Sándor Doró, Zoltán Katona, Árpád Pika Nagy,
István Nayg, Tibor Palkó, Zoltán Sebestyén

Templespace
October 7–November 7 2004
Curated by Peter Fitz and Csaba Kozák

Csaba Kozák

Visible or Invisible

    The story of Block started when five Hungarian artists met Thomas Nigel, member of the Herzogstrasse Group in Cologne in 1990. During their fruitful talk Nigel did not advise them to proliferate, but pronounced the magical infinitive: they must form a group. They did. The young artists, graduated from the Faculty of Painting, created a common painting, so to say they „formed a block” applying their individual paraphs (their name originates from this act). It promised to be exiting, though their second attempt to paint jointly did not satisfied them. To step out the frame, to burst open the stretcher of canvas, to leave the suburb of plain: it was their common purpose. Common aim and thinking together lead their activity toward the world of environments, installations and performances. They did not write any manifesto, did not put into words their ars poetics,they just started to work saving the uniqueness, originality and sovereignty of their solo works.
    The unsaid conception was to take pocession again space. Anywhere, any kind of space. They have started to interpret and analyze space (the given spot). They requalified, transformed, took away from it, covered space stressing some details and elements, other ones were hidden or destroyed. They dared to think big, materialized dream, endowed the objective world with ideas. If Block enters a space, after their presence it cannot recognize itself again.
    I do not know whether space bears idea or idea bears space. Probably they are in permanent labour. When Block enters any space they look around the way like nobody before. They catch sight things the way only they can do. Sometimes they adapt its original function, another time they reject it. They introduce objects, numbers, letters, texts, light, sound and add motion in the sign of one definite (or more) idea(s). At the same time they draw into the orbit of concept of their artistic space shaping the objects, trash, garbage, junk found on the spot. They apply simultaneously both organic and inorganic materials.
   Organic existence is continuously present (moss, animal bowels, rabbit, swan, fruits, etc.), while the treasury of inorganic materilals (pick-axe, elastic gown, electric hot plate, lampshade, plastic foil, etc.) is inexhaustible. The quadriga of the four first principles (fire, water, air, earth) appears several times with elementary power on the spots. Old and new mediums and means (black-and-white photos, colour polaroids, xeroxes, projectors, screens, videos, TV-sets, etc.) weave intermediate net in space, generating interactive connection in and with the substance of installation and we, the spectators. Over and above the artists’ physical presence (performances), the motionless (photo) and mobile (video) documentation of their faces, bodies and hands also sign and authenticate their installations.
    So many spots, so many sights, so many ”stories”.
    Plastic gows of chemical defence are on the wing in an arched corridor, coats open as if they want to break through, to force open the vaulting. I can hear the wing-beats of giant bats.
    Trashy erecting yard of a factory. The once charme and loneliness of provincial industry. On the ceiling neon lamps are arranged in triple proportion, amongst them ventilators rhythmically repeat. Windows are covered with black plastic foils. On the floor one can see the same neon units and ventilators, like an image reflected by mirror, executed symmetrically. „The rest remains in silence.” Two opposite niches in a museum. Apples, stringing on wires. One of the niches counts one hundred while the other one only five pieces. Proportion. The apples gradually ripened then started to become rotten. They were falling down in line. One could see day by day the process of transitoriness and the sight how it could manifest itself in luxurious colours and shades.
    Bowels, filled up with air and water, serpentine on the wall of a gallery. The artists stand in a circle, back to the audiance. The are rummaging (mixing gypsum). One of them leaves the circle, catches a pick-axe and cuts into the wall. In the meantime the bowels split. Catharsis.
    Half of a forest settled into a gallery. One cannot see the floor covered with long timbers in parallel lines just like the bays of the windows. If you step on them it starts waving like water. You can do it on your own responsibility, otherwise the forest begins to move…
    A toy rabbit is jumping on a table, it falls down, somebody helps it up, then the rabbit accidentally throws itself down into the depth. All the story is on video just like the other one where rabbits, closed into a cage, are pushing and finally chewing letters shaping the name of „Beuys” from carrots. Henz Widauer asked in Balkon (Hungarian art monthly) that…”is Beuys to rabbits’ taste?” Poetic question, however I am absolutely sure that Beuys tastes to Block. Béla Hamvas’ essay on dream in which the bee-master cleans the bees clearing away dirt covered their backs. Cleaning and purification. Two hands carve the philosopher’s words onto a metal plate, certainly it’s on video.On the surface of a water pool, cased with black plastic foil, light like a river-gravel makes a jump and is projected onto the wall. The artists sprinkle water on their faces in another film. Rebirth and redemption.
    Application on the wall, reminding to a field, is shining in ultra-violet light. There is pulsating inscription on the floor built from plastic letters. Himmel, that is Heaven. I believe this sort of Paradise.
    Ammunition wooden platforms in the Monostor Fortress, fire flames on the shelf below, leavened pie, shaping bread, on the upper wooden plate. The same leavened pie was flowing in the scaffolded wooden mangers at the Thorax exhibition in Berlin, and they tried to nail up the same leavened pie onto 100 xerox copies representing Vajk’s Baptism painted by Benczúr.
    Roman numbers from I to XII on the wall of a cellar stable, in front of them there are trasnparent plastic bags filled with water. There are 12 fountain trougs on the opposite wall, leavened pie in each, forming perfect shapes of bread. Above each of them there are welder’s masks. That is all. This work of art is so brilliant I would frame and preserve the space and installation in a premature Block Museum.
    The newest (though previously already executed) installation involves a transparent table (fixed with plastic wires, illuminated with ultra-violet light) floating in a dark space, with real fruits like apple, pear, lemon, melon on it. Natura morta. If we wait, circulation starts, the pulpy fruits become rotten and fall down. I hope they will do again this installation. Fruits always ripen somewhere. The present exhibition cannot be seen at the moment of writing this text. Perhaps, its title will be Visible-Invisible. However, it is still not sure. Probably there will be a hanging house, head downwards (house in the House of the Lord). Certainly, executed from plexi tubes, floating high, illuminated with UV light, with rhythmically repeating breaks. Below it there is a pulsating inscription, do not ask for its text, message. Projectors and projected scenes, or TV sets, lights and shades. Motion. There are letters, shaped from pie, in vessels, basins, the artists put them together into words, which slowly disintegrate and sink into the depth of the troubled, may be milk-like or dark liquid darkened with China-ink. And all the story starts again from the beginning. It repeats and repeats itself.
    Well, actually what is Block? What is the secret of their activity of nearly fifteen years? Characterizing their work, concerning the Hungarian art scene (and also the enriching international one), I found those key-words in the special literature which put in shade the primer sight and let us see behind the ”things”. Dream and reality. Representation and abstraction. Materialization and idealization. Duality. Contrasts and polarity. Counterpoint. Structuring, building and deconstruction, demolition. Sacrality without religiousness. Metaphysical, symbolic and metaphorical approach. Cultic and magical scenes. Mystery and mystification. Life after art. Art after life. Eternity and transitoriness. Permanent circulation. DNA. Quotations, references and paraphrases. Allusions and feed-backs to clear sources, to different origins (Leonardo and Michelangelo, Hamvas and Hartmann, Benczúr and Beuys, etc.). Thinking about the state, essence and reason of the artwork. We can continue listing. However, better if they do it.

