Qasi assumptions of Zs. K. As if-realism: (lacerations on forking off) …over here like Heraclitus nearly everything is beatable… (to state = to assume.) It’d be good though if this is for something. If this is for that. The word-coloring, the “end vote of painting”. watch out! do not let my art historian analysis to be wall painting! * Heraclitus synthesis

let’s beat. Synthesis. No. Make heartbeat sensible.

( )

Q.E.D. (E.K.G.), if -----------------------------------------------weird? Who will meet in the evident of heart-beat Heraclitus! Milan Kundera: whose essay book titled The Curtain says (translated by Pál Réz): The world shows a different face from every place. Though at first glance only ideological” (spirit-exercise type of) false evident are visible. More and more evident an existential evidence the less it’s visible.” (Thus – TD again – evidential which mostly is simply livable.) * Summary: for the works of Zsigmond Károlyi we had to bring this “aspect” forward to show. The exempt of thematic is their numerosity. This is how they remain comprehensively nonthematic.

APPENDIX-GREEN GRASS FIX “The art - my good self - writer”: Minimal – conceptual? (Zsiga) Word and or else wall paintings. Beatings as inspirations. (Holy-spirit! in my belief.) Beatings as 1. realization: E.K.G.: minimal-conceptual: a,/ man always does something this is most terrible, and b,/ man doesn’t do anything, but c,/ this is even more terrible, the “Doesn’t Do Anything.” 2, There is no half, toward, type (said so! thus the works of Zsigmond Károlyi ain’t concept-tual). Good, but… 3, The E.K.G. piece inspires many concepts. the color-shaped realization (see Bak) is not going from here to there. Zsigmond Károlyi works seem like series: several slacked singleness til the very end (V¯ery the end)

V¯¯ facts with colors in the sign of Heraclitus. I’d fall backwards if a color after another didn’t catch me. Ergo I don’t catch, I am caught.)

Zsiga, your form-colors v musical too. Ab ovo too too. This notion was made for you. This other confession is very much needed for my beating heart failure; for my asthma-likeness;

for my joyful sadness as a private man; (Zs.K.’s formations are the color-paintings of my life!); for the tolerance to the disappearance of my teeth; of my mortified fingers; of my slow tottering walk; to the growing of my diminishing.

The inner variation-line of the E.K.G.! Minimal or conceptual effect of the art work, if word-painting is planned of it? (PICTURESQUENESS) Of course, the form variations! The “Is” if your begin with V¯¯, minimal extreme in a conceptual way (inspired by Zs.K.) (Strong heart failure ~=.) (Plus the live beams.) The translucent V¯¯ is a minimalized form-color (artwork) makes me conceptual. This is basic education. (Pardon me for the possible weird words!) The “permissive colors” May not forget: about the basic element of Zsiga Károlyi’s E.K.G.: the “permissive colors”. And the permissive serial forms in their scale of colors. (“In their beauty’.) Strange (?) effect: for me in the border of my existentialism calling me standing. (See ii on its beat away elements: the in-failures of heart, throat, hands, legs their promising decay degrees. The exist. of the artist (Zs.K.) comes close. Hamlet kind of grant Falling asleep is amazing. Though it’s not know what-zing. (As I repeat it I the dark.)

H A J D U I S T VÁ N

Palimpsest Options for Reading Zsigmond Károlyi’s Painting And once you have walked the length of your mind, what You command is clear as a lading-list. Anything else must not, for you, be thought To exist. And what’s the profit? Only that, in time, We half-identify the blind impress All our behavings bear, may trace it home. But to confess, On that green evening when our death begins, Just what it was, is hardly satisfying, Since it applied only to one man once…1

Being aware of the dangers any simplification may imply, one could say that the pith and core of Zsigmond Károlyi’s lifework, or the totality, corpus and volume of the so-far existing 2 works, lies in the fundamental dualities of visuality (vision and perception). Embodying the relationship between that which has been given form (the sign referring to or symbolising art) and that which is (supposedly) formless (a surface or sometimes space), his paintings are built on an idiosyncratic perception of the irreversibility of the seen and the known, the obscurity of the premises of decision and the perplexity of choice and, through the transposition of such contradictions into images, a seemingly meagre yet unbelievably vast tautology and dialectics of the intentional and the unintentional.

1 Philip Larkin, Continuing To Live. Excerpt. 2 With a touch of malice, one could also say “still existing”, knowing that Károlyi has repainted his spoiled or damaged canvases countless times, so that a painting’s actual surface conceals a plethora of images whose translucent presence can often be felt behind the visible surface, evocative of their own history. A palimpsest!

A Blue Table for Gyula Czimra , 1975 Oi l on c a nva s , 90 × 90 cm

I S T VÁ N H A J D U

3 The output of this period is discussed by Mónika Zsikla and Miklós Peternák in the present catalogue.

Even-spaced Parallel s, 1978

Photo, ad hesive t ape, 4 20×297 m m

His inclination towards dualities is also manifest in the distinct periods of his career that take the following linear pattern and point to his attraction to even numbers: figurative – abstract/conceptual – figurative – abstract – figurative, following one another in alternating cycles according to logical decisions/choices/changes, without hardly any trace of “double talk”. Side by side and beyond his obligatory studies in painting during and following his academy studies, Károlyi made works of a conceptual nature, mostly inspired by the painting practices of Gyula Czimra and Giorgio Morandi, as well as by the linguistic, metaphilosophical and reception-theory analyses of Gábor Bódy and Miklós Erdély. His paintings, photos, environments, performances and films made between 1975 and 19773 feature elementary graphic signs – points and lines, as well as planes bearing the traces of painterly gestures, in a rhythmic alignment of either vertical lines (Even-spaced Parallels, 1978) or parallelograms (Straight Labyrinth, 1977) that “function” as cut-outs or, seen from another perspective, as frames – that “compete” with their environment (an unfashioned, seemingly incidental world that is not structured according to the principles of art). Regarding his early works and the later ones from the 1990s and the 2010s, an analogy could be made with structuralism and with serialism’s recorded phases of movement. His films, photographs and environments, and even his actions and graphics from the 1970s, could be linked to the conceptual-serial tendencies emerging within geometric abstraction. In the 1970s, works recording phases of movement or minimal narratives came forth from the connection of Minimal Art with an “objectless”, symbolic-concep-

Pa limpsest | Options for Reading Zsigmond Károly i 's Painting

tual narrativity. These indicated the quantitative changes of single highlighted elements – pure constructions or relatively amorphous shapes – exploring the aesthetic implications of hardly visible, “slow” shifts and the inherently developing staidness of movement. Naturally, striving for seriality and narrativity did not only inform the geometric and structural tendencies, but as a specific manifestation of a renewed claim, it fertilised almost all art forms. As a special feature of seriality, expressed through geometric abstraction, the phases of movement, the puritan narratives, were conceived as simultaneously unique and general within the frame given by the singularity of form. These series gained metaphoric value through their appearance as models, wherein minimal movements could be replaced by and endowed with newer and newer layers of meaning as stripped schemes of significant forms of movement. A wide range of serial works emerged within the geometric tendencies, from variations of colour to permutations of form. They encompassed a series of colour modulation born in the wake of emblematic endeavours, a surreal-mystical series appearing in geometric abstraction, as well as works that explored narrative in terms of more complex logical and mathematical – systematic and aleatoric – principles, rather than constructing a narrative on a straight line as a function of quantitative changes. The latter works analysed the changes that took place within a series through the qualitative differences between successive phases, so that instead of striving to create a structure, they were concerned with the changes of forms that occurred within the structure. These systems were also open in the sense that the movement they recorded was not limited. Their organising principles were in fact thought formulae; i.e., they sought to explore the mechanism of thinking in a way

Cor ner Painting , 1983

Oi l on c a nva s , 200×1 40 cm (H U FA | Pa r t henon Fr iez e Ha l l, 201 4)

I S T VÁ N H A J D U

similar to an image, by transforming it into an image. Among Hungarian artists active in the 1970s, Károlyi’s work could be compared to that of Dóra Maurer and Péter Türk. In sequences ordered either arbitrarily or according to the magic Fibonacci or a simple arithmetic sequence, Maurer’s series recorded finite phases of movement that modified proportions. These new pictorial rhythms, the modified proportions created within a single system by shifting, cutting or overlapping, were meant to examine perception through exploring the structure of the plane, along with its constant and variable elements. In Maurer’s more recent paintings, the frame has emerged as a constant motif, while her photo sequences have the line as their persistent element. The empty space enframed in her paintings, or the line penetrating into space in her photos, could be regarded as a metaphor of art, of craftsmanship. Türk’s photo sequences were also based on systemic principles, in which virtual movement played a major part, even if in a different manner than in Maurer’s work. While Maurer recorded and captured movement through a mode of visualisation, Türk transformed it into a gesture. His torn up and rearranged photos referred to the act of creation, the act before the creative process, as it were. Türk started from concrete, palpable reality and through a complex procedure of localisation, a strict and concrete sequential process, he developed it into an almost indecipherable system of ordered and systematised disorderliness, regulated confusion, an unusual average and essence of forms. The system in Károlyi’s works is not conceived as a form-giving power; it is an inherent facet of his attitude. He did not approach art as a means by which his works would relate to something external, serving the process of cognition, but by means of art he observed art itself, art’s internal, noumenal system. Therefore, his method could be seen as analogous to that of structural film emerging in the late 1950s. Structural film sought to get rid of all means of expression that did not pertain to film (music, texts, noises and gestures); or on the contrary, it attempted to excessively exploit, and deny, the key notion and process belonging to the making, viewing and understanding of films: emotional identification and involvement. Naturally, the claim that these films are silent and devoid of emotions or gestures only holds true if we speak of the “insensibility” of the film frames. As British theoretician and

Tang ram IV., 1987

Of fset on paper, 200×200 m m

Pa limpsest | Options for Reading Zsigmond Károly i 's Painting

critic Peter Wollen wrote, “the material must be semioticized”4 in structural film, or in what he regarded as film. It implies that the film strip as “material plays the dual role of substrate and signifier”. This key proposition of structural film theory is quite close to the theory of Supports/Surfaces, a highly significant group of French artists in the 1970s. In a doctrinaire and ad absurdum limited reading of this proposition, which was naturally not what Wollen expounded, only an unexposed and undeveloped film strip can be regarded as film (as if Károlyi pressed his paint-smeared finger onto the canvas and watched it motionless); or in a somewhat broader understanding of the definition: the exposed and developed film reel, placed in neutral and unmotivated space (as if Károlyi lightly passed his clean hand across the white primed canvas). Early structural films, first of all those made by the Viennese formalist filmmakers, such as Peter Kubelka, were connected to Austrian music of the early 20th century and particularly to the work of Webern and “visualised” the method of composition used in punctual and later serial music. With reference to Kubelka’s films, Peter Weibel remarked that chronology gave way to simultaneity in structural film, and that Kubelka’s works were “metric films” in that he treated frames just as Webern treated music, regarding the frame line, the break between two individual frames, as a point in time and an interval: “He moved from thematic to serial organization, and he regarded the series of frames as a function of intervals.”5 This “technique” has remained a characteristic structural organising principle of Károlyi’s serial works to date. As Paul Valéry stated in one of his notebooks, “The first reaction of the mind is to immediately repeat that which sensibility has painted, sounded, lost and improvised out of nothingness. In an attempt to understand, the mind repeats it and exactly through repetition and reiteration it will slowly arrive at comprehension.” With the quasi-realist paintings divided into sections according to the principles of the Chinese tangram game that Károlyi was involved in making during the late 1970s and early 1980s, following his former, strictly minimalist-conceptual period, he might have sought to avoid the ultimatum of exactly this tautology, which practically

4 Peter Wollen, ‘Ontology’ and ‘Materialism’ in Film. Screen, Vol.16. No.1., 1976. In: A Perspective on English Avant-Garde Film. Arts Council, 1978. p. 110. 5 Peter Weibel, Der Wiener Formalfilm – Entstehungsgeschichte und Leistungen. In Film als Film – 1910 bis Heute. Kölnischer Kunstverein, 1977, p. 178.

I l lu st rat ion i n: Joost E l f fer, Tang ram . (Köl n : Du Mont Buchverlag , 1976), pp. 2 4–25.

Tang ram , 1986

Oi l on c a nva s , 100Ã&#x2014;100 cm

I S T VÁ N H A J D U : P a l i m p s e s t | O p t i o n s f o r R e a d i n g Z s i g m o n d K á r o l y i ' s P a i n t i n g

claimed self-surrender, by yielding to the heroic fiction of creating visual spectacles. In his tangram paintings, the rigid system (structures confined in a frame or frames, pieced together from triangles) was distended by a fluid, intentionally dramatic and expressive manner of painting and by figures locked up in active-agitated gestures. The up-to-dateness of the then resurgent Informel, and Abstract Expressionism or the Neue Wilde, obviously did not leave Károlyi untouched either, seeing as in this period he even made a few self-portraits and paintings depicting hands and bodily details. A highly significant period in Károlyi’s career started in the early 1980s, in the wake of an old photograph that surfaced at the time, which bore a sign which had the force of an imperative: an X. While utilising the experience of the method of constructing

Außen-innen X, 1985

Of fset on paper, 20 × 20 cm

T he Same (Wallpaper), 1986

Of fset pr i nt , col lage, 810Ă&#x2014;580 cm (det a i l)

I S T VÁ N H A J D U : P a l i m p s e s t | O p t i o n s f o r R e a d i n g Z s i g m o n d K á r o l y i ' s P a i n t i n g

the tangram paintings, Károlyi turned to another elementary sign. His paintings “document” his explorations of a form that may be regarded as a symbol, an allegory and a metaphor. Accumulating all the strata of meaning pertaining to crossings, the X sign became the fundamental motif of his paintings. I am not sure whether in 1968, when he took his first photograph of a scaffolded building, Zsigmond Károlyi had in mind to titrate a fundamental geometric system “from life,” but ten years later, that small photo proved to be a suitable basis for his conceptual studies of art and its fundamental structures. Initially, the Andrew’s crosses within the scaffolding and the whitewashed X’s marking the windows only contributed to a collection of diagrams toward a study of correspondences-correlations. At the same time, Károlyi must have been fully aware of the sensual and spiritual/intellectual energy that two lines intersecting at a right angle convey: a diagonal is the simplest, most rational and most radical means to occupy a plane; two perpendicular diagonals, crosses rotated at a 45° angle, present the sign of a cross and positivity. He was not, however, interested in the sign being burdened by symbols in the first place, but as an extremely simple gesture that, none the less, bore all the marks of creativity. One might think of the crosses that appear in a similar approach in the work of Tàpies, Beuys and others, or even earlier, though from a different motive, in that of Mondrian. “Perception came first: the recognition of the identity of forms in the wooden scaffolding and the sign painted onto the glass, independent of their functions. ‘Intersecting

7 In.: Károlyi Zsigmond „Festészeti problémák posztkonceptualista megközelítése az 1970-es évek második felében.” A Magyar Képzőművészeti Egyetemen 2002. október 18-án tartott habilitációs előadás szerkesztett változata. Megjelent a Balkon 2003/3. számában.

