Szilágyi András (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 27. (Budapest, 2009)

Márta KOVALOVSZKY: Unfinished Process

art form, but soon crossed right over them, declared them necessary, abolished them.

6 The decisive changes presaged by the TextilFalikép '68 exhibition - the intrusion of the outside world into the world of textiles, the widening of the territory of textiles, the exchange of ideas between other visual arts and textiles, and the rapid response of compositions to the questions of art and reality came to fruition in a very short time. Neo-Avantgard moves were already apparent at that time: the arrival on the art scene of the "Iparterv Generation" in 1968 and 1969; the Új Zenei Stúdió (New Music Studio), formed in 1970; and Béla Balázs' studio for young film makers, which started operations in 1961. The mutual intellectual affinity of these young people's endeavours is perhaps more striking now than at the time. For all of them, the attitude to tradition and issues of freedom were at the centre of their activities, and all of them in their own areas struggled to "update" Hungarian art and to connect the events and products of Hungarian art into general movements. They fought a "war of independence" to be able to establish a modern idiom. In the fluctuating atmosphere of official policy - in the shadow of Prague and Paris 1968 and the "New Economic Mechanism" - they did not have an easy time. Endeavours in all branches ot the arts were characterised by the exalted struggle to reform its language and by the radicalism of "basic research" taken trom science. It was what happened when film-makers explored in their work the changing meaning of the moving picture and the reinterpretation of the documentary film (as in the "education series" of the Béla Balázs Studio); when musicians examined the form of sound and the new opportunities of musical structure; and when painters and sculptors, calling into doubt the sufficiency of the classical concept of art, broke down the composition into its parts, "sliced it up", separately examining the issues of material, structure, form, colour, content and expression. By the early seventies, it became clear that textiles was an equal-ranking partner; textile artists had acquired an affinity to visual artists by their courage to question or reinterpret classical values. In the middle of the decade, boundaries dividing art forms were manifestly collapsing and Neo-Avantgarde tendencies appeared in textiles just at the same time as in other visual arts. Looking back to what artists were doing at that time, it is possible to delineate the key phenomena which levelled out and treed up the path for textile artists to explore new ways of thinking, new ideas and new techniques. Some of these shook the art form to its foundations: the concept of textile as sculpture, the discovery of the potential for geometrical-structure forms, the examination of the internal properties of material, and finally, the birth of the textile concept. Marianne Szabó, with her felt reliefs of the late 1960s, moved away from the plane, and her works soon took control of all three dimensions. The solitary seated figure in a niche bordered by plant tendrils in Pad [Bench] (1972)

8 filled the space, and became a textile sculpture. The large-scale, multi-figure composition Életút [Path of Life] (1974),

9 filling the real, "life size" space, evoked the stations of a life in the breathless, enraptured tone of children's stories; firstly giving an almost encyclopaedic fullness to the techniques (weaving, embroidery, sewing, collage, etc.) she had used in her previous works, and secondly consummating and intensifying the power of her endeavours to fill space: her life-sized figures and puppets were arranged in a real space, and although they did not stray far from the linearly composed background, they were only a step away from 155