 István
Horkay'Dreams' ~ words & voice Roshni Jayakrishnan, words & music Arjun Sen  ~ In today's world, computers are used to simplify our lives. However, as an artist, I find computers and the digital world to be tools that must be taken seriously, because they inherently reflect the artist and his work. If my work is considered in its mathematical and digital realm, then we can see the duality of the human created art and the binary basis of digitizing. It is of the greatest importance that the humanity of the artist reveals itself truly and is not overshadowed by the technology. It is within these considerations that I come to a dilemma where I must find artistic parameters within the unlimited power of technology. When my work is saved as a psd file in Adobe Photoshop, I am at liberty to change, alter, or rework my pieces at will. My pieces, as stored files, remain alive and not complete with the resoluteness of, for example, a painting. Therein lies the challenge of finding closure and the end point to all the pieces. While the technology poses challenges, I find my expression in the limitless possibilities of producing my art in any shape or size allowable. Having this digital world as my artist's tools allows me to cross-reference literature and poetry with imagery. It is within the layering and the cross-referencing that the artist's character and soul emerge. To me, each layer is another virtual poem laid upon another one. My works contain hundreds of layers, each separate as it's own poem, yet each connect to all as a whole. My goal is create a new genre of digital art, what I call "virtual poems".             ~ THE OVERPAINTED WRITING a commentary by Bela Bacso But the one who refuses talking... How secretful a picture is... A gleam... that cannot be explained." ~ Bram van Velde Quite common it is when a painter traces
the pictures of one-time artists to learn from them, to crib
their secrets, to employ their knowledge for this own picture
making fantasy. It could be quite common; but Horkay traces not
Leonardo or Rubens, but a text, namely the first handwritten
page of Freud's Entwurf einer Psychologie (1985), the
mode how Freud's hand was writing, how he transformed the thought
into a tangle of signs and letters. On the write surface (all-permitting
and resistant at the same time) the Freudian text appears as
a kind of a culture historical frottage Horkay's art is epitomic in the double meaning of the word: a fragment, an incised part of something already in existence, and just because of this incision is an injury to the finished surface, to the tangle of writing or a finished picture. This relies on the experience that man, handing himself down through signs, simulates a kind of sense-wholeness. In these series this textual sense-wholeness appears to be ever different as different colors enter the surface at different sites. It is the same and not the same at the same time. "Once the signs are scars, then the wounds will tell tales of some non-alleviated history" (D. Kamper Zur Soziologie der Imagination Hanser V. 1986. p. 148). The sign will temporarily close over the story. Who else would know this better than Freud, who, after the neurological-physiological and neuro-psychical phases, so deeply doubted that it was possible "to bring to light the hidden content in its wholeness" (Konstruktionen in der Analyse 1937. in: Stud. Ausgabe Ergb. Fischer V. 1982. p. 398). This culture of historical 'frottage' is an artistic reminder of the liberating and deeply doubt-evoking act of the Freudian turn, namely that everything what gains sense in the sign is not the movement of sense itself, but that of alternating meanings, a re-determination of the sign from the past history. The presence of unclosed and non-fulfilled alternatives in relation of the emerging sign is a pioneering idea of the Freudian psychoanalysis. "Interpretation comes fully untied in sense relations, and will understand the force relations (Verdragung, Wiederkehr des Verdrangten) only through these sense relations (Zensur, Entstellung, Verdichtung, Verschiebung)." ) P. Riceur Die Psychoanalyse und die Kultur der Gegenwart in u. o. Hermeneutik und Psychoanalyse. Der Konflikt der Interpretationen II. Kosel V. 1974. p. 65). Painting did not, and naturally could
not withdraw itself from this turn, be it termed 'Beyond Painting'
by Max Ernst, or 'die Aesthetik des nichtrelationalen Bildes'
by the art historian G. Boehm. Beyond what, and non-related to
what: this is the principal and unavoidable question of The great late modernists (Cezanne, Klee, Ernst, etc.) wanted to break out from this well arranged and well-interpreted world, the prison of supposed possessing of truth. The free-in-himself man, the man making himself as the center, has re-presented the world for himself in the monoperspective of this all-self-reference. As worded by Florenszkij: "Artistic truth has once and forever disappeared from Western religious painting the process starting from the Renaissance , and though the painters declared their closeness and fidelity to depicted reality, in fact that had nothing common with the true reality whose depiction they took the liberty of, or formed a right to." (Florenszkij The Iconostas, Corvina, 1988, p. 30). In Horkay, the application of the painting
historical element in the picture is a remembrance of an era
we are over; over we are the naive relatedness created
by perspective, and over we are the picture creating technique
that relies on the latter. The application is neither parodistic,
nor is an ironic citation, but is an emergence-transparence of
a pictorial element of a past era as an item of a set. This set
writings, documents, stamps, painted pictures, etc.