Rotat ion, 1986

Ser ig raphy on paper, 36× 36 cm

I S T VÁ N H A J D U : P a l i m p s e s t | O p t i o n s f o r R e a d i n g Z s i g m o n d K á r o l y i ' s P a i n t i n g

6 In: Zsigmond Károlyi, „Festészeti problémák posztkonceptualista megközelítése az 1970-es évek második felében“ [Post-conceptualist Approach to the Problems of Painting in the Late 1970s]. An edited version of his habilitation lecture delivered at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts on 18 October 2002, published by Balkon magazine in its issue No. 3/2003.

Gr id of Light, 1985

Photo pa i nt i ng , 41 × 29 cm

diagonals meet in two different planes, yet with such natural interconnectedness as if one were the shadow of the other. With a movement dictated by the causal space in between them, following the calligraphy of the motifs, I cut up the square-format photograph along its diagonals, marking, as it were, the pictorial plane itself as transparent pictorial plane (1981). By further diagonal sectioning of the square form and rotating the middle part at a right angle, the former work was given a positive signage. (Such striving for simple gestures is aimed at the kind of beauty that manifests itself in the elegance of mathematical deductions.),” wrote Károlyi in his lecture entitled, IKEMXX (= An Unknown Central European Artist in the XXth Century).6 Or else, a ruin-geometry: the selection of small, unimportant and ephemeral objects of reality, without embellishing them and avoiding pathos or visionary inspiration; unintentional symbol-forming, the retrospective act of investing a sign with the status of a metaphor or metonym; the boundary of realism, the abstraction of symbolification… Through multiplication, the sign painted onto sheet glass or appearing as a cross within the scaffolding became almost a narrative that, in turn, unfolded a varied set of known and conjectured meanings. The diagonals, crosses and X’s are made to intermingle and dilute in, as well as reinforce, each other, but this seemingly chaotic texture leaves no room for either didactic or literary readings. The multiple re-painted surfaces, with their newer and newer layers, also afford us an insight into spatial dimensions that, however, point to some type of poignant, determined closedness, rather than opening out to infinity. The “known”, supposedly familiar, almost conventional expressivity of the superimposed and tortured layers of paint is far from suggesting a sense of eupho-

Inventor y of Motifs, 1979

Felt-t ip pen, envelope, 80Ă&#x2014;80 m m

I S T VÁ N H A J D U

ria arising from the process of painting; on the contrary, the “pleasure of painting” is reduced to some strange sense of discipline, almost resembling typical Central European conservative classicism, not to say depressivity, owing to the decayed greys, greens, yellows, blues and the heavy, withered browns and blacks. In Károlyi’s paintings from this period, the broad stripes of paint and the multitude of layers almost annihilate the reality envisioned on the canvas, so that the pigment is able to create a new reality out of itself, presenting itself as the spectacle when the viscous, sticky, coloured material becomes solidified. Károlyi’s modified photographs that, for lack of a better term, he called “photo paintings”, seem to be more “realist”, to almost have a documentary quality. Naturally, reality in these works is less sensual, but it appears in a far more complex form of richer layers of meaning. The reality of the photograph is inhabited by the reality and mystery of the unpredictable processes of chemistry. Reality beseeched to emerge by the developer fluid – the world recorded by chemical means – becomes modified or terminated by exactly the developer and the fixative: the developer that refuses to develop and the fixative that decomposes endow chemistry with a metaphoric dimension. And the reality of darkness, the unpredictable and hardly controllable process, becomes an imperative: the accidental becomes aggressive. Chemistry is rendered expressive by forced chance; the hysteria of the developer, the fixative, the reducing solution and the

Scaf folding , 1987

Oi l on c a nva s , 50 × 60 cm

Pa limpsest | Options for Reading Zsigmond Károly i 's Painting

red prussiate of potash provokes the appearance of a new reality. Recognition of reality is again not a matter of flashing seconds but of painfully long minutes. Moreover, colours are absent; only the black and white of the photo paper, the yellow and silvery pink of the decomposing chemicals have remained: the sad colourlessness of the imagined picture. Apart from, or exactly owing to, their painterly character, these works explore the immanence of art, just like his paintings from the late 1980s and early 1990s, which show the reappearance of straight lines that were “used” as etalons of rhythms fifteen years earlier – as prescribed by the principle of universal disharmony, one may add.

* The present exhibition is centred around a body of work that Károlyi painted in the 1990s and in the last ten years, which could be termed geometrising painting, to use a somewhat awkward yet more apposite adjective to geometric. (The slow and gradual formation of Euclidean geometry, as its name indicates, was based on measuring the Earth.) These are geometrising works, or works that utilise geometry, rather than geometric paintings, as they are about an underlying idea that is no longer linked to projective geometry – that Károlyi would mention so many times with such affection – even if they are concerned with the depiction of doubtlessly geometrical elements. This body of work is not about two-dimensional figures that are described or constructed, but about an idea that can be defined in terms of geometry (a square, a rectangular, a triangle and a circle), sometimes painted in an incidental manner and at other times with ruler-like precision. Variations on a fundamental idea, Károlyi’s geometrising paintings are ground plans in both the literal and the figurative sense of the word, complete with elements of the consequences drawn by art historical tradition (20th-century geometrising Isms). “In 1980, I took part in two exhibitions at the Zichy Castle, organised by the Óbuda Gallery as parts of the exhibitions series Tendencies: the show presenting Geometric and Structural Tendencies7 (curated by István Hajdu ) and the one called Soft and Hard (curated by László Beke). At the former, I realised one of my plans from 1979, in a size of approx. one and a half square metres on a display board, with the intention of making an INVENTORY OF MOTIFS (its earlier working titles were: “RETROSPECTIVE RÉSUME”; CONSTRUCTION; UNTITLED, etc.), and at the second show, two of my works were presented: offset prints of OUTSIDE-INSIDE and EVEN-SPACED PARALLELS (in multiplication, side by side, below and above each other, fixed onto the wall with strips of adhesive tape.) It was about the latter ones that Miklós Erdély remarked in his Optimistic Lecture that: ‘they recall the aesthetics of derivation, but instead of its formal aesthetics, they radiate the beauty of the pure […] structure of thought, also contemplated on a metal-level…’ All that I had been concerned with in the second half of the 1970s was summed up in these three works (…) The drawing (blueprint) is a “sketch” of a postcard, or a copy of

7 In: Károlyi ibid. The exhibition, held between 10 October and 11 November 1980, was co-curated by Júlia Szabó. Even though Inventory of Motifs (paper, charcoal, 100x100 cm, as the catalogue indicated) was included in the exhibition checklist, the layout designer, János Fajó, omitted this work from the catalogue. Probably he read the irony of the work as derision, as an attack against the lofty New Geometric Abstraction. Károlyi – rightly – felt such ignorance towards his work was unfair and, as I was only informed about the incident after the catalogue had been printed, nothing was left for me to do but offer my clumsy explanations.

I S T VÁ N H A J D U

a pre-printed envelope, meant for the catalogue (…) We can see horizontal and vertical lines, four right-angled parallelograms with an X sign in front of them. We can see both identical and different lines in terms of length and width. Mention must be made of the draft-like character (“freehand drawing”, made without a ruler) and the grid patterned ground (as it was made on a torn-out notebook paper). (I have listed the line elements of the phenomenon. The main protagonists of my works, these motifs would return later in various situations.) Is it a readymade? A Pop-Art gesture? Ready-found Hungarian minimalism (= visualisation of “primary” structures, in the magnetic field of “reticence” and impersonality). Why? Can we speak of realist or abstract painting in our case? The answer is provided in the variations of the title, in the repeated attempts at naming it; to say more than that would be nothing but a vain, hermeneutic effort. One thing is certain: the concept was not limited to projecting a gesture of anti-creativity into an art scene armed with rulers, assuming a grave air. (…) Now, twenty years after, instead of a collage of posterior impressionist/cubist projections and connotations, let me only quote here a variation of the geometric definition of the straight line from 1977, a paraphrase that I made for myself: ‘A straight line is the lateral view of a jumble of helter-skelter scribbles (drawn on a planar surface)!’ (…) ‘As soon as the depreciation of line as boundary takes place, painterly possibilities set in.’ I read this argument in Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History.8 I found the most exact articulation of my fundamental aesthetic position in János Pilinszky’s poem, HERE AND NOW: I look at the lawn, maybe the lawn. The grass moves. Wind or shower maybe, or simply the fact that you are moves the world, here, now.”9

8 In: Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History. Translated from the 7th German Edition (1929) into English by M.D. Hottinger (Dover Publications, New York, 1932 and reprints). p. 19. 9 János Pilinszky, “Here and Now” (Trans. by Bruce Berlind and Mária Kőrösy). In: Walter Cummins (ed.), Shifting Borders. East European Poetries of the Eighties. (Cranbury, London, Mississauga: Associated University Presses, 1993), p. 235. 10 Even if it could be seen as blasphemy, I admit that Inventory of Motifs has also called to my mind Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook.

Inventory of Motifs is not merely a postal address format sample, but a fundamental inventory of Károlyi’s thematics. At the same time, it is a picture, as well as a wittingly or unwittingly ironic reference or allusion to René Magritte’s picture with or of a pipe. Magritte is not much truer to reality when tackling his pipe than Károlyi with his vertical lines and squares; therefore, just as the former is not a pipe, the latter is not an address sample, or it is just exactly what it is… this is the model of that – the image is a drawing – the drawing embraces and interlinks elements, the elements are encompassed in an inventory, the inventory is the (symbol of the) lifework – the lifework is a promise and an idea, and of course, it is an unfulfilled promise (not just because it did not appear in print), consequently, it is the reflection of the promise and the idea. Despite its apparent carelessness, or perhaps just owing to the painless manner of drawing, as well as its tautology and witty didacticism,10 this work could be examined within the context of Conceptual Art, particularly when compared with Joseph Kosuth’s by-now classical works. In 1965, Kosuth made his One and Three Chairs, comprised of a

Pa limpsest | Options for Reading Zsigmond Károly i 's Painting

real chair, a photograph of the chair and an enlarged reproduction of a thesaurus entry for the word ‘chair’. The environment visualised a process of abstraction, and – more importantly – it also used tautological means to identify the chair-phenomenon with the object, i.e., the idea with the phenomenon. In his later works, Kosuth did not deem it important to present the full documentation of the process of identification; he confined himself to representing the thesaurus entries. Therefore, the processes of abstraction and identification were carried out in the viewers’ mind, as they were able to recall and systematise the underlying content of the dictionary entries – the phenomena –, based on their knowledge and experience. After all, the Inventory of Motifs also records an identification process: a useful illustration, showing how to address/dispatch (output) and mail/mediate (input) a letter, and the small geometric elements within it as picture-motifs are made to transform into artistic (aesthetic?) signs, so that they eventually function as symbols of empty/non-empty signs.11 Additionally, of course, they may take on and convey some lyrical sentiment or thought: grief caused by the silent vanity of an unsent and undelivered message. “Since according to common agreement there is nothing outside and separate in existence from sensible spatial magnitudes,” wrote Aristotle, “the objects of thought are in the sensible forms, viz. both the abstract objects and all the states and affections of sensible things. Hence (1) no one can learn or understand anything in the absence of sense, and (2) when the mind is actively aware of anything it is necessarily aware of it along with an image; for images are like sensuous contents except in that they contain no matter. Imagination is different from assertion and denial; for what is true or false involves a synthesis of concepts. In what will the primary concepts differ from images? Must we not say that neither these nor even our other concepts are images, though they necessarily involve them?”12 The “sensible forms” in Károlyi’s Inventory of Motifs were made to transform into quasi-conservative abstract paintings in the early to mid-1990s. Mostly untitled, usually identified by letters, these paintings were composed from superimposed planes that shift apart or are placed one upon the other (with archaic reverence for construction). The elements that once comprised tangrams now refer to the geometric logic in superimpositions instead of their earlier juxtapositions. These surfaces often project from the edge of the canvas, reaching beyond the frame to continue into the “meaning-absorbing” plane that is stretched onto the canvas frames, until (yielding to the force of deconstruction) they eventually cease to exist, while they endow the painting with a box-like body, making the painted canvas leave the plane and assume spatial dimensions. Onto these planes, another structure is made to “settle”, a structure of a different direction, suggesting a sense of dynamics: a dense system of often embossed streaks of paint that fence off and deny access to the space behind them, as if the curtain had finally come down on the chaos-stage of the earlier works. The equal-sized bands of wide and bulky brushstrokes, which seem to follow an ornamentation dictated by a sort of step variation, keep tilting on each other: the rhythms of their slant and the angles of incidence outline a pure-minded quasi-narrative. Burying countless images underneath by way of a palimpsest, these planes, which were overpainted countless

11 One may also recall Miklós Erdély’s “empty sign” … 12 Aristotle, On the Soul (Translated by J. A. Smith), Book III, 8, In: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/a8so/complete.html

I S T VÁ N H A J D U : P a l i m p s e s t | O p t i o n s f o r R e a d i n g Z s i g m o n d K á r o l y i ' s P a i n t i n g

times, extinguish gesturality and expressivity, and wittingly or unwittingly refer back to the puritanical, hermetic and spiritual traits of classical geometric abstract art of the first half of the 20th century. It is through colour that Károlyi connects the movements that have been directed onto two planes, and channels them, as it were, into an identical direction in these monochromatic and dichromatic pictorial surfaces. At the same time, he almost never chooses to utilise the meaning that a colour might suggest: averaging out sentiments even when they are brought into contrast, the mixed – broken, dull, gloomy – colours or pure greys and blacks are merely meant to determine the object nature of the painterly fact and differentiate them from its environment; from the world-that-is-not-painting. In these works, Károlyi’s “colour theory”, I think, is deeply affiliated with that of Van Gogh: perhaps here lies the source of these paintings’ almost inscrutable sorrow…

13 This painting (oil on canvas, 130 × 95 cm) was included in the exhibition New Sensibility IV, City Gallery, Pécs, 13 March – 5 April 1987.

