Tricolour, tripod, tristeza

(third run)

Which came first? The photo or the egg? A hard question, because depicting ‘the real world’, its fine, chaotic still life is a demanding challenge. The photographer is grabbed by a monumental or a null moment of ‘being in the world’ and of the ‘sense of being’ (Heidegger) and clicks. That is how it goes from light painting to holography. And if he is talented, he becomes ‘the hen laying golden eggs’.

In the 80’s I met Slavko Matković, a Serbian author, founder of the neo-avant-garde group, Bosh+Bosch, and he opened my eyes to contemporary art. I started to translate his poems for fun. He had a volume titled Photobiography in which he was writing up the story of his family: aunty Lozika, a witchy medicine woman from the farm; Grga Bajić, his grandfather, a red soldier; Leonid Matković Idas, his father, a partisan and Tito-communist; and others. All of his poem cycles were written based on photographs from the past. I loved them. And all of a sudden he laid every shabby, yellowed photography for me. I recognised them right away: the lodging at Sebesity, the black and yellow trench, the beach in Palics… But these are not your own stories! How could you know what happened there and then? – I asked him startled. He started to smile: You know, my little pal, not authenticity is important, but the truth… And an artist must know that – regardless what he can see. You must know the things that cannot be seen in the photography…

The third part of his series of his albums Ákos Hegedűs is not showing us traditional familiar situations (wedding, christening, funeral), nor visuals created artistically. He steps out into ‘the empty space’, where, by Peter Brook, a man is walking across the scene and another is watching him – and that is theatre (all the world is). I am watching the black and white pictures, the moments: there are Hungarian and foreign ones among them, personal and universal, and a 21st century tableau, an almost hopeless challenge is setting up… However they do contain some anachronistic novelty. Vilém Flusser claims that in the ‘selfie era’ of digital telephones people (travellers) do not record the Cathedral of Reims but themselves in front of the cathedral, without it. They put a high premium on the ephemeral self-identifying documentation. The pictures of Ákos do step out of the fields of tourism with a sad smile. What he can see he shows you: a strikingly hard core reality. Either patriotism, futurism, or sorrow. There is no lie.

The accompanying texts (short proses) are directly flying in the face of the facts: who is who and who did what where when and why. They are independent entities, that is why they are precisely defining the vision they can see. It is contemporary multimedia entering the field of a capricious Future, where ‘Time and Space do not reign’ as Marcel Duchamp have forecasted.

Triceps

morphogenesis

I did want to finish what I started 10 years ago. A tough one. The third is always the critical one. The third LP of a band, the third part of a series, the third act in the theatre, the third period in ice hockey, moreover, the youngest prince is always the third as well. Do you know why? The first one can be good by mistake as well. That can sometimes occur. If the first one is good by mistake, then the second one can be taken forward because of the swing gained from the first one. But at the third one you really need to pack things in it, because if that becomes rubbish, then you are doomed. It all clears up at the third one. At that moment you cannot point backwards, you really have to do it very well. So, I had to make the third part. I could not go on without that. However I faced the problem I have just outlined. Having three people in the pictures is not enough in itself, because I think of something much more than that. You are born. Alone. Then, at best, you find a partner, and then, typically, the third participant comes in. A child, a friend, a lover. But that is just the surface. In the silence of the depth those three totally change your life. Birth, relationship and the third part. Later it does not work anymore. Introducing more participants will not change you significantly. Routine is followed. That is why that story does end here. There will not be a book of four, sixteen or eighteen hundred and fifteen people in the pictures. Part Three closes the story, and the adventures of photography and literature will peer at me from another tale from now on. It happens that it is hard to let something go, but that is not the case here. The most important thoughts of my last decade have already been photographed into these three books. Alone became dark and blue, Duologues joyful and deliberately wise. And this one here, this is the particular Part Three. Good fun it has been. Sometimes depressive and cruel, still good fun. Are you calling it self-serving? Yes, it might be. But life itself is self-serving as well, and if you look through the trilogy of morphogenesis, then it might become a bit easier, a bit more understandable and maybe a bit more substantive to put up with yourself as well, moreover, there is your partner around, and, of course, that particular Part Three…

(morpho)