is not else than some accumulated mass of culture and knowledge
that surrounds us as a fermenting and evaporating hill of rubbish,
of which everyone tries to save something, as allowed by his
own fancy and the laceration and destruction degree of the hill
itself. The question is how in this 'post' era motion develops
at all from the radiating, energy-saturated set in our cultural
memory at the returning of the displaced, the postponed, the
passed and the repressed. No kind of memory will be born from the increase of quantity, since on well-travelable, non-inhibited road sections the latent time section is short, and the content is manifested rapidly. We can say, the conscience-fitness of perception is uninhibited, that is, referring to the Wunderblock, without permanent trace, it acts as a traceless, non-superscripted sheet of paper. As we know it from Freud's writings, memory is formed on sites of permanent traces, and due to discontinuous innervation, elements formed at different times can be stored in the same neuronal layer. Memory cannot be compared to a laboratory settling system in which particles arriving later will, by necessity, be positioned in ever upper layers. Bahnung is not a continuous-linear movement from the unconscious through the preconscious to the conscious. "Trace as memory is not a pure Bahnung that could be acquired again and again in a simple present. Trace is an ungraspable and invisible difference among the Bahnungs." (Derrida Freud und der Schauplatz der Schrift in u. o.: Die Schrift und die Differenz Suhrkamp 1976, p. 308). Freud showed that delay, postponing, supplementarity are inseparable from life, while Derrida in this radical Freud interpretations criticised the time to time emerging naivity of transcription und translation, and the belief that the mind would be a motionless 'text'. In his pictures Horkay overpaints, incises the written signs of the 'Entwurf'; in other words, he tears up the signs that close past history as 'scars'. This is summoning of what cannot be forced into signs. Painting becomes a 'chromatic language' (P. Kaufman), which, now far away from the pure presence of the self-exposing re-presented, presents the painting to us as something 'deferred', as it was worded by M. Duchamp. Due to its time-giving nature, delay is the eternal supplement to the same thing, and thus it will never liquidate the picture, but makes it infinite, resistant to any intrusion. The 'post-human' art of our era has moved the farthest away from the ideal which reached the calmness of total emptiness by putting instincts to silence. (cf. Lyotard Essays zu einer affirmativen Aesthetik Merve V. 1982, p. 106). Opening art toward the inherently uncertain existence of man, toward the layers of past history that cannot be covered by signs, promises the possibility that man, on some non-distincted place, will re-experience the world as something of his own, where he will be most essentially concerned by what surrounds him. Then the art-piece will not serve to put to silence "... what conceals itself, what calls some self-concealing repulsion in man from what can be neither planned or controlled, nor calculated or performed." (Heidegger Die Herkunft der Kunst und die Bestimmung des Denkens in u. o.: Denkerfahrungen Klostermann V. 1983. p. 148).
     
    
 ~ István Horkay Budapest Katona József utca 25 HUNGARY ihorkay@yahoo.com http://www.horkay.com/ |
if
I may use this term in a somewhat figurative sense after Max
Ernst. The text does not mean simply itself; it is hardly eligible.
The meaning of the picture is born from an 'injury' to the tangle
of words. The never re-whitenable surface is penetrated by colors;
constancy is re-achieved, since the retraced (frottage), and
all written art-pieces lose permanency with advancing time.
artistic painting in our culture. Horkay's
pictures offer a rather interesting answer to this. Embedded
in the art-piece, Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza,
two figures of Piero della Francesca, are exposed to us as a
well considered 'collage'. In this delicious double portrait
of the Quattrocento the harmonically arranged, perspectivic landscapes
form the background of man, in the foreplan of which man is posted
in a way that his rule is unquestionable. The subdued nature
expresses the man 'free in himself' as well as the formidable
maladjustment this glorified man has to face when his attention
is focused only on himself, as it comes from the superior position
of possessing everything. This is expressed by A. Chastel's remark
to Whipping of Christ, a picture by Piero della Francesca:
"He augments both the arithmetical sense and the intensity
of colors to the utmost point, thereby transforming Universe
into a bright, unslotted cage, where mankind can never lose its
way." (Chastel Italian Art, Corvina 1973, p. 113).
An experiment to
create a 'scientific psychology', the 'Entwurf' is closing of
an era, when, naturally, the great ideas of the analytical age
are already in preparation. Derrida's criticism seems to be rightful:
"If we start from a hypothesis postulated in the Entwurf
twenty years ago, namely that a permanent trace supposes that
a road section (Bahnung) is deliberated and some resistance is
overcome, than we have to conclude that there is no trace at
all, since there is no opposing resistance." (Derrida
Die Postkarte II. BrinkmannBose V. 1987. p. 107).
Bacsó
Béla