Seemingly small things determine seemingly big things *
By János Sugár

The launch of a biennial series is not simply an exhibition, but the declared beginning of a prospective process. Hence, its starting point will unintentionally be interpreted as a sign with time.
Relativism is a concept that, if I may put it thus, has an enormous career ahead of it in common parlance. Politicians now attempt repeatedly, commentators, feulleuton authors, essay writers now are reading up, TV editors now are searching for the appropriate subjects for their reports. We are going to hear about it to no end, and this is naturally not by chance. It is a new concept, which we have loaded of late with all the content that we view as problematic. All of our concerns related to the course of the world can be concentrated into this notion, even if it may have little to do with the original interpretations of relativism from the perspectives of philosophy, science and anthropology. And by means of misunderstandings, this word mediaticises: it might already be a headline, and we can indicate this word if we would like to refer to the moral erosion brought on by inequalities, commerce, trash media, and individualism, summarising to all intents and purposes the bad conscience of Western civilisation.

We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognise anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires.
Pope Benedict XVI (when Cardinal Ratzinger)

Enlightenment expanded onto everything the potential for self-reference, and with this rendered total specialisation. Since then, there is no need to reconcile the truths of the various professional spheres in the interest of continuity of a world concept. World concepts began to multiply, and the fields of science have to be coherent within themselves. This approach made possible the technical-scientific revolution, which yielded incredible wealth and technical and cultural development, e.g., all that owing to which we can speak here about an art biennial.
The Earth is round, and so its surface is at once closed and infinite, i.e., we believe that it is infinite, but we encounter this closedness with increasing frequency, when we are thrown into an uncomfortable, undesired proximity to the Other and her/his world concept. Perhaps it is counter to the frustration caused by mounting proximity that consumer society took form, where the fragmented consumer proletarian** can discover in the selection her/his drooping self-respect. An Olympics of products competing for her/him, her/his money, attention and vote is in progress, and the fragmented consumer proletarian learns to judge and to choose. (It is no surprise that casting-type TV-shows are so popular.) The response is in oversupply, even of our most particular consumer desires; we can obliviously surf through the alternatives. We are spoiled, bribed by the magnitude of the selection; nevertheless, rhetoric compulsorily associates with redundancy/excess, and our demands/desires have already been rendered malleable.
With the development of communication, the mediated has replaced immediacy; alongside the first-person experience, knowledge mediated by somebody and something has appeared. The events of locations far from our immediate life experiences also engage into our everyday; we are involuntarily informed about so much more than ever before. What should we do with all this compulsory knowledge?

“. . . if ‘I' is seen as that to which others say ‘you'  (if self-knowledge is seen as a
consequence of acknowledging others), then the distinction between knowing (cognition)
and acknowledging (recognition) will also be rendered invalid:
art and science will have then to be seen as ‘political disciplines'" (206).
(Vilém Flusser's "Memories", originally presented at the 1988 Ars Electronica conference.)

The dilemma of relativism is the oversupply ensuing from prosperity: if we become accustomed to having a large selection everywhere, what will we do if suddenly there is no choice? Are we able to envision common goals beyond our own short-sighted interests? How can solidarity prevail if we don’t find the alternatives in the wide selection we are accustomed to in the supermarket? Until what point should our responsibility extend? What kind of aggression is closer? When should we renounce comfort? Mediatisation operates the global sense of responsibility, which indicates what we should know about and what we should not. Political-commercial-cultural marketing established by digital convergence transmits the patterns of behaviour appropriate to this. The economy of attention devalued earlier cultural content into fifteen-minute*** multicultural fragments. Contemporary cultural bureaucracy is a part of the communicational, entertaining, propaganda, and, last but not least, economic bigger structure, efficient, and built upon supply: if you don’t like this performance, exhibition, etc., then simply look for another that you do like, because there’s plenty to go around. Obviously, art must emerge from the light and easy atmosphere of the lifestyle, in order to be in critical opposition to the totally mediatised world; and this can be thematicised in numerous ways in an era in which everything is fundamentally changing.

