Balázs Kicsiny: Experiment in Navigation

http://www.biennale2005.hu/kicsiny_b/navigation_11_e.htm An Experiment in Navigation

radio interview with the curator, the artist and the writer

20 February 2005

You are preparing for the 51. Venice Biennale which is always a period of great excitement. It is a very important occasion. Péter Fitz (curator): Absolutely. The Biennale gives an outline of what is happening in visual arts in the world today. Many question what sort of an outline it can be. Each nation wishes to show something of its art - this is the outline that can be seen here. The Venice Biennale has a long tradition since the late 19th century and Hungary has been present ever since that time. The enormously beautiful Hungarian pavilion was erected in 1909 after the plans of Géza Maróti, so this is one of the oldest places operating in the exhibition park. When the director of the Műcsarnok Art Gallery, who is at the same time the national commissioner of the exhibition, announced the competition you submitted your application with Balázs Kicsiny's project not as the director of the Kiscelli Museum (Budapest) but as an independent art historian. PF: That's right. Kicsiny had a very large-scale exhibition in the Kiscelli Museum in 1999, and we have kept in touch ever since. He lived and worked in England in the past few years, and has won a good reputation. I knew that he was able to put together a project that could make an impression on international level as well. What is going to happen in Venice? As far as I know, the artist does not intend to give a panoramic view of contemporary Hungarian art. His works are more universal than that. PF: Kicsiny created mainly sculptures and installations these years, which tells much about the state of art today. Now he will be represented by four entirely new works, three sculptural installations and a video-installation. Not so long ago, on the occasion of the Hungarian Cultural Season in Leiden, Holland, we could see one of Balázs Kicsiny's most staggering works in an enormous cathedral. Twenty-three anchored sailors lying on the church floor. Their heads were illuminated, which is not unfamiliar to your recent sculptures, I think. The religious setting gave an especially particular effect to your work. We are standing now in the Kiscelli Museum where one of the four new works is on a test display here. Balázs Kicsiny (artist): Yes, what you can see here is Winterreise. It reminds one to Schubert. BK: Yes. It is about the idea of "seeking my exact place". Dressed in priest's black robes and donning a helmet there are two figures in the middle of the space skiing in opposite directions using the same pair of skis. They might be looking for their way in the darkness - it is a very impressing scene in this enormous ex-church. At the moment the artist is talking to the writer, László Krasznahorkai, about the passage he is about to write in Kicsiny's catalogue. Do you already know where to look for the sentences? László Krasznahorkai (writer): I am strolling around here searching for them. One might find various directions to take here. Kicsiny's works have been characterized by very powerful meanings so far, and he is astonishingly consistent in that in this new work. Although he can be considered a rather successful artist, for some reason Balázs Kicsiny's works are scarcely known in his homeland, Hungary. Would you mind giving our listeners an idea about his place in contemporary art history! LK: I think his proper place is among the best. But this is something everybody recognizes in the moment they get in touch with his works either as a spectator or as a writer of art. It is interesting that there is no discussion about that. Kicsiny has a childlike, even naive relation to that rather concrete fact that each of his works represent that set up his entire life-work. The works he has produced up to now stand for specific things, like in the case of the two priests which we can see here, or the drinking figures donning a diver's helmet, or even the sailors whose limbs end in anchors. His figures are always extremely concrete, astonishingly living creatures, without even a touch of abstraction. In Kicsiny's art abstraction emerges not in the particularities his using, but in what one can see for example here in Winterreise, where the two figures are heading for opposite directions on the same pair of skis, where these figures are holding in their hands not ski poles but a specific navigational instrument which was widely known and even used up to the 17th century, but which had a drawback, that one had to see through it against the sun, so it caused serious damage to the eyes or even blindness. One thing is certain though: this instrument, which can also be seen as a variation of the cross, is a deeply suggestive object. What does the artist say to the writer? BK: I provide him with background information about the work. However, many times the result is perfectly independent of such motivations. Am I right when I sense a kind of spiritual relationship between the two of you? BK: You are most probably right. In the early nineties when I had been reading László Krasznahorkai's novels I felt that we would meet sooner or later. Perhaps my English residence and Krasznahorkai's travels in Asia have extended the problems of Hungarian visual art and literature to much wider horizons. I think this is surely one