In 1986, Károlyi painted his Tatlin Monument,13 based on the slanting model of Tatlin’s legendary project for the Monument of the Third International. The painting, made after a poor-quality reproduction, is an emblematic piece: an ironic-sarcastic commentary on the history of ideas and a collection of examples in the techniques of painting: the headstone of ideas and praxes. Károlyi “represents” constructive form-giving and its symbol (along with its political-ideological connotations) as an expressive gestural painting, actually diluting and annihilating a positive utopia on the one hand, and acknowledging and immediately transcending the postmodern outlook through irony (once again) and through the elements of controlled chance in the manner of painting, on the other hand. To put it in other words: the painting “represents” the moment in which such a game, which is obviously doomed to be lost owing to the “sensible” principle of creative destruction, renders itself visible as the beatific act of “progress” and “development”. Another aspect that makes this painting significant is that it partly illustrates Károlyi’s (and many of his contemporaries’) relation to the abstract painting of the previous decades, and partly points out, in an indirect manner, that to him/ them, abstraction, and especially constructivist orthodoxy or the decorativeness of New Geometry, no longer means the illusion of freedom that is still rightly considered self-evident by many artists who are one or two generations older. More importantly, I believe that Károlyi’s Tatlin Monument synthesises the history of abstract painting from a certain perspective, and not only from Károlyi’s viewpoint, and what is even more noteworthy, it synthesises his own method: the double technique or technical duplicity, which was to continue into the works he painted in the early 1990s, even if in a much more moderate form. It might be useful to recall that contemporary “abstract painting is meta-linguistic painting, referencing historical abstract painting itself. Today’s neo-abstract painting often refers to the strategy of classical abstract painting as an object language. All the more so as abstract painting became a meta-language, inserting and elaborating the historical styles of abstract painting, whether constructive or Informel, in place of things and the soul. Such a meta-linguistic codification reduces new abstract painting into mere sign reality, in which the significations of abstraction float about freely just like

Tatlin’s Tower Put in Quotes by a Candle, 1986

Oi l on c a nva s , 130×95 cm

trademarks (logos), in polyphonic relations with the history of art and modernity itself. Painting is thus able to unfold painterly qualities with playful freedom. Therefore, this phase can also be described as one in which the problems of form and figure became problems of codification. New abstract painting is informed by this codification principle. From conceptual art to Land Art, from avant-garde films to video productions, the 1960s and 1970s witnessed a development of aesthetic practices that were radically novel, resulting in an irreversible change of direction in the conditions for the production and reception of art. More than anything else, these innovations would question the traditional concept of visuality and the notional status of pictures.”14 Károlyi’s geometrising paintings from the 1990s simultaneously refer to the Western European and Russian-Soviet classical avant-garde art of the 1910–1920s and to the systematic painting of the 1970s, a conceptual impulse that referenced it. The works of German artists Blinky Palermo and Imi Knoebel and American artists Brice Marden and Robert Mangold were similar in their motivations: they all started from the Mondrian–Malevich–Rodchenko–Ad Reinhardt–Barnett Newman line, to arrive from Malevich’s “meditation object” to the painting object representing itself. Károlyi’s works also visualise pure, logical structures, but the use of movements dictated by permutation, aleatoricism and determined chance or secondary determination makes his works more complex than those of his German or American predecessors. These movements – more precisely, the source of the movement, which is the real implication of an indirect process that, for lack of a better term, has been defined above as determined chance – recall the achievements of the conceptual photos and films of the 1970s.

14 Peter Weibel, Pittura/Immedia. Die Malerei in de 90er Jahre. Klagenfurt, 1995, p. 14.

Following his figurative experiments of the 2000s – archaising, quasi-symbolic genre paintings, still-lifes with children’s toys, acerbic pastiches – Károlyi returned to geometry-based paintings: often resting on rotations of squares and triangles, this new body of works synthesises a practice spanning several decades. The platform and the arguments for synthesis are based on a type of orthodoxy, a fundamentalist theory of painting, as well as becoming stylistic frames, characteristic forms. Created by rotation, the planes’ virtual displacement, or division of the pictorial surface into successive new segments that bring about rhythmic transformations, means that the pictorial structures (sometimes planar fractals) are often extremely rich, utilising the primary colours of additive and subtractive colour mixing, as well as their broken “mutants”. The almost exclusively square-format panels of balanced proportions are linked by idiosyncratic, immanent seriality, a form-giving gesture; the planes that have been conceived as regular (but are actually acutely personal) are varied-permuted by folding out and over, folding in and down, and mirroring. A square is divided into two; a triangle – or more rarely a circle or a circle sector – is mirrored. The cool and warm colour pairs suggesting distance and nearness are aligned either in hard tension or in a placatory balance of complements, and the paintings also attest to a sense of strict, and at the same time self-ironic, quasi-pedagogical “dogmatism,” making a distant but perhaps not unintended allusion to the Bauhaus.

Pink and Green , 1996

Oi l on c a nva s , 113 Ã&#x2014; 113 cm

MÓNIKA ZSIKLA

Nail, Lath, String and Black Paint Analytical Works from 1979

In the late 1970s, Zsigmond Károlyi was oriented toward Conceptual Art, Minimal Art and Arte Povera, and his art practice was characterised by an attraction to simple, transparent things. Károlyi’s works in this period were marked by the observation, documentation, analysis and imaging of elementary relations and minute shifts, rather than following inherited conventions of representation. The body of work he created at that time indicates his striving to build upon simple facts of reality. The young artist sought to locate traditional painterly problems in the mediums of drawing and photography, working out possibilities of a painterly activity beyond the confines of easel painting. Most often he used cheap, ephemeral materials, such as sheets of paper, debris from decoration workshops, nails, string and wooden rods purchased at woodworking shops, and industrial paint available from any store selling household items. Depicted in a simple context, the motif that preoccupied Károlyi for a long time was an elementary sign, the primary element of intervention into plane: the line, more specifically, the straight line, taking the form of a diagonal, a horizontal and/or a vertical line, parallels, a broken line, and even intersecting (X) lines in individual works. Var iable Angles on Two Nail s, 1979

L at h, st r i ng , na i l, crayon (Va sa rely Mu seu m, Bud apest , 2008)

Horizontal from Diagonal, 1978 Photo, 36 Ă&#x2014; 2 4 cm

MÓNIK A Z SIK LA: N a i l , L a t h , S t r i n g a n d B l a c k P a i n t | A n a l y t i c a l W o r k s f r o m 1 9 7 9

His endeavours were recapitulated in two exhibitions he presented in the cities of Budaörs and Miskolc. Earlier works that must be mentioned as significant preludes to these shows are: Story 1-2-3 (1977), Horizontal from Diagonal (1978) and Two Angles Define a Straight Line (1978). The line, the protagonist of all three works, is made to transform into a broken line in Story 1-2-3 as a result of the artist breaking the sheet glass used in it,1 and is brought to a horizontal position as the diagonal of a rectangular in Horizontal from Diagonal. The shape hanging on a string, tied alternately onto one of the nails hammered in the two endpoints of the straight line drawn to mark the horizon in the amorphous panel of Two Angles Define a Straight Line,2 represents two possibilities of a line placed in approximately vertical position. In this case, the angle of incidence is dictated by gravitation. The photos documenting the successive steps in creating the works suggest that they could (also) be seen as belonging to process art. This “line thematic” was continued in his works presented in two exhibitions3 in November 1979, the basic materials of which were nails, laths, string, and paint. In this period three and a half decades ago, Károlyi concerned himself with fundamental problems related to the ontology of the picture, such as: What is a picture? How to define the difference between a photo and a painting? How could one formulate the system of relations between support, paint and imaging? How does a picture relate to a frame? These questions, along with comments reflecting on them, have been preserved in Károlyi’s notes from 1979, which contain frequent references not only to poet János Pilinszky, but also to H. Wölfflin, who formulated contrary pairs of precepts, such as the linear and the painterly, in his key opus4 that belonged to Károlyi’s seminal readings during his Academy years (1971–76). Wölfflin’s ideas contributed to the young artist’s awareness of the problems arising in artistic practice, and he articulated the specificity of his activity in his notes accompanying his daily work with his hands as follows: “the theme of my works is their own making”.5

1 Underlying the gesture of Károlyi’s breaking the sheet glass is Duchamp’s paradigmatic work, and the following considerations: “The only real break in the development that started with the Renaissance check-patterned floor plane is the drawing created by chance in Duchamp’s The Large Glass: “our roots”! (“Jegyzetfüzetemből” [From my Notebook] in: I.K.E.M.XX. Károlyi Zsigmond fotós munkái és írásai, Magyar Fotográfiai Múzeum/Hungarian Museum of Photography, 2003. p. 123.) 2 The Hungarian word for ‘nail’ and ‘angle’, used in the title, is the same, so the title may also be read as Two Nails Define a Straight Line. (Translator’s note) 3 November 1979, Jókai Mór Cultural House, Budaörs; 9–30 November 1979, Molnár Béla Gallery, Miskolc. 4 Heinrich Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History (1915) was first published in Hungarian translation in 1969. 5 Károlyi Zsigmond, A budaörsi és a miskolci kiállításokról [On the Budaörs and Miskolc exhibitions] (1979), quotation from Károlyi’s manuscript that the artist made available for me while I was researching his oeuvre.

Ver tical Diagonal, 1978 Of fset pr i nt , 19,8 × 29 cm

MÓNIK A Z SIK LA

The “wall pictures” presented in Budaörs and Miskolc were made from the following components: approximately one-metre long laths (Duchamp must be noted as a reference again here), a few nails, string, black paint, while the “support for the image” was provided by the whitewashed wall of the exhibition space. Importantly, the relationship between the artwork and the exhibition space was re-articulated by the fact that Károlyi worked directly on the wall rather than applying paint onto a traditional support (canvas, panel or cardboard), thus turning the wall into the support of his painting. This gesture altered the status of the artwork, mak-

Punctual Picture, 1979, Budaörs Photo, 18× 1 2 cm

Na i l , L at h , S t r i n g a nd B l a c k P a i nt | A n a l y t ic a l Wor k s f r om 1979

ing the “easel painting” expand into an environment, while the “artwork” became a temporary, ephemeral element within the surrounding space. According to the artist’s intentions, the resulting constellation was to be viewed as a picture, as well as referring to the history of painting. The ambivalence of the painterly gesture led to an unusual duality: the painting’s delineated space became identical with the real physical boundaries of the exhibition space, allowing a maximum of freedom in all directions; in return for this freedom, however, the temporal existence of the artwork became delimited. The formations that once existed on the gallery walls can only be viewed today in the form of photographs,6 and it is on the basis of these photos that the artworks may be conceptually reconstructed. This process is analogous with the practice of contemporary artists whose works for specific sites have also become known only through photographs (e.g., Sol LeWitt, Blinky Palermo or Ernst Caramelle). Károlyi’s drawings, sketches and texts are alternative scenarios. As for the modus operandi, and by way of an example, the painter quotes a poet, Pilinszky, speaking of his method of writing (mutatis mutandis: writing equals painting!): “One part of the writing is that which I write, while the other part is being written: I am actually interested in the latter. I am aware that the fate of the writing is utterly incalculable in this way, but I believe that if one lets the world speak, there’s nothing much to worry about.”7

6 Documentary photographs of these exhibitions were taken by György Galántai, Attila Kovács and Sándor Murányi. 7 I.K.E.M.XX., p. 177. Note No. 9.

T he Fif th…, 1979, Miskolc Photo, 22×17.6 cm

Gravitation , 1979 I nst a l lat ion

The “scenario” for one of the paintings is the following: “I dip one end of the lath into paint, and throw it like a dart against the wall, without aiming. In this way, I will get a point, while the lath, bouncing back, will fall somewhere”8 (Punctual Picture, Budaörs, 1979). Another instance of the use of lath: he dipped both ends of the lath into paint, and then drilled a hole in it at a point other than the midpoint, nailed it onto the wall and rotated it around, producing concentric circles of paint on the surface of the wall. On another occasion, he tied string to the ends of a lath, and knotted it on two nails hammered into the wall at a span’s distance from each other, at equal height. With a brush and black paint, he marked straight sections of random length so that the paint left marks both on the string and the lath, as well as on the wall. His movements were directed by aesthetic considerations throughout. “I took a photo of each single stage, then displaced the entire constellation, photographed the newly created graph, then moved it all again, and repeatedly photographed the results of the repeated movements”9 (Six Photos, 1979). In Gravitation (1979) Károlyi realised a truly formulaic ensemble of intention and prepared eventuality, of which he wrote the following: “One may also view a wooden ruler hanging on a nail as a picture. A lath, a nail, plus black paint… Painting the lath and the wall, both the figure and the background, all at once! – this was the basic concept here. An example of how the horizontal becomes vertical.”10 The laconic description only makes a hint at the complexity of the real world. Holding the lath, which was fixed onto the wall with one nail, in a horizontal position, he painted a segment of it in thin paint, in such a way that the paint left marks on the wall and then, yielding to gravitation, started dripping down. Following this, he let go of the lath which, having lost its horizontal support, finally found its resting position in a vertical state. With its displacement at a right angle, the lath conformed to physical laws, and moved from the horizontal to the vertical position. This simple series of movements leaving a mark modelled the theory of general relativity. Confronted with the partial, minimalist figure of horizontality, the viewer may start to harbour nostalgia for the colourful and utopian harmony of the Mondrianesque vision. In this system, which developed its own rules, the model and the picture became identical. The lath functioned as a ruler and the string assumed the function of directional sections in the picture that took shape on the wall. While manually tackling materials, the artist marvelled at the artistic qualities of basic cases. In the sequence of emerging views, through minute shifts as if on an “autodidactic training track”, an enigmatic and ephemeral visual spectacle of a constructivist atmosphere was brought about. As Jan Hoet wrote, “Double entendres, Károlyi’s installations refer to sensibility, to irreal and poetic matters, questioning the validity of logic and objective perception. The opinion that none of the forms of human perception is able to provide an unambiguously right picture of reality is made to express something about individual human existence in Károlyi’s work. Perhaps he is the closest to the vision of an artist as someone engaged in pure form-giving. He exhibits the applied materials in palpable vicinity, in their immediacy, and in essence his method lies in mirroring painterly qualities within them.”11

8 Quoted from the artist’s manuscript. 9 See footnote No. 8. 10 Zsigmond Károlyi, in I.K.E.M.XX. p. 69. 11 Jan Hoet, 6 Hongaarse Kunstenaars. Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Stadt Gent, 1980.

