What happened? This is the right tense to use when putting the question. I cannot tell exactly what it is we are after - following a natural disaster in the middle of Budapest’s town-planning area, or perhaps at the local survey of an industrial accident of the N-bomb, but maybe someone has thrown out the garbage through the window. I say I do not know exactly what it is, but for sure: after something, so post... Post mortem.
Something is very conspicuous: man, whose trash is parading here in the photographs, is nowhere to be seen: has become extinct from this landscape. There was a time when they lived, moved around, yawned at academic conferences, fed up pigs, celebrated with neogothic tawdriness their imperial longings - not at all consequent of our small country. But now not even trains come to this place, where junk of worn away history is lying on the streets unattended.
There is an angelic grace in all this happening in Budapest. Apocalypse in the present, in Andrássy Street. But even more exciting: who is it that witnesses all these? A video recorder left working? A hole gaping in the bottom of an oil barrel? A UFO? A satellite? A survivor called András Bozsó?
And if there is nothing at all beyond the waste, what is the message of these works? Maybe this message-like aesthetic rubbish is sheer blarney. Memento mori hog-wash. Maybe Bozsó just getting bored takes his matchboxes to push them round by cause of nostalgic feelings. It is our common misfortune that he keeps dropping his pieces of work with Attila József-like foolishness. Creating order and chaos in the world. But it has always been so in the couple of thousand years of art history. So no message, no apocalypse, no art. Bozsó is humming to himself.
But then what disturbs me so madly? It feels as if someone were dreaming ahead my own dream. Closing my eyes, behind the lids there shines the debris of a similar city. An over-accurate diagnosis of my fears. Just an example: I have never seen black pigs in the parking lot of the Academy building. But I have always searched for them with my eyes, smelling their smell, hearing their grunt. And now what to credit? My eyes? They are not there but here I can see them. My nose? I have always smelt them, and now the maximum I can nose is the sour scent of the emulsion. What is more real? The piece of art? Its subject? The Fiction created about it? What I feel in myself? What Bozsó feels? This country and its capital of times past?
The answer is rather more what hangs on the walls, here and now.
Tibor Bakács 'Sneaking'
