Conceptual Photography

In 1971, I tried to incorporate the creative method I had first adapted in the Five Books, the ultimate reduced form of artistic expression called conceptual art, into a unified genre, and I decided that whatever I did, I would always choose photography as my language. Like many other artists who worked in the field of conceptual art in the 1970s, I was looking for a basic motif as a starting point that could replace the entire cosmos of fine art, and I found this – very simply – in the word “art”. I thought that the concept of “art cosmos” – which could stand for the entire realm of art and all its conceivable forms – could be most easily illustrated by the word “art” written on a little ball.If I have a ball like this, all that’s left is to start playing with it, and the rest will be brought about by chance or so-called “life”. All the events and adventures that normally happen “life-size” in the real world to art itself and to the artists who serve it can also happen to the little ball.

It’s been almost half a century since I took a whole series of photos that served this programme, and now it’s time for me to ask the question: Did I manage to achieve my goal with these photos? Did I really manage to relate in an infinitely reduced form all that could be the fate of art?

The answer is not simple. Today, after so many years, I can see very clearly that the whole series fits well into the definition that these images are actually allegories. That is, these are not just depictions that can simply be called symbolic, but scenes that immediately contain some “lesson” or moral. The art-ball sinking into the water (sea ...) naturally symbolises the sunset, but it can also be the symbol, the allegory, of the “eve”, the passing or end of art. The Kokoo [sic!] photo, which shows a bird’s nest with some eggs, chronicles that the cuckoo was there and laid its odd egg among the eggs of the little songbirds – the cuckoo’s egg will hatch before the other eggs, and the newly-born bird will eject its step-siblings, the other eggs from the nest. However, this selfish little cuckoo is art itself – so would the lesson of the photo be that art is a parasitic being? That is, this photo is also an allegory with a moral. The most dramatically coloured moral is in the soap bubble on which the word “art” is reflected, as it is also about the death of art: “...evanescent like a bubble ...” as we read in an old Hungarian poem. The scene of the children blowing bubbles was a common pictorial theme in the 17th and18th centuries and a requisite of religious paintings collectively referred to as “vanity” pictures.

With this photo, not only did I find another symbol for the fate of art, but – although I had no intention of anything at all – I also managed to resurrect a baroque art form that had become extinct in the 19th and 20th centuries. I can tell you that this shot was a fortunate coincidence. Because although its moral is about transience, the image of bursting soap bubbles has become a significant audience success, and this photo has kept the entire Art Series alive ever since.

Text by Géza Perneczky, in: Géza Perneczky, The art of Reflection, edited by Patrick Urwyler, Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2020, p. 33.

Interestingly, while the all-encompassing and diverse word “art” was enough to denote emotions and evoke cultural accomplishments or human thoughts and scenes, I needed two words of opposite content, a pair of concepts, in order to conquer the dimensions of the physical world. This antagonistic thought-world was best represented by the yes-no duality. I had come to the conclusion that the word “art” perhaps referred to the organic world, which includes the full range of colours and shades of grey, while the dimensions of the physical or mineral world were better suited to the fact that we see all its phenomena through the glasses of the yes-no bipolarity. Transitional shades already disappear here, and what remains is a world depicted in black and white contrasts. While the word“art” could fit on a single ball, it was best to write the words of the yes-no concept pair on geometric shapes and tie them together with a string, prompting them for action.
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Of course, I also tried to put the words yes-no into different “life situations”, situations that could be easily and “humanly” interpreted, but the result was usually too hard-polished and rational, and remained outside the more nuanced emotional world. This can be best seen in the series Yes-No Strategy, which involved a multitude of gestures – movements reminiscent of the rigidity of semaphore signals and yes-no combinations with an emphatically mechanical position rarely reminiscent of typical human situations – mostly sticking to signalling the dimensions above and below, right and left, back and forth, orimitating the offensive-defensive movements of war games. Even the explanation came to mind that the yes-no world was actually a legacy of the classical avant-garde, and it was perhaps no coincidence that it had been reformulated primarily in the works ofEastern European artists. It is well known that the historical and social circumstances (and checks ...) of this region did not allow for such rapid development that would have led to the colour and sensuality of consumer society as early as the 1970s.
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It is also worth mentioning that this much-mentioned “delay” – that is, the phase delay of the cultural achievements of Eastern European countries compared to the West and in defiance of the still harsh conditions, became more moderate, or even disappeared, between 1965 and 1973, in the very years of conceptual art. In fact, the validity of this observation can be extended to some other provinces of the so-called “third world” – above all to the cultural achievements of Latin American countries. In the years surrounding the 1970s, here as well as in the cultural centres of other Eastern European countries, such conceptual works were conceived that did not lag behind similar works from North America and Western Europe.

Text by Géza Perneczky, in: Géza Perneczky, The art of Reflection, edited by Patrick Urwyler, Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2020, p. 61.

Mirrors – thus, in the plural, and distinctly meaning two or three mirrors – do not belong to the typical world of experiences in today’s society. They have been replaced by the dazzling kaleidoscope of steel-glass architectures, a world that is reflected and broken down into thousands of details, where it is almost impossible to keep track of the role of individual mirrors. This vibrant and buzzing environment may exempt us from controlling our movement and behaviour – because we no longer have a single, well-defined mirror image that would “watch out” for us. If we did, it could be compared to the portrait of Oscar Wilde’s hero, Dorian Gray, which grew old instead of him, thus becoming his moral “superior”, as it were.
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When I was a little child, I could see at most three mirrors at once – and this mirror set was mounted on a single piece of furniture in my parents’ bedroom. Yes, it was a classic bedroom mirror with a structure similar to winged altarpieces. In front of you was the motionless large mirror in which you could see yourself from the front, and on its two sides were the narrower mirrors that could be turned to and fro on hinges, in which you could manage to see yourself from the side or back when set at the right angle. Later, such bedroom mirrors went out of fashion. They were replaced by elevators that could provide a multiple mirror experience because their walls were covered with mirrors. However, these had the fault that the mirrors were strictly at right angles, could not be folded out or moved, and therefore the mirror image they provided also became very limited.

When I started taking unusual photos of myself and the objects around me, it also seemed obvious to include such interesting mirror experiences among my photographic themes as a reminiscence of my parents’ bedroom mirror. At first, I only bought medium-sized mirrors, ones that reflected as much as the framing of a classic portrait painting would show. I started shooting by holding two mirrors in my hand and moving them to-and-fro. Meanwhile, in a large mirror hung on the opposite wall, I could check what the camera saw, placed in front of me with a self-timer. And not only did I wave the mirrors I was holding right and left next to my head (multiplying and also showing my head from the side), but I also tried to multiply my body parts and limbs in a variety of ways using the two mirrors while sitting and standing or making dance moves. Eventually, I came to realise that I couldn’t do without a “real” hinged mirror system, similar to the old bedroom mirrors, that my full figure could fit into. I also built this hinged mirror, and it worked so well that I soon bought a film camera to try and capture the appearing images in motion

Text by Géza Perneczky, in: Géza Perneczky, The art of Reflection, edited by Patrick Urwyler, Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2020, p. 91.