MIKLÓS PETERNÁK

Mirror Line Labyrinth Zsigmond Károlyi and the Motion Picture

It should be noted at the outset that the subject matter of this essay, Zsigmond Károlyi’s film and video works, are no longer available in their original form. By now, both his films and original video footage have been transferred first to analogue video tapes and subsequently to digital formats.1 Such a multiple transfer process has resulted in considerable changes in how they are viewed compared to the originals. Even though the author of these lines has seen the majority of the original films,2 the available copies have often overwritten memories of the original versions, or at least left reminiscences a bit confused. It must be stated though that this situation is neither unusual in general, nor alien to the oeuvre of the artist discussed here, seen in the context of his works in other media. The most significant outputs of the international cinematic avant-garde (Man Ray, Eggeling, Moholy-Nagy, etc.) are also almost entirely inaccessible in their original formats, since the filmic material itself and even projection speed has changed over time, not to speak of the differences between individual copies housed in various archives, the unique acoustic environments of the original screenings, developments in projection technology, transformations of the audiences’ attention span and viewing habits, and so forth. Actually, media-related transfer or migration is a general trait of Zsigmond Károlyi’s work: a drawing is made to transform into a photocopy, to become a print in turn or perhaps a painting; a photo is transformed to a collage and then to serigraphy, to possibly become an installation and then a graphic. Striving to retain and simultaneously modulate the motif, Károlyi alters the material so that the delicate gradations of the metamorphoses bring the textural-conceptual potential of form-giving into focus. Such a painterly (or in broader terms, artistic) discourse is manifest even in pictures without a single brushstroke, or in works where you can only perceive the place of a picture, and even that is only perceptible because it is covered by some type of text: you sense visual tonality (the act of filling in a frame) through the rhythm of your reading of the text. “I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where. And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.” T.S. Eliot: Four Quartets. Burnt Norton, II.3 The above quotation appears at the end of Károlyi’s first film, You Step out of the Mirror, an 11-minute black-and-white sound film, produced in 1977. The caption, which only appears in Hungarian, is hardly readable in this version,4 and it cannot be heard in the English voice-over either. It comes before the last scene of the film: as the quotation disappears, someone enters the frame from the left, to stand still in its axis, blocking out,

1 This text is exclusively concerned with the artist’s motion picture works that could be regarded as authorial works. The main source was a 1-hour long U-matic video compilation made in 1993 at the Béla Balázs Studio, which has survived in the collection of the C3 Foundation Budapest and has been digitalised for this occasion. The cassette includes: (1) You Step out of the Mirror (2) Straight Labyrinth Nº3. Even-spaced Parallels (3) Columns (4) Untitled (5) [Still-life-Painting] (6) [Building] (7) MUYBRIDGE IN MAKÓ (My Book, for Thomas Bernhard, 1984) (8) [Background] (9) Detail of a TV-broadcast, Galerie IN SITU, Aalst (10) Károlyi’s exhibition at Knoll Gallery Budapest. Items 9 and 10 do not belong directly to the chosen subject of the present essay. 2 A series of public screenings organised in 1983 at Eötvös Club, Budapest, presenting the history of Hungarian experimental cinema included the normal 8 mm film, Even-spaced Parallels, and the 16 mm film, I Saw the I Saw You. 3 Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot is a work of four poems: Burnt Norton (1936), East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941), and Little Gidding (1942). The quoted lines appear in the film in Hungarian. 4 As a still, see Zsigmond Károlyi, I.K.E.M.XX. Kecskemét: Museum of Hungarian Photography, 2003. (From the History of Hungarian Photography, 28. Klára Stima and Magdolna Koma (eds.) p. 6. (hereinafter: Károlyi 2003)

MIK LÓS PETER NÁ K

5 “The internal monologue of our alter ego – the third character replacing the camera – is ‘translated’ and can be read as a caption below the frame.” (Károlyi 2003: 110.) 6 This text can be read at the end of the film as a subtitle, below the sequence of silent images preceding the Eliot quote. For the full text, see: Károlyi 2003: 110. The two actors were Orshi Drozdik and Mari Varga. 7 For the text of the dialogue, and the referenced works, see: Károlyi 2003: 111, 113-115. 8 A K3 munkacsoport forgatókönyvei [Scripts of the K3 Section]. Budapest: Balázs Béla Stúdió, 1976. 11.-13., in an expanded version: Kapcsolatok. K 3 forgatókönyvek [Relationships. K3 Scripts]. Budapest: Balázs Béla Stúdió, 1977. 11.-15. Both publications are limited editions of stencilled volumes. 9 Applying for support for the completion of his film, Károlyi submitted a synopsis dated 9 July 1977. The quoted excerpt from T.S. Eliot’s poem was used as a motto for the synopsis, which was titled Confrontation in the original typescript, and later modified to I Saw the I Saw You. 10 The title refers to a motif in Cosmicomics, a book of short stories by Italo Calvino. 11 Balázs Béla Studio Scripts March 1982, Vol. II, 270, and Kapcsolatok [Relationships] 271-273. For the script see also: Károlyi 2003: 145.

as it were, the room with chairs and tables, shown lengthily in the preceding scene, then giving way to freeze-frame and fade-out. Apart from the title, we encounter two types of text in the preceding part of the film: instructions appear from the beginning5 and the dubbed voices of the two actors can also be read in the form of (English) subtitles. As the author described the topic in 1977, “Two girls, sitting (then standing) face to face, as if they were sound mirrors reflecting one another, utter that which they otherwise do not utter; they are speaking about what we can see anyway.”6 The transcript of singular speech acts recorded “live”, or selected individual frames, served as points of departure for other works, such as Double Portrait, a series of pictures that Károlyi made for his exhibition at Studio Gallery Budapest in 1979, or Text Screen, a visualisation of the situation in a single picture.7 It was a long journey to the eventual production of the film. The script of the first version was submitted to the Experimental (K3) Section of Béla Balázs Studio in 1976,8 with the title Relationships. A year after the acceptance of the script,9 a 16-mm, two-strip working copy was produced with the title, I Saw the I Saw You),10 in 33 minutes. In terms of a new (summer 1979) decision by the Studio management, this version was “ruled out” with reference to the given economic situation (which meant that negative cutting and audio mixing was not completed, i.e., no “standard” optical sound print was made from the 16 mm film and the separate 16 mm perforated magnetic sound track). Károlyi submitted applications for the completion of this film on several occasions, starting in 1982 in the framework of the BBS’s film script competition, along with some other film plans:11 “Attached please find the original synopsis. While it has been considerably altered during shooting, it has essentially remained the same. I can present a shortened version, an approx. 10-minute film entitled Mirror: it is a part of it, yet as a torso it ‘stands in its own right’. For its completion, post-sync, two short shots and a couple of inserts are necessary. (A negative should be made of the positive print prepared on the editor, from which the standard print could be made. This process would entail some loss of picture quality, but this is the only way it can be done.)” In a letter dated 15 April 1987 to the BBS’s Experimental (K) Section – which had been reorganised in

Straight Laby r inth ,, 197 7

Berc sény i Dor m itor y, Bud apest Photo: A nd rá s Koncz

Mirror Line Labyrinth | Zsigmond Károlyi and the Motion Picture

1980 –, Károlyi wrote: “A part of the film has been lost; from the salvaged remnants I would like to edit a final version of approx. 10-15 minutes.” According to a report by the K Section, the film “was to be finalised” in October 1988,12 but eventually only a video transfer version was made instead of the planned 16 mm film print. As can be seen from the above, the film has undergone several metamorphoses over time; it was always present as a task to be completed, but at the same time, new works sprang up from certain of its elements, such as Károlyi’s 1979 exhibition at the Studio Gallery, including its catalogue. Other elements have gone once and for all: according to the original script, two friends would have talked in a café about the genres of stilllife and portraiture in painting (while the presently available version only includes scenes with an empty café, or actually a simple room with chairs and tables, without any reference to a café). In the film that has come to survive as the final version, two women describe what they can see (including each other) and what they are doing.13 At the same time, the present version has preserved the aspect that was also part of the script of Relationships, to which the original discussion would have only served as a background: “…the film is the development of a psychological space, in which each of the two characters is present alternately as the perceived and the perceiver (as opposed to Beckett’s Film,14 where the same man becomes divided into two, here two persons would become entwined), reflecting on the same thing together through the overlapping elements and aspects of art and reality: on themselves.” The author seems to be hiding in his first film. At the same time, certain instructions given from the position of an observer indicate that he will come forth. This actually happens in the second film (which was similarly completed after many vicissitudes that are not going to be discussed here) and in all the subsequent videos. Straight Labyrinth Nº3. Even-spaced Parallels grew out of an exhibition, i.e., the exhibition was transformed into a film, while in the case of the previous one, You Step out of the Mirror, the film was transformed, among other formats, into an exhibition. “It is not the picture that should move; I want to move. Subiectum in actu,”15 can be read in “Film”, a handwritten manuscript that I have received thanks to the author. The initial motif

12 Mozgó Film/3. [Moving Film/3] Budapest: Balázs Béla Stúdió, 1988. 81. 13 Károlyi’s notes (“Studio Gallery – January 1979”, manuscript): Shooting – 18 November 1977. “Shielded Broadcast”… in the rehearsal room of the Pasarét Film Factory, as the two girls struggle with the wires of the microphone, facing one another as fencers – and the tape recorder functions as a hit register. Compensating for the tension induced by being under surveillance, they are describing each other… For them silence means crisis: instead of the silence of attention, they try to escape with aggressiveness; instinctive, awkward embarrassment: they only move so that they will be able to say something. They rely upon feedback. 14 Samuel Beckett: Film, 1965. http://www. ubu.com/film/beckett_film.html and http://www.ubu.com/papers/beckett_schneider.html 15 “One’s relationship to freedom is determined by the relationship between the person and the subject. It means that the more dominant the intellect, i.e., the subject in action, the “subiectum in actu,” is in one’ being, the higher and fuller the grade of freedom is; and if the subject is totally in himself or herself, then freedom is absolute and infinite.” András László, Līberālismus contrā Lībertātem. http://www.layakriya. hu/ultradextra/liber.html

St i l ls f rom t he f i l m

You Step out of the Mir ror, 1976–78

MIK LÓS PETER NÁ K

St i l ls f rom t he f i l m

LIGHT/SPACE/IM AGE , 1979

of the notes, which could be seen as a draft for an essay, is similar to his first film: “we create the sequence of events in order to remember – it can be projected again any time (’77).” Seeing as Károlyi keeps reutilising his earlier notes, be they texts or visual drafts, the long working process of “I Saw the I Saw You” and its modes of form-giving could be regarded as a working method, in which “external circumstances” obviously acted as co-authors. In his above-quoted notes, Károlyi makes reference to almost all the artists and authors who are important to him (such as Moholy-Nagy, Seurat, Tandori, Bódy, Huszárik, Mészöly, Hajnóczy, Pasolini, Pilinszky, Borges, etc. Quite exceptionally, Miklós Erdély is not mentioned here). From among those mentioned, it was a short story by Péter Hajnóczy that he was planning to adapt to film, as he had engaged in writing film proposals and scripts even when still at school (e.g., György Goldman, Sculptor, 1964). During the sessions of his school’s film club, he also had the opportunity to familiarise himself with projection technology. At this point, it might be worth putting a conjecture into words: While the avant-garde, or in stricter terms, the earlier generation of conceptual artists coming to the fore in the mid-1960s, had turned to poetry as a form of inspiration, as well as an art form that they were also engaged in (such as Erdély, Pauer, Szentjóby and Altorjai), Károlyi and his contemporaries turned to film for the same reason. Straight Labyrinth is based on colour and black-and-white, normal 8 mm film shots. The film was shot in his exhibition at the Bercsényi Club of the Budapest Technical University, and was initially presented in the form of an installation, i.e., as “expanded cinema”, with the projection envisioned using two projectors. As can be read in a description from the time: “When I project a transparency onto a translucent (gauze) curtain, the segment of reality behind the picture plane becomes incorporated in the background of the image. If I project two images (two opposite views of the same walking figure) onto this canvas from both sides, the spatial illusion of image and reality will overlap. (Both halves of the space are reality and illusion, all at the same time). The plane will only retain the figure. By ‘shifting apart’ the two sides of the pictorial plane (by projecting the films onto

Mirror Line Labyrinth | Zsigmond Károlyi and the Motion Picture

two curtains), the figure projected from two sides will emerge in the gap between the two curtains as a lack, while the two pictures intersect and dissolve in one another. On entering the room, the visitor walks along the corridor, repeating that which happens in the frame (with his shadow appearing on four planes: the two screens and the walls). On his way back, provided that the visitor does not pass by the projector,* his shadow will again cover up the figure on several occasions, i.e., the visitor himself becomes part of the image, while he actually terminates the image by blocking it out. *As he approaches the image on the wall, the limit of his shadow is his own size, or my life-size figure projected onto the screen.” Only traces of this concept can be detected in the video version available today, while the idea to unify the concepts of Even-spaced Parallels and Straight Labyrinth must have occurred in 1979, when he submitted his project for the “FilmTime” competition of the BBS.16 In the first, black-and-white part of the film, a girl (as a visitor) moves in the pictorial space (and in the exhibition space), with the camera moving, as well. (The girl will also return in the colour shots.) In the second part, a male figure (Károlyi) walks along the visible and invisible surfaces of the exhibition space and the always visible surfaces of the filmic space, according to a given choreography. Initially, the sound is provided by speeded-up music, while the second part has English-language narration,17 alternating with silent parts. Coming into the frame, the author shapes the film space through his own movements, so that he can observe the changes of this space later in this exposed form and also shape film time. In the making of both You Step out of the Mirror and Straight Labyrinth Nº3. Even-spaced Parallels, it is this authorial view (viewing) that seems to be of importance: the continuous playbacks, the plethora of editing potentials, the innumerable “director’s cuts” and descriptions, not to speak of newer works created in the wake of past experience (and the palpable material of the film strip) indicate that the question of offering points of view to assist the potential (external) viewer with the process of decoding was not raised, or was only tangentially raised. The author’s attention

16 A three-page film synopsis written in February, with the planned title: FÉNY/TÉR/ KÉP [the title is a pun on the words Light/ Space/Image, also meaning Light/Map]. http://www.c3.hu/collection/koncept/images/karolyi2.html For details see the synopsis among the film plans submitted in 1982, with the description of the original environment: Balázs Béla Stúdió film scripts, March 1982, Vol. II, 266 – 269. 17 “Reality is nothing but the reminiscent trace of its own disappearance,” narrated by Péter Forgács.

MIK LÓS PETER NÁ K

is exclusively focused on the autonomous act of film-making; form-giving is the same as in the case of any art object, and the experiential process is too complex to allow room for acknowledging the validity of any individual, one-off viewer position. For this reason, tiny details may be more important than narrative. The linearity of the film, its development in time, acts against the linearity of attention, which confounds fundamental film-viewing habits, the routine of attention. And it does not matter what you do not pay attention to, if you do not pay attention to anything. Thomas Stearns Eliot used Heraclitus’ two Fragments after the Diels edition as a motto for his volume of poetry, from which the excerpt quoted earlier in this text was taken.18 ηοῦ λόγος δ›ἐόνηορ ξςνοῦ ζώοςζιν οἱ πολλοὶ ὡρ ἰδίαν ἔσονηερ θπόνηζιν 1. p. 77. Fr. 2. (Although logos is common to all, most people live as if they had a wisdom of their own.) 18 Hermann Alexander Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 1903. Eliot indicated the volume and page numbers and the (then used) number of the Fragment. While the original edition did not include the English translation of the Fragments, by now a few online versions omit the Greek text and only include one of the available English translations. 19 The source of the English translation: http://www.davidgorman.com/4Quartets/ 20 László Beke, “Károlyi Zsigmond – a jelenlét, mint utópia.” [Zs.K. – Presence as Utopia]. Mozgó Világ 1979/1, 113–123. 21 Károlyi 2003: 175.

ὁδὸρ ἄνω κάηω μία καὶ ὡςηή 1. p. 89. Fr. 60. (The way upward and the way downward are the same.)19 Using Károlyi’s own words, László Beke stated that the sphere of thought that Zsigmond Károlyi fundamentally addressed was “our image in life (our life in the image) our image in the image our life in life,”20 even in the case of themes that are apparently utterly simple. His works could also be seen as reflections on problems related to the absence of, search for and return of the picture. If we add a fragment of a sentence written by Károlyi in one of his later texts, Entropy after Utopia – “A painter creates a non-existing place through realising himself…”21 – we have practically outlined the context in which his video works, made following his films, can be understood. We can see these places, with the painter within, while in the singular present time, in front of the camera, he

Column s.