TIBOR WEHNER

BLOCK PHENOMENON

Not an easy task: writing an introduction to an unknown work which is still to be born, which exists only on the level of ideas and concepts. How shall I describe the non-existent, the form and essence of which are outlined currently only by evaluating the projected sketches of the artists and complicated antecedents? How to put into words my conclusions based on rather uncertain information collected from a network of guesses and shadows? It makes the problem even more hopeless that as a new phase of the fourteen years’ activity of BLOCK, the group used the Kiscell Church to install its newest work which – similarly to the former works realized in special places and in places made special or rather similarly to the meaningful phenomena merged with its environment – focus on a central building and on the temporary lighting thereof – on the building up and destruction, process like alternation - furthermore on the video work tuned to monotony. Could it be that instead of speculations I should have asked the members of BLOCK group to fill in the questionnaire prepared for the installation project of Artpool Art Research Center in 1998 (How long have you been preparing installations? Why do you prepare installations and not something else? What do you think of your work(s)? What do you think the difference is between the installations you know and your own installations? What do you think about the relationship between traditional works and installations? )?

The works of BLOCK at the turn of the century and in the new millennium, breaking with the static and permanent character of statues, graphics, etc. are built up from scenes and phenomena, situations that can and cannot be repeated, unique artistic events, planned and improvised performances and series of the medial recording thereof. The installation, the environment, the performance and the video – their connections, mixture and interconnection – can be fit in the frame of a genre and a form of work and several important characteristics can be noticed among the typical, special characteristics of the works and productions developed applying the tools of this genre: like the placement into a concrete space, breathing together with the space, integrating the elements of the environment into the work of art, creating the autonomous and the extended media of the work of art. Like a process in time, the pictorial-factual event, the operation, utilization of the behavior of materials, the change and the alternation and repetition. Like creating light and sound effects, using mechanic and electric devices, automatism, broadcasting and projecting devices, screens: making the sight dynamic. Like utilizing organic and non-organic, natural and plastic materials, the simultaneous presentation of the natural and artificial and placing them into an artificial position, creating coherence for the found object and rebuilding - transforming it. Like the rustic, roughly elaborated character of things, shabbiness and being worn off by time. Like the disappearance of the borderline between definite intentions and things happening by chance. Like the reoccurrence of texts, fragments, references.

In my opinion, similarly to former BLOCK works of art, the Kiscell installation is penetrated by the ambition to posses the space and to catch the time (only at the level of ideas though currently, when I am putting these words down): one can witness the intention to freeze-frame (to wash away, to eliminate) the time in the possessed space and to create and maintain a phenomenon which is always the same and remains unchanged in the passing time. The permanency and instantaneousness alternating in the being and seeming reality, changes and constancy sharply collide with each other and with themselves in the space and time the artists wish to grab. Repetition, as the immutability of change, like the simultaneity of the always concluding and of the never concluding process is a delicate paradox which can be synthesized into a fertile thought in the media made dynamic by the occurrences and appearances of the work of art.

On the basis of the installation of the BLOCK, the time recorder of the art groups in Hungary, realized in the dark and repeatedly lighting up space of the Kiscell Church in 2004 the continuation of the deepened program of the group can be forecast. The symbolization and conceptual BLOCK ambitions transposed into the sphere of sensuality realize their purpose in the research of the tragic duality of reality and illusion, life and death, being and not being –said by Heinz Widauer, as one of the analyzers of the activity of the group at the turn of the millennium.