* http://www.gerlo.hu/p.lekov/illusory.html
** copyright by Attila Kotányi (1924-2004), philosopher, architect
*** The expression is a paraphrase of Andy Warhol's statements, in 1968 that In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes. And in 1979 “...my prediction from the sixties finally came true: "In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes."

IPUT (superintendent: Tamás St. Auby)
/.../ Tamás St. Auby, who himself is a kind of institution, superintendent of the International Parallel Union of Telecommunications (IPUT), did not intend the Belgrade Academy to be the stage for some kind of political or war plan, but simply transformed it into a sort of exhibition space, while he himself undertook the role of “curator”. As is common knowledge about Tamás St. Auby, he is quite unsatisfied with the functioning of Hungarian art institutions, and if my interpretation proves correct, then we can understand this work as the design for an alternative exhibition space in which the IPUT superintendent installs artworks at his own discretion, as can be seen in the image, as well. /.../ (Zoltán Sebők, art historian)

/.../ The collage is mounted on two pedestals, on the one a pile of t-shirts, on the other exemplars of a photocopied brochure: a collection of responses to Tamás St. Auby’s open e-mail written in connection with the exhibition entitled Aspects/Positions *. He had asked for opinions on the fact that numerous important artistic tendencies, such as the happening, Fluxus, conceptual art and Pop Art, were not represented on the part of Hungary in the retrospective exhibition. Many well-known artists and art historians corroborated the artist’s opinion. /.../ (Eike, artist, curator)

His latest work is a curatorial statement: as the Agent of NETRAF (Neo Socialist-Realist IPUT's Counter Global Art-History-Falsifiers Front), he researched and collected the works and documents of the Hungarian unofficial art scene of the sixties, and presented them in a specially designed transportable multimedia study environment. St. Auby has put a lot of work into properly documenting this very exciting section of Hungarian unofficial art, which has not been sufficiently researched by art historians. The project Portable Intelligence Increase Museum, Pop Art, Conceptual Art and Actionism in Hungary during the 60s, (1956 – 1976), 2003 has been presented twice in Budapest and has also travelled abroad, including to the BAWAG Foundation, Vienna, 2004, and to Mamco, Geneva, 2005.

* Aspects/Positions. 50 Years of Art In Central Europe 1949-1999, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, 1999.
Museum of Contemporary Art - Ludwig Museum, Budapest, 2000

Szilvia Reischl is among those creators whose artistic career was made possible only by the openness in art education that came post-1990; her creativity would have remained unnoticed in the conservative environment that preceded. She is a typical example of a researcher-artist, who devotes a disproportionately great amount of time to the realisation of ideas that normally simply flicker across our minds. How many people have we seen in our lives? How many degrees of family relations can we name? Her precise deliberations on everyday situations taken to the point of the absurd run to poetry, where from manic consequentiality a subversive attentiveness will take over.

Omara’s offical designation is amateur Roma artist, albeit with the radicality of her painting and the power of her narration, she could be an important author of Hungarian contemporary painting. Of course, for this the contemporary scene would have to think in more diverse terms about itself. Mara Oláh’s blue paintings refer to the violations she has suffered over the years, and the daily discrimination that has followed from her poverty and minority status. These humiliating situations she has lived through are not fiction, and her impotent rage breaks through in her painting. She begins to paint from her lack of means, which does not necessarily lead to the idea of an envisaged beautiful picture, but much rather the magical power of evocation. This is why her narration is of existential importance, and her content-centricness here signifies the liberation of enunciation.

Ádám Kokesch in his objects researches the meaning inherent in the different dimensions: he miniaturizes something that does not exist, and ultimately, by way of refined and thought through, but simple materials - we see exactly the same object simultaneously small and large, and the intrinsic non-existent appears. The aloof style of his artworks draws upon everyday, commercial object culture, but while one of their important elements is their call for attention, these objects are several times over divested of the possibility to call for attention; they must be discovered, before we discretely retire them to the background.