T he 1978 work reproduced at t he Ghent Mu seu m of C ontempora r y A r t i n 1980. A st i l l f rom t he v ideo record i ng of t he per for ma nce.

Mirror Line Labyrinth | Zsigmond Károlyi and the Motion Picture

creates that unique formation, the meaningful translation of the given place, which takes place as the act of the subject, but which can only be sustained by the recording of the present object-lens, through a new translation. More precisely, it only becomes perceptible in time when viewing the video, while leaving no trace at the spot where it took place. These translations make it possible that the real action functions publicly, that the event becomes meaningful, at the cost of a special sense of depravity: the existential level of creative action becomes transformed, and the created meaning can be made visible in the form of pictures, at any place at all. Such is the nature of translation: just as Logos becomes Verbum in Latin, the intended gesture of artistic creation (“Kunstwollen”) becomes a concrete, sign-like message, an artwork. A reconstruction in its present form, Columns is a development of the original video following a new approach, drawing much upon Even-spaced Parallels and its sections resembling frame lines, which appear here on a different scale, but reduced in terms of quantity, while the sound is given by the script of the earlier work.22 The action is simple. Two laths of wood, propped up against the wall at a distance that equals their width, are painted white and black, and then the strip of wall in between them is painted grey (the mixture of white and black, as it were) at the same height as the laths. Following this, the parallels become organised into a straight line, seen from the perspective of the camera, forming a grey-white-black line leaning against one another, dividing the pictorial space into two, so that we are only able to gather information about the real spatiality based on the preceding scenes. The events in his three videos, Untitled, Still-life-Painting and Building,23 may be described similarly. The common element here is logos, the relevant translation of which is assisted by augmenting the glossary of the utterable with new verbs (verbum) through the form-giving made visible in these works. (If we were to position these videos in an international context, two endeavours of Gerry Schum’s Television Gallery, Land Art 1969 and the series Identifications 1970, are called to mind.) MUYBRIDGE IN MAKÓ (My book, for Thomas Bernhard, 1984) is a video by Károlyi that is the easiest to interpret in the traditional sense from his body of video

22 The text was published in: film/művészet (a magyar kísérleti film története). Budapest Galéria, 1983, 33. http://catalog.c3.hu/ mediatortenet/PDF/FILMMUVESZET_WEB. pdf 23 The titles of the videos can only be read in English on the original tapes: “COLUMNS”, UNTITLED 1984, STILL-LIFE-PAINTING 1984, BUILDING 1984.

Mallar mé in Makó (f i l m pla n), 1983

Two transparencies, 6×6 cm Photo: At t i la Pác ser

MIK LÓS PETER NÁ K

24 “When I walk, Oehler says, I think and I claim I walk, and suddenly I think and claim that I walk and think because I think that, while I am walking. And if we walk together and think this thought, we think that we walk together and at the same time, we think, even if not together, that we are thinking, but this is something quite different.” Thomas Bernhard: Gehen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971). 25 Cf. the caption under plate 21,“SORMINTÁK 77-ből” [Linear Patterns from 77” (Gilgamesh. Tablet Nine) I.K.E.M.XX. Balkon, 2003/3. http://www.balkon.hu/ balkon03-03/01karolyi.html 26 Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) was a photographer-inventor working in the bordering fields of science and art, one of the pioneers of film, the creator of zoopraxiscope. His work has inspired numerous artists, e.g., Gábor Bódy: Motion Studies, 1980.

Synthesi s (f i l m pla n), 197 7

Photo a nd tempera on paper, 50×65 cm

works, since it has a sujet (the quotation that can also be read in the work, and that can be heard twice and in two languages),24 it has a connotation – the title reference to the pioneering work of Eadweard Muybridge –, as well as a beginning, a middle and an end; thus, it has a sense of linearity that does not act against viewer expectations. The reason for this is that this video is about another realised work; it could be regarded as an actual analysis of an artwork, using the medium of video as a means and form. We can also see the analysed artwork, the bound book whose pages only contain legs (rightleft), as the author flips through the book at a given point in the video. Strangely enough, however, instead of the usual main title at the beginning of the film, the inscription left-right-left-right…25 is written out, decreasing in size in the horizontal axis of the frame until it forms an indecipherable linear pattern. The actual main title is to come later. Another conspicuous element, as compared to Károlyi’s earlier appearances in his films, is that while the work addresses walking, walking is brought to an end here, with only the legs remaining: images of legs as pages, as the pages of a book. It is only in the last shot that we can see moving legs, walking across graphic prints thrown about on the ground, depicting legs in a way very similar to the pages of the book, following which the book is closed (several times). Such a visual hierarchy actually represents the tense aleatoricism of the quoted text, which ends with the statement, “but this is something quite different”. But how come Muybridge26 appears in the main title? I hope I am not wrong to conclude that the relationship between the first consistent researcher

Mirror Line Labyrinth | Zsigmond Kรกrolyi and the Motion Picture

Descr iption of a Scene, 1980

Of fset pr i nt on paper, 250ร 250 m m

MIK LÓS PETER NÁ K: M i r r o r L i n e L a b y r i n t h | Z s i g m o n d K á r o l y i a n d t h e M o t i o n P i c t u r e

27 One such version was presented at Ernst Museum, Budapest, at the exhibition of the Intermedia Department of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, “Szép idő” [Nice Weather] in 1988: Gábor Győrfi and Ferenc Sebő: To the Master’s Memory. Zsigmond Károlyi: RembrRaNDt (Reconstruction by Gábor Győrfi). http://www.c3.hu/intermedia/kronologia/szepidok1.html 28 Miklós Fogarassy, “Fixírrel és vérlúgsóval” Károlyi Zsigmond fotós munkáinak néhány megközelítése [“Fixing Agent and Prussiate of Potash” Some approaches to the photographic work of Zs.K.]. Balkon, 2004/4. http://www.balkon.hu/balkon04_04/08fogarassy.html

of the technique of stop-motion photography, whose pictures and books have become fundamental, archetypical elements within our visual culture, and the graphic series based on the rhythm given by walking legs is created by the fact that this is something quite different. An essential element of graphic art prints is that a single sheet (matrix) is enough to print many copies, even as many prints as can fill a book. Film and video frames or photo sequences, however, require a separate picture for each phase, with each being a bit different from the other, even if you cannot see it when you observe a single element of the series. The illusion of movement, e.g., of walking, can be created from these minute differences through the functioning of the series (e.g., by projection). The last work that must be mentioned by way of a conclusion is not related to film and video, mediums that have been rendered obsolete over time, but to the heroic epoch of New Media, as it is a moving image based on a computer program. The original title and data of the work (rembRaNDt) Moving Graphics for Television Screen. (HT 1080 Z School Computer) point to the fact that it was motivated by graphic arts, while in terms of visualisation it is time-based. That which may be termed here as graphics is actually a printable custom-made program, written by the artist (grapho also means writing) for this work. With the help of the functioning machine and interface, it is possible to obtain a picture-like, perceptible version. Various platforms may serve this purpose27 with essentially the same result. On the monitor, you can see white light spots (or pixels on digital monitors) that seem to appear randomly on a black background, slowly developing into a familiar face: the portrait of Rembrandt, which is easy to identify thanks to the painter’s renowned self-portraits. Eventually, the image becomes disassembled again into pixels, only to start all over again in a cycle. The capitalised RND in Rembrandt’s name within the title refers to randomisation, but the decision to capture his portrait on the monitor was by no means made at random. As Miklós Fogarassy contended, “…taking the dissolution in the modern age and the by now questionable position of classical painting as a definitive point of departure, as it were – choosing Rembrandt from among the Old Masters as an example, whose works he has approached in such an original manner –, [Károlyi’s] pictures feature the functioning of line, the straight line, the point, the light-and-shadow relationship, and mirror (reflection), or in other words, segments of the temporal processes that accompany the making of a picture.”28 The way leading to/away from the picture, the way upward and the way downward, are the same. Budapest, October 2014

LÁSZLÓ BEKE

From Identification to “Differentiation”? The Art Critic at Variance with Himself. At the beginning of this millennium I wrote the following about Zsigmond Károlyi: “Could one possibly view the thirty-year work of an artist as a path from (a way out of ) the Straight Labyrinth to (and beyond) an (almost) homogeneous surface of colours (or paint)? I am not sure whether such a way or path exists; perhaps there are only works (in art), but there is also life, which is probably even more important, seeing that we are talking about a human being. In any case, art is of existential significance for Károlyi (even if it seems to be a parenthetical part of his activities nowadays), by which I mean that he encompassed the totality of his reflections on art, life, the world and himself in the installation in which he projected light through two parallel screens of gauze. At that time, in the 1970s, we could only rarely encounter such profound thought on art practice, and Károlyi chose light and photography, in addition to language, as the major means of his thinking. It was also photography that he used later on to learn how to think about paint and painting.”1 I think the above critical approach has not lost its relevance today. What actually needs to be tackled is the interval starting in 2002 continuing up to 2015 (until today): a prolonged compulsion for writing. I must try hard not to end up writing this text about myself instead of Zsigmond Károlyi.

1 Text from the cover flap of Zsigmond Károlyi’s book, I.K.E.M.XX. (Kecskemét: Magyar Fotográfiai Múzeum/Hungarian Museum of Photography, 2003). The decoding of the title is ‘An Unknown Central European Artist from the XXth Century’.

Ar t Academy Nude with a Tang ram Candle, 1973–83 Oi l on c a nva s , 100×80 cm

Chessboard , 1980

Of fset pr i nt , 2 4×2 4 cm

Chess for Ka ssák , 1979

Oi l on f ibreboa rd , 70×70 cm

Chess/Board/Picture, 197 7â&#x20AC;&#x201C;79 Photos on f ibreboa rd , 80x80 cm

LÁSZLÓ BEK E

In 2002 Károlyi earned his habilitation at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, to become the Head of the Painting Department there. Since then, as I was able to observe, he has focused his energies on teaching rather than on painting. On the pretext of my report as a habilitation opponent, all I was doing was recapitulating the initial period of his career as an artist (that I identified as a path from his studies in painting to conceptualism, then expanding it, as an approach to painting again, to the beginning of the 21st century).2 Way back at that time, the question was raised that it would be imperative to complete the full span of this path in a sort of monograph. The reason why this idea has remained unrealised is something that I would rather not discuss here. Let’s leave it at this: most probably I am to blame.

2 Zsigmond Károlyi, “Festészeti problémák posztkonceptualista megközelítése az 1970-es évek második felében” [Post-conceptualist Approach to the Problems of Painting in the Late 1970s]. An edited version of his habilitation lecture delivered at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts on 18 October 2002, published by the Balkon magazine in its issue No. 3/2003.

Column s, 197 7

M i xed tech n ique on paper, 21×30 cm

Now that I am re-reading the text of his habilitation lecture (as it was supposed to be a lecture delivered freely instead of a reading, it seems a bit suspicious that it has been put in writing) I am becoming more and more confused: at first I thought that I had written it (!). Later on I discovered an increasing number of comments in brackets, and realised that they are my interpolations meant to help Zsigmond edit his lecture for printing. So it seems that in the meantime I have managed to fully identify myself with him. By this I do not intend to suggest that the past ten or twelve (or even more) years have passed without longer pauses in our communication and even quarrels and divergences in terms of political, ideological and aesthetic views. But that does not matter now. There are only two possibilities to write a monograph in Hungary today. An art critic collects as many images as he can, arranges them in chronological order, and

F r o m I d e n t i f i c a t i o n t o “ D i f f e r e n t i a t i o n” ? T h e A r t C r i t i c a t Va r i a n c e w i t h H i m s e l f .

writes a sort of running commentary on them. An art historian, however, seeks to explore the past in detail, a drawback of which is an inclination to linger on every minute detail, which results in moving the artist to indulge in nostalgic reveries of the past instead of inspiring him to go on – with his work. In Károlyi’s case, none of these modes seem to be feasible. What needs to be done is to reveal so-far hidden correlations that have suddenly become relevant, and compel the artist to continue working on them at an accelerating pace. Perhaps he would prefer a slowed down synthesis, but we do not think the time has come for it yet. While several tendencies run parallel in Károlyi’s art practice, the appearance of the tangram paintings in the late 1970s and early 1980s signalled a marked shift in his work. Tangram is an ancient Chinese puzzle, consisting of seven regular geometric shapes (five smaller or larger triangles, a square and a parallelogram) that can be formed into tens of thousands of shapes. Károlyi’s work, however, never reflected the strictly systematic, combinational or variational mode of visual thinking characteristic of Vasarely and others. Was such a compositional mode, controlled by the tangram, a modern, a post-conceptual (postmodern) gesture, or was it perhaps an avant la lettre setting of a trend? For tangram, origami and many similar Oriental (logical) games count as explicitly trendy nowadays. In the early 1980s, a new tendency started along with postmodern art – more specifically, New Painting – mainly in the USA: Neo-Geo, which set for itself the aesthetic task of softening and rendering more painterly the strictness of geometric abstraction. Károlyi’s tangram paintings and other geometric works – for instance, his

Parallel Rows, 1993

Oi l on c a nva s , 98×137 cm

LÁSZLÓ BEK E

Tang ram (Sketches), 1984 29,7 × 21 cm

newer “remakes”, the Quadritriangles (2013/14) – may as well be regarded as part of this endeavour. He, however, arrived at this point from a different direction and set out on a different course from here. Painterliness was of seminal importance for him, but this painterliness always embraced a great portion of conceptualism, as well. One of Károlyi’s most radical – or in actual fact, an extremely conservative, i.e., academic – decision was to introduce studies in monochrome painting at the Hungarian Academy (or was it already a University?) of Fine Arts. Monochrome painting seems to be the greatest challenge for painting in the 20th-century history of art. From the end of the past century, no one can evade Malevich, Rodchenko, Yves Klein and Ad Reinhardt, and everyone strives to realise his or her unique, idiosyncratic approach. (The most painterly, the most material painting is at the same time the most conceptual art!)

Gr id of Light, 1987

Oi l on c a nva s , 4 8×52 cm

F r o m I d e n t i f i c a t i o n t o “ D i f f e r e n t i a t i o n” ? T h e A r t C r i t i c a t Va r i a n c e w i t h H i m s e l f .