aspect in which we have met our match. Could you lend us a hand in what points of reference does the spectator have about you as an artist apart from your paintings and sculptures? BK: The space is something very important I think. The space itself and the artwork in it, the ranging of that space and its cultural and social background. For me it is important where the specific institution is located geographically, I am interested in it from a social point of view, and I like to know the people who go there. Many times it is a dilemma for myself, too. How much does seeking your place and your way influence the work? BK: It is unquestionable that my case is different from that of other Hungarian artists who worked in Western-Europe in the sixties, seventies and eighties. When I left this country I considered everything I was taking with me, and it has not been questioned at all. I think instead of a political determination I am now characterized by an awareness of the things that being Eastern or Middle-European involves. Having acknowledged that, it was less difficult for me to find my place in Western Europe, and it also helped me to look at the western part of Europe with a critical eye. You have just moved back to Hungary. Is it a transitory state? BK: Perhaps it is. I would very much like to maintain this freedom of movement. János Sturcz: Travelling Still The Art of Balázs Kicsiny   Balázs Kicsiny has won reputation and acknowledgement in Hungary and abroad with installations full of dramatic power and archetypal situations, which are rich in symbolic references. Kicsiny's protagonists are, like in his earlier works, part of his already well-known iconography, they wear uniform and practise characteristically male professions, they are lonely heroes who used to be in a sacral position in the 19th century but are now fighting against elements, and are battling for identity and lost faith; they are priests, miners, firemen and sailors, in the figure of whom the artist continually contrasts sacral and profane features by instilling absurdity and irony into their heroism. Although they have lost orientation and self-confidence in this post-modern world, their sense of duty has remained unchanged. A further meaning is added to their figure now: they have become travellers, and, as a consequence, they perform absurd activities which do not lead them directly to their purpose. Kicsiny's priests are doing sports, they are skiing, fencing, navigating, his firemen are dozing in the middle of the city on fire. But these are not at all free-time activities. It does not matter what Kicsiny's figures are doing, what counts is the simple fact that they are acting somehow, they fight, they struggle, and although they often lose sight of their end they never abandon it. They all wear a uniform, these uniforms, however, can be swapped over and over again because their characters are totally alike, all self-denying, living in deliberate solitude, and obsessively looking for mission and challenge. The fact that Kicsiny's protagonists are travellers has surely to do with the artist's own experience, as he lived for ten years in a foreign land, in the misty Albion surrounded by the sea (the first line of Winterreise runs as follows, "I've arrived as an alien, and now I depart as such"). Behind it, there might hide a somewhat deeper, perhaps more universal understanding of man's earthly existence, of finding one's own way, of wandering - Franz Kafka, who defined himself as Robinson, drawn back on his own desert island, put it as follows in a letter to Max Brod in July 1922: "All I have ever written is like Robinson's flag on top of the island". The historical period and location where we feel ourselves at our spiritual home is encoded deep in our psyche. Balázs Kicsiny and the turn of the 18-19th century, Swift, Blake, Füssli, the German and English romanticism that discovered the subconscious and created visionary images, Friedrich, Schubert, Müller, Weber, E.T.A Hoffmann, Wagner and their spiritual successors are of the same spiritual habitat. In Kicsiny's works practical experience blends with mythic figures and subjects that are borrowed not from masterpieces of art, but mostly from engravings, words, prints and newspapers of the 18-19th centuries that reveal some naive popular fantasy topics. He is captivated with crushing force by images that depict unknown objects or ones whose functions are obscure, but suggest some deep existential or spiritual meaning, such as practical instruments shaped like a cross; on the other hand, Kicsiny finds the symbolic potential in the most common objects of our time as well, like in the case of the current collectors of Budapest trolleys, or the divers' and fencers' helmets. Practical instruments that have some symbolic meaning appear on many of Kicsiny's works, such as scales, lamps, clocks or anchors which, becoming attributes of protagonists they are connected with, reinforce their meanings and touch the deepest roots of existence - like orientation, finding one's way physically and spiritually, struggle, labour, fight, travel, sin, judgement and time - all these embodied in the accurately elaborated iconography of the artists's protagonists. Kicsiny's anonymous priests, firemen, miners, sailors are at the same time wandering Jews, deceived lovers or Marksmen who are hopelessly and restlessly travelling still. Just the way we all are.