PUPPET AND GRAVITY
8 December 2023 – 3 February 2024
Ani Molnár Gallery
Puppet and Gravity
Solo exhibition of Tamás Waliczky
Curator: Anna Szepesi, art historian
Opening: 7 December 2023, Thursday, 6 pm
Opening speech: Zsuzsanna Szegedy-Maszák, art historian
On view: 8 December 2023 – 3 February 2024
Before a group of mere skin and bone men surround and eat Péter Földes'
overeaten
protagonist in the 1974 animation ’Hunger’, we witness a long scene
where he
disorientingly falls. Trusting in the healing powers of pills, the male
figure, who lies down
in the hope of recovery, closes his eyes, but instead of resting, he
falls out of bed in his
sleep and is pulled down by gravity. As he falls, his body twists in all
directions in front of
us, sometimes his head is up, sometimes his feet down. The spinning
exposes every inch
of the nude man’s body to our view. The film tells a story: it has a
beginning, middle and
end, and a serious moral message about the unfair distribution of
earthly goods.
Waliczky's puppet, on the other hand, is not the ’protagonist’ of a
story, but of a state, who
tosses and turns endlessly as long as the computer software that
simulates the rotation of
the puppet's confined space, a metal box, is running. The fall caused by
gravity is not the
result of the protagonist's actions. It is as if we see that, despite
our own attempts to take
control of our lives by shaping them, our environment is driven by
forces larger than
ourselves, forces in which we have no control. We ultimately fall,
stagger and bump.
Most of the animations in this exhibition can be seen by the public for
the first time,
although three of them were presented in Pécs during the LOKART Festival
last summer.
Waliczky, who has experienced the institutionalisation of new media art
in real time, says
that he feels it is important to create in certain classical genres,
without depriving the
technique or medium of its own characteristics. In the works shown here,
we can recognise
landscape, self-portrait and still-life-like depictions. But with a
computer, you can only make
computer art. Waliczky not only voted for medium-specificity, as he
stated in his manifesto
of '89, which is still valid today, but his artworks are also a function
of the changing and
expanding possibilities of the medium.
For Waliczky, human vision is an infinite subject, and in his oeuvre he
repeatedly analyses
and reconstructs the possible ways of our visual perception and makes it
comprehensible
to us through the mechanics of existing or imagined cameras. His choice
of technique is
autobiographical, as is his choice of subject matter, be it a
self-portrait in a cap, the
environment in which he creates, or a stripped-down computer animated
puppet bearing
the basic physical characteristics of the creator.
Zsuzsanna Szegedy-Maszák
Photos by Péter Drapkó