Moreover, when an artist becomes a monochromist, he or she is no longer able to escape the charms of a colour, except at the price of aesthetic pangs of conscience. Furthermore, a monochrome painting should not represent, mean or symbolise anything. (The recent attempts – by either the artist or art critics – at finding sense in them, such as in the case of orange or red [mud], should not be taken seriously.) As for Károlyi, to the best of my knowledge, he never painted a single “real” monochrome picture. As far as one is able to judge in retrospect, his impulse sprung from the most elemental, sensual, desire to paint. “My paintings are artworks made with a brush in oil on canvas, and if they have any theme at all, then it is actually the brushstroke. You draw the brush across the canvas from edge to edge, which becomes thick; and, depending on how thick or thin the paint is, it becomes matt or glossy. I employ the elementary beauty of painting.”3 Taking a brush as thick as possible and a surface as large as possible, to paint it completely or partly, or draw wide, impasto “lines”, i.e., gestures. For the latter, see especially: “Each brushstroke on the surface means painting the background.” “The picture that I would like to paint is something like when you cannot see a picture from the glinting paint.”4 In other cases, he gets hold of planks and designs installations, or makes photographic drafts, then places vertical stripes on the walls, or makes newer photographs of the created situation, and then starts again painting vertical stripes that overlap and appear to make visible an empty background of a different colour. Yet another type of painting (the browned “photo-paintings” with photographic emulsion applied onto the canvas, which Károlyi started making in 1985) drew upon the experience, or were made upon the conceptual consideration of the fact, that the tim-

3 Erzsébet Kulich, Hagyom a képeket „beszélni” [I let the paintings “speak”]. In: Fejérmegyei Hírlap, 16 October 1995 (Interview with ZS. K.). 4 In: Károlyi Zsigmond (untitled, exhibition catalogue, Budapest: Budapest Galéria Kiállítóháza, 1987], pp. 10, 22.

Scaf folding , 1987

Oi l on c a nva s , 70×70 cm

LÁSZLÓ BEK E

5 An example of Károlyi’s “semiotics”: „[ide kérek 6 függőleges vonalat - bl] + + + + + + +xxxxxxx “In between the two, there is the cross – either as a symbol ( just as, for instance, Hugo Ball uses it: ‘The word and the image are one… Christ is image and word. The word and the image are crucified.’) or as Descartes’ coordinate system […]” – I refer to Károlyi here, because recently one of my friends blamed me for such interpretation of the +. L.B. (Zsigmond Károlyi: (What do the works with the X have to do with the earlier works with the [ide kérek 5 függőleges vonalat. Bl ?) In: Károlyi Zsigmond [untitled, exhibition catalogue, Budapest: Budapest Galéria Kiállítóháza, 1987] p. 17. 6 See Zsigmond Károlyi, E. K. G. (Budapest: Pauker Collection, 2012), with a preface by Imre Bak, “Expresszív konceptuális geometria” [Expressive Conceptual Geometry] and especially its cover with the exhibition view at Villa Waldberta, Feldafing, 1995).

Circle, 197 7

(E x h ibited at t he Ghent Mu seu m, 1980)

ber diagonal bracings forming “X” shapes in the scaffolding of a building he saw in his neighbourhood also evoke the annihilating gesture of crossing out. He photographed these X’s one upon the other, and manipulated them through montage, usually based upon the tangram principle.5 When the model of Tatlin’s Tower came within Károlyi’s range of vision, he had already acquired the methods of deconstructive architecture, as well. There were several artists and authors at the time who engaged in such type of semiotics, from game expert Balázs Vargha (who was originally a philosopher) to the strictly conceptualist artist Péter Türk. It was but a single step from this point to “painting over” (covering up) which, in Arnulf Rainer and other artists’ cases, meant re-painting pictures. Is it effacement or, on the contrary, infallible protection that might as well be removed later on? Here is a trivial contrast: painting and whitewashing. Károlyi has realised that the “ontological essence” of these two forms of activity is basically the same, just as Walter Benjamin contended that the essence of painting lies in “Mal”. His argument can only be understood in German, as “Mal” means a patch and a trace in “malen” (to paint) on the one hand, and in “Denkmal” (monument, leaving a reminding mark) on the other hand. When Károlyi paints and whitewashes, he covers the surface of the canvas or fibreboard with a layer of paint as a reminder. He painted such “pictures” in the first half of the 1990s, their spectrum ranging from the recognisable paraphrases of Kassák’s “Picture-architecture’ to almost complete monochromes.6 It should be noted at this point that in this domain of painting, a “painting” has to be strictly differentiated from the product coated with paint that is inadequately

F r o m I d e n t i f i c a t i o n t o “ D i f f e r e n t i a t i o n” ? T h e A r t C r i t i c a t Va r i a n c e w i t h H i m s e l f .

but all the more consistently called in the colloquial a “picture”. Károlyi paints the surface – be it an A/3 paper, canvas or fibreboard – in the most careless manner, in faint colours, with daubed and smeared impasto, with “badly” articulated and shifting forms, yet in a supremely sophisticated manner. And as far as the supports are concerned, they range from the almost one-dimensional, thin paper to three-dimensional, painted objects. Károlyi’s approach to resolving the correlation between one and two dimensions is radical: “A straight line is the lateral view of a jumble of helter-skelter scribbles (drawn on a planar surface!”, he exclaimed in 1977. This sentence could be the motto for the artist’s initial period heading in the direction of painting (way back in the 1970s), a period in which the line conceptually dominated over the plane, that is, surface. The full text of his habilitation lecture from 2002 should be quoted here, as it seems that he has not been able to tell us more about himself since (or has he?), and that he has not been able to realise the goal he described at that time as his theoretical goal better than that. Or has he? All the texts and notes written by Károlyi should be published in chronological order, richly illustrated with his work. This solution would be a reversal of the pseudo-monographic situation when someone writes a running commentary in between representative reproductions of artworks. Although his book I.K.E.M.XX. includes an appendix with an array of texts, but written a decade after, such an undertaking deserves to be perfected. It needs to be shown that Károlyi is at least as great an art phi-

Central Symmetr y, 1991

Oi l on c a nva s , 2 pieces , 1 40 x 1 40 cm K nol l Ga l ler y, Bud apest , 1992 Photo: Ja n de Nys

losopher as he is an artist. An extraordinary trait of his mindset is that he thinks like a poet: in powerful imagery, similes and metaphors. His initial inspiration came from János Pilinszky and other poets. His early key work entitled Straight Labyrinth is not a mere illustration of Pilinszky’s poem but its “realisation”.7 “Yes, Pilinszky’s world grown cold and no man’s land […] , the tin-cup toppled in the straw, the catatonic twilight, etc., could be quoted without end, but the later Pilinszky is also good here; even better! It was some type of post-modernity after his classic period…”, Dezső Tandori linked the poet to the painter-conceptual photographer with these words.8 Károlyi’s life and work has been accompanied by such statements and texts – by others and primarily by himself – up to the present. Organically connected to this world, there is a series of paintings with dogs, teddy bears, bunnies, dragons and other children’s toys made into trendy still-lifes (2000/2001) – perhaps not independently from Tandori’s sparrows and teddy bears? I have a few voluminous files, one bearing the label, “Collection for László Beke”, and 25 pages within it: “the selected material (for Miklós Peternák)”. Both remain to be published. 7 Naturally, one can also find an analogue in Borges’ writings: “I know of a Greek labyrinth that is but one straight line.” In: Jorge Luis Borges (1942), “Death and the Compass.” Collected Fictions. Tr. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1998), 143-56. 8 In: Zsigmond Károlyi, I.K.E.M.XX., 2003.

Károlyi’s paintings are perplexingly relevant today, and even his old works are “contemporary”. Is there anything that I can add to what I have already said; I who once so strongly identified myself with him and yet became distanced from him later on? Is it necessary at all to write about a philosophical painter who seeks to find painterly truth? For me, this is a characteristically “post-contemporary” situation.

A N DR Á S FORGÁCH

Is he in the right place? …As if things’ dependence on something verified that something. – It is on a sinking balloon that they ask of everything: “Do we need it?” But for what? – For convenience? For existence? The floor is firm in here and there is furniture; and here I am with my time, which I dispose of boundlessly. I’ll pack it off, if I like I’ll leave it open, if I like for a possible chance to come – … PETRI GYÖRGY: Demi Sec

One faces a difficult task when trying to define Zsigmond Károlyi’s place, and I am not speaking of his painterly place, even though Zsigmond Károlyi himself, standing in the place of something, is quite a picturesque phenomenon that calls to be painted, but the place he occupies as a painter: the precise parameters of his entire position in both Hungarian painting and the art scene in a broader sense. The reason for this difficulty is Zsigmond Károlyi himself. It is his doing in the best sense of the word, as he always leaves you with a sense of delicate ambiguity: an incessant oscillation between viewing and critical interpretation, a fleeting glance and attention, ignorance, enjoyment, evaluation, and the process of canonisation now interrupted then gathering momentum, and the compulsion to position something in an endless row of artworks. You sense such ambiguity both when viewing his works – which are doubtlessly professionally and perfectly executed artworks seeking to record traces of their making, be they small pieces of paper or photographs made to transform into photograms or the results of the application of paint onto traditional stretched and primed canvases – and when you are in his company and talk to him. The latter remark is by no means irrelevant, since social sharing (meetings, discourses, talking of things, buzzing around things through discussions, the constant endeavour to approach something and dance around the world through words) is not only a major aspect in Zsigmond Károlyi’s maturing as an artist (see his first masters; see Café Rózsa; and see FMK1), but it is a crucial facet of his everyday existence, as well. This must be emphasised because, not unimportantly, he is also a university professor who is obliged to render the unknown understandable, and who is supposed to explore and reveal the specific talents of each of his differently-minded

1 Young Artists’ Club, Budapest

A N D R Á S F O R G ÁC H

and differently-gifted students. It is by no coincidence that Károlyi speaks so often and so passionately about his own experiences as an art academy student; see his entire “Czimra-period,” if this label may be applied to his reflections on the oeuvre of Gyula Czimra, which resulted in quite a few significant early works and gestures (such as the cobalt blue easel, which is simultaneously an anecdote, a legend, a story, an allegory, a paradigm and the origin of major artworks). To put it briefly, this sense of ambiguity is brought about by Zsigmond Károlyi himself, who senses and makes you sense the same tension in everyday existence as can be felt in his works. On the one hand, he seems to suffer at times from the absence of a precise standard, measure, term or category, under which his work would unambiguously fall, because it seems to be too varied even in his own eyes and impossible to place in a single definitive trend; and he is often worried about the possibility that his work may seem unfinished, as well as being indeed unfinishable, and that it might not be so coherent, consistent and closed as the oeuvres of other painters he adores and esteems (one may call to mind Lucian Freud, or perhaps Félix Vallotton, or Giorgio Morandi, or Gyula Pauer with his own “Pseudo” that seems to be the Jolly Joker taking it all, or possibly Paul Klee, who so admirably kept track of his own work that at the moment of his death it would have been child’s play to produce a catalogue raisonné, while Károlyi himself has often complained about the painful – although obviously almost intentional – incompleteness of his recordkeeping). On the other hand, however, by continuously destroying what he has just made, or by constructing that which he creates by destruction, he generates the very situation that makes his work resist categorisation and defy positioning; a situation that has become a significant part of his art practice. Without turning a remark into an exercise in empty stylisation, it must be noted at this point that he is a practitioner of discussions focused on his contemporaries. He keeps an eye on them and devotes important articles to them: articles that will surely figure as key items in the discussed artists’ bibliographies, including texts on Gábor Pásztor (Mirrors Put in Fire, Kortárs, August 1988), András Lengyel (The Way from Utopia to Entropy, Új Művészet, June

A nd rás Forgách Zs. K. in New York , 1988 Penci l a nd pen on paper

Is he in the right place?

1991) Ernő Tolvaly (The Wall of the Drinking Glass and the BRIDE, Mozgó Világ, August 1981) or the one on Béla Veszelszky (The “Right Place”, Balkon, August 1994, which was also published subsequently in the artist’s catalogue for his exhibition at the Budapest Kunsthalle). Naturally, he also speaks of himself in these articles, whose style is close to live speech: a meditative style, often stopping to think or quote from his notebooks and favourite thinkers, making the personal presence of the speaker perceptible. He enters the space, as it were, between his subject and the reader, indicating the position of the speaker. (An excellent example of the latter is an unpublished text he wrote in the early 2000s on Jenő Barcsay, entitled ONE Barcsay PAINTING, which he considers unfinished as a text, even though it is perfect in its own right.) For an illustration it is enough to quote the opening sentences of the “(paragraphs of a summarizing nature)” passage of his earliest text, written on Ernő Tolvaly (one could write a complete novel about the stylistic-syntactic-semantic dimensions of this uncapitalised sentence in boldface, full of confidence that makes you feel unsure), arranged according to the following headings: “1) The making of an artwork is the agony of something. When it is completed it is dead.” “2) Any reading may be equally valid. E.g., this text should be viewed in the same way as one observes the layer of paint in tautological portraits; the movements and developments of the ground will be written onto them.” “3) The unknown is given, independent of us: the surrounding world. It reproduces itself through thinking; it exists within us.” “4) Ernő Tolvaly’s attachment to the unknown, his adherence to nonstyle, keeps re-creating the basic situation. The ‘tabula rasa’ does not develop, and that is why

Mandala , 1980

C ol lage, 38 × 38 cm

A N D R Á S F O R G ÁC H

all of his works are without precedent.” “5) My writing is rippling water. No such thing as an unsuccessful wave exists; just as neither good nor bad, nor any type of classifiable tautology exists.” And the concluding line: “That which cannot be finished may be left unfinished any time”. This aphorism of an almost Wittgensteinian mysticism is complete with a note: the description of a life event, either the event or its description, or the link created between the two, is made to become an artistic act (Here, I believe, Károlyi quoted from his own diary): “We are sitting in the next door Café Virág. With my back against the wainscot, I am looking out the window. Farther away, the waiter is sweeping up splinters of a knocked-down glass. Trans Europa Express by Kraftwerk is being played on the tape recorder. The train stops, the song ends. ‘Well,’ I break the silence crossing my arms, ‘before I go to the grocery to do some shopping, we could have another round,’ / (That which comes in between the quotation mark should be viewed just like a photo taken in your hand; self-exempting defiance-alliance to a ‘duality’ in the face of the infinite.)” To paraphrase Károlyi, that which comes between the brackets mirrors image-making through reflections, through the conceptual. This brings his approach quite close to the aporias or paradoxes of the pre-Socratic philosophers: we do not have to make images in order to make images. It is conspicuous that Károlyi keeps signing his unclassifiable position. Even though there might be a category or tendency into which one of his periods could possibly fit (Conceptual Art, Fluxus, monochrome painting, and so forth), certain parts of his oeuvre will surely stand out, and will surely also question the category at hand (while being actually correlated). They are linked through their conceptual-intellectual character. “Painter of thoughts”: this could be a hit right in the middle or that squares the circle. His last period – or more precisely, his most recent period (Petri could be quoted here again: “the last years of a Hungarian poet / as the earlier ones have been lived through”), which is not the last period in teleological terms, as it does not involve fulfilment or a goal attained, but it is just like this and not like something else – is, nevertheless, the survey or rendering illusory of a type of completeness (starting from the pictorial implications of the meaning of illusion, it implies completeness as an image; an exhibition as a single image, the image of a single thought) through a process of methodological and systematic reduction, with the help of a serial arrangement of geometric shapes and colour patches. His former monochrome “period” created the illusion of a similar sense of closure: the possibility of survey. The task is to only engage in what can actually be grasped; and in the case of a teacher, an attempt to give students – and art critics – an alphabet of forms with unlimited validity can do no harm. He uses apparent formalism, a sort of simplified language, in an attempt to express modes of extreme sensibility, where the details – by which I refer to the manner of painting rather than to the geometric shapes present in his paintings: the perfunctory composition with its vagueness and “faults”, including the translucent presence of an earlier version, or the relationship between the layer of paint and the canvas (“because the Angel is in the details”, to quote Petri again) –, that is, the image-making method itself, which makes use of basic geometric forms and which may seem quite simple on the surface, is a direct

Is he in the right place?

(straight) continuation and a monumentally enlarged detail of the congenially intuitive conceptual gesture that he engaged in as an Art Academy student. An unsettling sense of boundlessness is closely and inevitably connected to the above: an array of predecessors, students and contemporaries, whose works he has visited and who have visited his works. In fact, it implies a sense of boundlessness within the artistic process, or in other words, an endeavour to avoid any gesture that would entail conflicts by being too harsh, too strong and too radical; a type of artistic humbleness and withdrawal into the background (he never speaks of his own art practice to his students), the sublimation into form of the ever recurring act of searching, even searching about, alternating with repeated periods of silence, while the sense of variability to which his works attest points to the direction of the infinite (the unfinishable that may be left unfinished any time). Such a reticent, contemplative act of form-giving, however, is also a pedagogical gesture. A gesture of educating not only his students but also audiences and art critics, interposed with continuous learning. In The Third, Gábor Bódy’s 1971 film (in which I played a part, too, and which documented several artistic attitudes against the fictitious backdrop of a university theatre group’s rehearsals for a stage adaptation of Faust: what could one do with knowledge?), the 19-year-old Zsigmond Károlyi states that learning is also an artistic act; or else, artistic practice is learning. Unfortunately, I do not have this film in my archive here in Hungary, so I cannot quote him, but this detail of the film was used by the art group Kis Varsó / Little Warsaw in their 2009 project for Berlin: at the Koch-Strasse station of the Berlin U-Bahn,

Huber t Rober t (1733–1808) T he Painter’s Studio

Oil on canvas, 37×46 cm (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam)

A N D R Á S F O R G ÁC H

they projected a detail from Gábor Bódy’s film, in which Károlyi (their dearly loved teacher) spoke about learning, and which was counterpointed with their professor’s current video commentaries.

2 János Pilinszky, “Here and Now” (Trans. by Bruce Berlind and Mária Kőrösy). In: Walter Cummins (ed.), Shifting Borders. East European Poetries of the Eighties. Cranbury, London, Mississauga: Associated University Presses, 1993, p. 235. 3 Dezső Tandori, “Stairs neither up, nor down”. Trans. by Gábor Gyukics and Michael Castro. In: Swimming in the Ground: Contemporary Hungarian Poetry (Ed. and trans. by Michael Castro and Gabor G. Gyukics). St. Louis: Neshui Publishing, 2001.

For Károlyi, the most effective formula to solve the sublation of ambiguity, to delineate the hard contours of uncertainty, is to create a paradigm, a myth and a situation for his works out of his life, his frame of mind, his sensibility and his own figure (in this sense, I could compare him to Hölderlin, whose handwritten poems are virtual visual artworks with their ambiguous endings and multiple tectonic layers of endlessly superscripted, scribbled-over lines), because that which is lifelike is never closed, but is fluid, changing and open. Károlyi lets autobiographical facts and motifs surface in the description of the genesis of certain motifs (for, as we have already seen it, the description is part of the artwork). He describes places that he visited with a friend, perhaps a long lath fence or a zebra crossing, where he exposed his camera without any specific intention of making art, or he describes a shirt he used to wear as a child: this is how he creates form out of a past chance event. Nevertheless, the figure, i.e., the invisible self-portrait of the artist, is not created through direct autobiographical references, but by presenting an attitude. It means that he instils into his works a sense of tension and uncertainty – not so much doubt about the possibility of arriving at certitude, but hypersensitivity to existence as a whole, through always changing modes of approach to artistic problems, questioning them at the very moment of their application, as well as carefully preserving and exposing his uncertainty about his own significance. As the notebooks of his diary kept for many years show, however, what he actually attempts to explore by such stubborn questioning is non-existing certitude or absence itself. Poems by Dezső Tandori and János Pilinszky must be quoted here, which are recurrent references in Károlyi’s art theoretical or autobiographical notes. Pilinszky’s “I look at the lawn, maybe the lawn. / The grass moves. Wind or shower maybe, / or simply the fact that you are / moves the world, here, now.”2 And Tandori’s “Or is there room for / the missing and the available? / Is it necessary at all / to make this distinction?”3 The latter

Z sig mond K á roly i. A n a mateu r photo f rom 1957.

Is he in the right place?

sentence reverberates in almost all of Károlyi’s paintings. An image or shape painted onto the surface gently turns away on the canvas to let something emerge from underneath, an underlying entity explicitly pointing to the missing picture, the place of (the room for) the picture. This might also be the source of his consciously maintained and perhaps intentionally harboured angst connected to completed and closed artworks, which would make (I must use romantic epithets in what follows here) the painfully beautiful ensemble of “the available” and “the missing” disappear. (The notion of beauty in Károlyi’s art practice could be the subject of a separate analysis). The risk involved in leaving the artwork open, however, suggests some sort of uncertainty, despite the fact that Károlyi, a teacher, a critic and a painter, has a very firm sense of quality. It is at this point that the act of searching (the search itself) for non-existing certitude becomes important. Károlyi seems to re-create such non-existing certainty with the help of diaries and sketchbooks kept for decades, books read time and again (see Heinrich Wölfflin or Rudolf Arnheim), and literary examples introduced into his body of works (from Miklós Mészöly to Péter Hajnóczy, and from Dezső Tandori to Sándor Weöres), until the certitude of uncertainty is eventually crystallised into artworks. As a result, the artistic methodology, along with the collection of paradigms, is placed in a more or less dangerous and fluid connection with (auto)biographical elements. In the case of a retrospective exhibition it may come as natural, since a standard catalogue also ends with dates and lists, outlining a kind of biography. As a characteristic trait of Károlyi’s frame of mind, a private family photograph will also become a paradigm in his hands (i.e., it can be conceptually linked to his recent paintings): a photo of the artist taken by his father, showing the then ten-year-old boy in a striped shirt. Those stripes are placed in the context of the stripes and lines that span over his various periods of painting. One could go on listing examples of the diverse transformations that a line, a dividing line (see “straight labyrinth”, i.e., the white stripe on the floor of the legendary Czimra exhibition in 1976), a gap, an empty strip of wall in between two pictures, a wall surface, a brick fence, or a zebra crossing may undergo in Károlyi’s work. It might count as an art historical commonplace in

Ready-made picture, 1975

1 20 × 35 cm

A N D R Á S F O R G ÁC H

the context of Károlyi’s art practice to mention that a photo he took as a teenager of a house being refurbished (that certain “photo from ‘68”) was not envisioned as a prelude to his subsequent X Series, but merely as an interesting picture. An even more characteristic anecdote is that of the “filthy rag”, his grandmother’s one-time floor cloth, which surfaced forty years after, wrapped up in newspaper. As the artist put it in one of his notes, it was actually not a floor cloth, but “what the professional jargon calls ‘drapery’”, which he planned to exhibit stretched onto canvas frames in 1975. The anecdote ends like this: “What happened was that 40 years after, I put it into the washing machine, and then re-composed it.” (Re-composition in this case, as far as I remember, implied rotating it. I have seen the picture on the wall of the artist’s studio.) As the Pilinszky poem also suggests, it is always an actual person who is looking, and it is the mere existence of the person that moves the world, showing that the world exists. A wonderful example of the latter is a train of thought I have heard Károlyi articulate regarding the problem of how rain could be captured in painting. While Hockney, Van Gogh, Hokusai and others experimented with representing rain by jagged lines of falling drops of rain or by waves moving in expanding circles on the surface of a pond or a pool, Károlyi approached this task from a completely different direction: invisible raindrops move the leaves of a tree or a bush as they fall on them, and in the wake of these small hits, the leaves keep stirring in an incalculable, ungraspable and irregular rhythm, to bend backwards as the raindrops collected on them roll down. Instead of asking whether it can be visualised in painting or still photography, the thought penetrates into the heart of

Gábor Sz abó i n Gy u la A lpá r i St reet i n 1986.

Is he in the right place?

the phenomenon and distinguishes the irregular from the apparently regular rhythm, moving from the representable towards the irrepresentable. We are speaking of a teacher, a philosopher, and a painter. Does the order have hierarchical importance? Or is he first and foremost a painter, in the second place a teacher, and a philosopher only in the last place? Or is he a philosopher above all, that is, a thinking man, and only in relation to that role is he a painter, and besides that, a teacher? No, a man who has taught decorators and would-be artists at different sites and at different, high school and university, levels since he graduated from the Art Academy, is surely not a teacher only secondarily – just as one of his first masters, Ákos Birkás, or another highly important master, Miklós Erdély, who spawned a school despite and exactly through his being outside the institutional system, or Gábor Bódy, to only mention three fixed stars in Zsigmond Károlyi’s sky. The names of Tamás Szentjóby and György Jovánovics must also be mentioned here (but I could also refer to Dixi – János Gémes): in the 1970s all of them were great masters of spoken language (just like Gyula Pauer). These masters delivered long monologues onboard a train, in pubs, in a car, or in a studio, as virtual artworks ready to be framed or printed. It might be related to the fact that owing to the censorship of the time focussed on printed matters, the expressive power of spoken language became heightened, similarly to Shakespeare’s time when the majority of people were illiterate. Károlyi became a true master of such prolific and meandering monologues, often based on free associations and subjected to deep-rooting impulses and parallelisms, so much so that thinking manifesting itself in spoken language also provided a latent paradigm, as well as inspiration, for his later works. It might be no coincidence that in a discussion with Orshi Drozdik in 2011 he stated – rather boldly, I think – the following: “For me, the key works of the era, however, that could represent the characteristic vein of the whole period in retrospect, were the Fluxus events made by members of the “Rózsa Circle”; bagatelle events that could be re-enacted any time, based on a simple piece of paper. For example, what I did was to line up all the tables within the room along a single line, and with this the work was done. As an emblem of this Rózsa Circle period, I could mention two photos by Ernő [Tolvaly], ‘What do Gilbert and George do when they’re not living sculptures?’ It points to the core of the entire problematics, I think. Then, the question of whether this counts as avant-garde art or not, or under which category it would fall if someone was sitting at a table drinking coffee in a café, or what differentiates a living sculpture from life: well, actually, this seems to be the cardinal question of the time.” What makes the difference indeed? Obviously, it is not the order of social roles that counts, but the continuing constellation of these things: and this is the point where the world at large starts racking its brain: where is Zsigmond Károlyi’s place, after all? Károlyi has provided a precise and definite answer to the above question; on several occasions, he has stated firmly that he was in the right place between 1975 and 1980, as that which he made and did at that time was the most important not only for him but

A N D R Á S F O R G ÁC H

for the era as a whole, and that in this respect, it does not matter at all how many people realised it at the time and how many people have known it since, and whether he is mentioned and referenced, and whether he has become part of so-called art history. And indeed, we have learned from Mikhail Bulgakov that the work is not destroyed by fire (even if it appears to have been burned). “That five years’ period of time was highly interesting in my respect,” he said in the above-quoted discussion with Orshi Drozdik in 2011. “In 1980 I thought I was to stay in Belgium, but in the end I returned to Hungary and I basically haven’t done much from that time on. I’ve practiced teaching. Quite sincerely, I must say that I am not interested in the art historical position of the whole thing. I’m satisfied with what I did between 1975 and 1980, and I’m aware that I haven’t made anything better than that. It doesn’t matter whether someone else also believes or realises it, because it doesn’t matter what happens in Hungary. What is important to me is that I did something that indeed resulted in some international feedback. But then I returned home to start teaching at the Decorators’ School. Later, around 1990, I wrote a letter to the museum in Gent, asking them to send back my works, the portfolio that

T he Second 70×70 cm Painting , 1992 Oi l on c a nva s , 70×70 cm

Is he in the right place?

I left there… Then I found out that they had thrown them out. Who cares about Hungarian art? … One could check the participants of the 1977 Biennial [of Paris], where I took part, and see what has become of all the other artists. But I’m not really interested in it now, just as I’m not interested in knowing who reported on me to the secret police. I have lots of things to do; I invent tasks for myself. It suffices to say that within the five years’ period of time following my art academy studies, I’m interested in what I made myself. If someone mentions something else, then of course, I start thinking about it; but I feel I don’t have a reason to envy others.” And indeed: a version of his habilitation lecture delivered at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts on 18 October 2002, edited for and published by the Balkon magazine in its issue No. 3/2003, about “An Unknown Central European Artist in the 20th Century”, namely Zsigmond Károlyi, presents a brilliant and infallible youthful Zsigmond Károlyi, who was unable to make mistakes and who was in unison with his time and himself. I believe that this rather subjective statement regarding his art practice is unassailably objective. Apart from the series that Károlyi made in the late 1990s and early 2000s about his sons and their toys – which I am not discussing here, as it is not included in the present exhibition (even though one could tell a lot about them, and even though their absence is surely meaningful) – it is clear that the above-quoted thoughts, expounded by way of a situational analysis, with the nearly painful exactitude, fluency and uncompromising resolution as they reach their goal, continue into the great monochrome series that preceded the colourful paintings presented here in greater number. First shown in 1996 at the King Saint Stephen Museum in Székesfehérvár, this series comprise almost ugly canvases, with their colour resembling dark matter or grey concrete, conveying explicit and brutal opposition to colourfulness. The thick layers of paint, applied onto the canvas with deliberately rough brushstrokes, bring about a pattern partly resembling traces of formwork in concrete buildings. Proceeding from painting to painting in this series, Károlyi repeatedly experimented with and developed the technique of absence that suits his personality so well. He re-created the delicate vibration born in the wake of duality that is the hallmark of the above-quoted two poems by Pilinszky and Tandori – iconic presences in Károlyi’s work – through his brushstrokes and the bulging, protruding paint (resulting in rough, relief-like surfaces that evoke the dynamics of painted matter as can be seen in Van Gogh and Rembrandt paintings, even though Károlyi’s surfaces are diametrically different from them in that his surfaces direct attention to the act of painting). Such surfaces show directions and overlaps by means of patterns showing through one another, exposing unprimed canvas areas here and there, or continuing a brushstroke on the side of the picture. Instead of attempting to delight the viewer’s eye, however, it is meant to initiate the observer into a process. The thick layer of unadorned paint applied onto the canvas is effervescent matter. It is not delight, however, that these paintings seek to bring to the observer. As is also suggested by the remarkable titles given to the majority of them, which refer to problems, colours, predecessors or methodology, they differ from his recent paintings (the main material of the present exhibition), in which an abstract picture and a combination of geometric motifs meta-

A N D R Á S F O R G ÁC H

morphose into veritable landscapes before our very eyes. The Székesfehérvár exhibition, as opposed to the present one in Paks, was perhaps the most radical painterly gesture Károlyi has ever made, even though the latter statement is a sort of euphuism, as the manner in which the program is completed seems to resemble a laboratory experiment. The sudden and radical reconfiguration of reality, which occurred in the external world during those years (even though it seems to have actually happened on the surface), triggered the painter’s counter-reaction, manifesting itself in a sort of downgraded sophistry: Michelangelo fashioning a chair leg.4 There are two important quotations that must be referred to at this point: one from the already quoted discussion with Orshi Drozdik, and the other one from a more recent text written by painter Imre Bak in 2012, because both texts examine Károlyi’s recent activities from the perspective of an artist, rather than from that of an aesthete. (Italics are mine, A.F.)

4 Reference to the job Michelangelo is forced to do in a vision of the future, the ‘phalanstery” scene of The Tragedy of Man (1862), a play by Imre Madách. (Translator’s note)

Orange Str ipe, 1994 (2012) Oi l on c a nva s , 70×100 cm

“Let us take, for example, the American Thomas Eakins, who painted wrestlers and rowers: while his painting is nothing but insipid effort, his photos are wonderful. This is where the fundamental problem lies, and this is the point where many will stop painting, because painting is a giveaway: it demands that you are able to like your own movements. The apparatus, however, releases you from this demand. It is the triumph of “natural beauty,” that of naturalism, when the camera reproduces and multiplies the unknown. It is, of course, only a working hypothesis that a painter speaks of a world understood, because, in this respect, the medium is the painter himself, rather than the painting. Naturally, this is an immensely difficult, complicated matter on the whole.”

Is he in the right place?

At the Székesfehérvár exhibition, we saw a painter who, instead of showing that he liked his own movements, actually concealed his movements in professional terms. And while these movements may seem to be rigid and mechanical (even if they may be enjoyable in themselves, just as for example, hatching or any other apparently mechanic act may be a wonderful activity for someone drawing), one faces a much too personal message here: this is the point at which I have arrived by now; this is my relationship with painting; I am engaged in daubing, and not simply making monochromatic paintings, but choosing colours that are almost non-colours. I am interested in structures, and meanwhile I feel my entire youthful age throbbing and pulsating in me; not that I am interested in it, since I am no longer a young one, but a 44 year old man, but I flash light upon it so that those who understand the young ones can see it, while I offer my remarks on the problematics of painting. In his recent paintings, which include a few radiantly beautiful pieces – beautiful in the sense that an inexplicable harmony is created in them beyond their intellectual-conceptual contents, with colours folding out – Károlyi communicates something not only through the eventualities of the painted matter or the signs of transparency or the structures of emptiness revealed by rotations, but by mobilising the expressive power of colour, and thus creating contact points and borders within the apparently disciplined geometric motifs. At this point, I must let Imre Bak speak (Expressive, Conceptual Geometry): “Starting in the seventies, in that seemingly fluid situation, it became inevitable for artists to have a theoretical-conceptual basis, which is also a characteristic trait of Károlyi’s work presented here. …Reference to constructivist forms, however, has become mere reference by now, as instead of placing forms onto the pictorial surface to construct pictorial structures out of them, he makes the picture’s surface become the field for a painterly act, at times questioning the rectangular surface itself. Forms are also created as a result of such activity on a colourful, sensuous surface, emphasising its materiality. As Matisse put it, painting is not about colouring shapes, but shaping colours. In Károlyi’s work, the pictorial surface – including the frame, the mount, the picture-within-the-picture and rotations – provides the subject instead of the actual motifs applied. The traditional closed, rectangular pictorial surface is questioned here in the same way as in the colour aluminium reliefs by Imi Knoebel, built from narrow rectangular structures, or as Liam Gillick builds colour “laths” in three dimensions to produce spatial painting. Zsigmond Károlyi, however, adheres to the structured, sensuous space of the pictorial surface. This pictorial space starts expanding from the material, reaching out into infinity, evocative of metaphysical content. The emerging forms, which appear to have three-dimensional qualities, fill the space of the pictorial surface with tension. At other times, coloured spaces are built one on top of the other, their relations generating a further three-dimensional effect.” “The picture’s surface is made to become the field for a painterly act,” says Imre

A N D R Á S F O R G ÁC H : I s h e i n t h e r i g h t p l a c e ?

Bak. It is clear that the thoughts Károlyi articulated in 1976 in connection with mirrors – Always blocking out what we are looking at, a mirror is a window opening backwards – have remained valid: paintings secretly possess the characteristics of a mirror, in that they cover up that which is about to unfold. That which is unfolding, in turn, comes about in the wake of the continuously renewed articulation of a system of relations (a thought related to diagonals and the cross, put down in an old notebook). At the same time, one should not forget craftsmanship either, the manufactural element that becomes so emphatically manifest in an abstract pattern, at times disguised as a sort of easy-going awkwardness, because “errors” could be corrected, whereas the trace of the hand, the mode of writing, the calligraphy, is a significant part of the artwork. Now I am turning to the painting on the wall of my room for help (Orange Stripe, oil on canvas, 70 × 100 cm). It has a vertical orange stripe within a bluish-grey streak in the middle, a horizontal streak reaching to the bluish-grey stripe at the upper left, and another streak of the same colour at the lower right. The canvas is primed, or rather, washed; it is greyish-white and matt, with alternating lighter and darker brushstrokes; and the structure of four stripes emerges on this light-coloured ground, with two horizontal and two vertical stripes. The orange colour in the middle emits some light; the contours of the stripes have been freehand-painted, generating a sense of delicate and vague vibration. For a long time, I did not notice that the upper-left horizontal dark stripe is a bit thinner than the stripe at the lower right. The one below is exactly a centimetre wider than the other one on the opposite side above. Until you realise the difference, you only experience that this quite calm and simple form seems to be in continuous motion. (Let me refer again to Pilinszky’s poem about what makes the world move.) The material protrudes at the edge of the large vertical bluish-grey streak, and the edges of the orange stripe are also somewhat in relief. The two darker streaks at the upper left and lower right have been applied onto the canvas in thinner paint. The bluish-grey streak is lustrous, just like the orange stripe painted over it; the paint is thicker there, and its oily lustre enhances its presence, while the two dark streaks are duller. Here and there traces of correction and overpainting are visible, mainly on the off-white ground: the painting is full of micro-events. The composition is a diagonal transposed into a vertical format, one of Károlyi’s idées fixes. The painting contains, if not a full novel, then a well-written short story, about the relationships between the below and the above, simply pointing to the story, rather than actually telling it. Where is his place?, we might ask, and might as well give the answer right away: But for what? Budapest, 14 December 2014

LIST OF WORKS:

A Silhouette for W.J., 1980 Oil on canvas and fibreboard, 70×70 cm

Parallel Rows, 1993 Oil on canvas, 98 × 137 cm

Untitled, 1990 Oil on canvas, 90×50 cm

B (Brown), 1993 Oil on canvas, 140 × 140 cm

Painting with a Blue Background, 1990 Oil on canvas, 90×50 cm

Displacement I, 1993 Oil on canvas, 110 × 30 cm Property of Pál Barta

Sketch, c. 1990 Oil on canvas, 90×70 cm Private property BT/1 (Cracow Painting), 1990 Oil on canvas, 200×160 cm Columns (3 Yellow + 3 Blue Ones), 1991 Oil on canvas, 94×200 cm Parallel Rows, 1991 Oil on canvas, 120×100 cm Parallel Rows, 1992 Oil on canvas, 120×100 cm Stripes (Grey), 1992 Oil on canvas, 140 × 140 cm Stripes (Ochre), 1992 Oil on canvas, 140 × 140 cm Etalon, 1992 Oil on canvas, 80×60 cm Private property Three Blue Stripes, 1992 (2011) Oil on fibreboard, 92.5×40 cm Duality Paintings III, 1992 Oil on canvas, 72×184 cm Brown Square, 1992 Oil on canvas, 140 × 140 cm Grey Stripe on a Blue One, 1992 Oil on canvas, 110 × 130 cm The Fifth, 70×70 cm Painting, 1992–93 Oil on canvas, 70 × 70 cm Property of Paksi Képtár, Paks

Painting (Wien/8.), 1993 Oil on canvas, 45 × 45 cm Property of Árpád Tóth

Untitled 2. (Gdansk), 1995 Oil on canvas, 60 × 30 cm Private property Untitled 3. (Gdansk), 1995 Oil on canvas, 60 × 30 cm Private property Reflections on Reflection, 1995 Oil on fibreboard, 41 × 41 cm Grey Wedged in by Green, 1996 Oil on fibreboard, 48 × 38 cm

Untitled (Vienna), 1993 Oil on canvas, 100 × 40 cm

Painting Enclosed with Blue (6 Rectangles), 1996 (?) Oil on canvas, 80 × 60 cm

Interlocking, 1993 Oil on canvas, 110 × 30 cm

Five Stages/1 (Story with Hiatuses), 1996 (2012) Oil on canvas, 120 × 100 cm

Two Blue Wedges, 1993 Oil on canvas, 110 × 30 cm Private property

Five Stages/2 (Stairs down and up – ×), 1996 Oil on canvas, 120 × 100 cm

Four Squares/2, 1993 Oil on canvas, 112 × 55 cm Four Squares, 1993 Oil on canvas, 112 × 55 cm Vienna (XVII)–Bp., 1993 (1996) Oil on canvas, 120 × 120 cm Two Squares + Two Shadows, 1994 Oil on canvas, 100 × 70 cm Four Squares on an Orange Ground, 1994 Oil on canvas, 100 × 70 cm Two Squares + Two Shadows, 1994 (2012) Oil on canvas, 120 × 200 cm

Matboard-picture, 1996 Oil on canvas, 130 × 160 cm Pink and Green, undated Oil on canvas, 80 × 80 cm C&P, undated Oil on canvas, 70 × 130 cm 4:0, 1993 Oil on canvas, 80 × 60 cm 2:2, 1993 Oil on canvas, 80 × 60 cm 3:2, 1993 Oil on canvas, 80 × 60 cm

Untitled, undated Oil on canvas, 70 × 30 cm

’98.KT 1/90× 70, 1998 Oil on canvas, 90 × 70 cm Private property

Untitled, undated Oil on canvas, 80 × 30cm

’98.KT 3/90× 70, 1998 Oil on canvas, 90 × 70 cm

Untitled 1 (Gdansk), 1995 Oil on canvas, 60 × 30 cm Private property

’98 KT 2/90× 70, 1998 Oil on canvas, 90 × 70 cm

Sappy Green Tilting to the Left (Working Title), 1998 (2008) Oil on canvas, 90 × 70 cm Brown & Blue, undated Oil on canvas, 90 × 70 cm Between Heaven and Earth, undated Oil on canvas, 105 × 65 cm Shifting Rectangle, undated Oil on canvas, 70 × 100 cm A Blue Stripe Perpendicular to Two Diagonals, 2004 Oil on canvas, 60 × 80 cm Stripes and Columns, undated Oil on canvas, 70 × 140 cm Six(+2) Squares, undated Oil on canvas, 70 × 100 cm Interrupted Continuity, undated Oil on canvas, 60 × 40 cm Untitled (‘Floating’), undated Oil on canvas, 100 × 70 cm C&T (Covering and Transparency), 2006 Oil on canvas, 60 × 60 cm Green Stripes on a Pink Ground (This Is Not a Stairway!), 2006 Oil on canvas, 64 ×90 cm

Space-Concept (Blue–Purple), undated Oil on canvas, 70 × 100 cm

Blue on Yellow, Yellow on Blue, 2013 Oil on canvas, 140 × 140 cm

Four Diagonal Stripes, 2007 (2012) Oil on canvas, 160 × 130 cm

Two Squares & Blue Shadow 1, 2, 3, 2013 Oil on canvas, egyenként 140 × 100 cm

Three Blue Squares, undated (2013) Oil on canvas, 80 × 100 cm

Quadritriangle 1.-15., 2013 Oil on canvas, egyenként 90 ×90 cm

Grey Stripes Perpendicular to a Diagonal, undated Oil on canvas, 80 × 100 cm

Four Squares, 2013 Oil on canvas, 140 × 140 cm

Three Rectangles, 2008 Oil on canvas, 155 × 160 cm

Almost a Square, 2014 Oil on canvas, 140 × 140 cm

Desert and Four Small Blue Pictures, 2008 Oil on canvas, 70 × 50 cm Property of Péter Forgács

Diagonal Grey Stripes in Single File, 2014 Oil on canvas, 140 × 140 cm

Symmetry (Two squares, with sides measuring 45 cm, touching at one corner), 2009 Oil on canvas, 90 × 50 cm Quivering Orange Rectangles, 2009 Oil on canvas, 160 × 140 cm

Five Diagonally Halved Squares Standing on their Corners, 2014 Oil on canvas, 50 × 50 cm

Untitled, 2009 (2012) Oil on canvas, 170 × 1500 cm Grey Square, 2011 Oil on canvas, 140 × 140 cm Two Complete Squares, 2012 Oil on canvas, 140 × 140 cm

Four Triangles, 2006 Oil on canvas, 50 × 70 cm

Four Blue Squares, 2012 Oil on canvas, 100 × 140 cm

Four Triangles/2., 2006 (?) Oil on canvas, 60 × 80 cm

Three Squares (Perspective), 2012 (2014) Oil on canvas, 140 × 140 cm

Két kék golyó, 2006 Oil on canvas, 60 × 85 cm Property of Eszter Simongáti

Blue and Ochre Squares, 2012 (2014) Oil on canvas, 100 × 140 cm

Two Halved Squares (A 90º Turn), 2006 Oil on canvas, 75 × 100 cm

Six Squares, (2009) 2014 Oil on canvas, 50 × 50 cm

Two Circles, 2013 Oil on canvas, 140 × 140 cm Three Rectangles, undated Oil on canvas, 155 × 160 cm

Z S I G M O N D K Á R O LY I | A R e t r o s p e c t i v e Ré g iúj | Old Ne w ∙ 1975–2 015 Paksi Képtár | Art Gallery Paks ∙ 22 March – 28 June 2015

T H E E X H I B I T I O N WA S C U R AT E D B Y

István HAJDU PUBLISHER

Paksi Képtár R ESPONSIBLE PUBLISHER

Zoltán PROSEK EDITED BY

István HAJDU THE E X HIBITION LIST A ND THE BIBLIOGR A PH Y W ER E COMPILED BY

Mónika ZSIKLA Thanks to Árpád TÓTH (Neon Gallery, Budapest) for his assistance. PHOTOGR A PH Y

Jan de NYS, György GALÁNTAI, Zsigmond KÁROLYI, András KONCZ, László LUGOSI LUGO, Attila PÁCSER, Miklós SULYOK, Lenke SZILÁGYI, Árpád TÓTH, Virág Judit Galéria PR I N TED BY

Mester Nyomda Director: Anderle LAMBERT GR A PHIC DESIGN

Ferenc ELN © The authors © Paksi Képtár, 2015 All rights are reserved. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced without express written permission from the publisher. Paksi Képtár | Art Gallery Paks H-7030, Paks, Tolnai u. 2. www.paksikeptar.hu Sponsors:

ISBN 978-615-5121-06-7