Eliost, Karen (szerk.): Szombathy. Városjelek 1971 - 2012. Művészet Malom, Szentendre, 2012. szeptember 28 - november 11. (Szentendre, 2012)
A város törlődő jelei
decrepitude of the communist system of the early 70s and a comment on the unfinished project of building socialism, which like Derrida’s signifier, was always already deferred. These black curvy things, flexible tubes designed to carry water or cables, seem to be surplus to requirements, left behind after the builder has departed, with no practical function. Presented as photographs, they of course take on new characteristics, are perhaps salvaged from their uselessness, offering up new meanings within the artist’s semiotic system. The twisted shapes they reveal should though probably not be read as signs in the sense of resembling alphabetical letters or exclamatory marks, but rather as intimations of an as yet undecipherable linguistic code, an abstraction of the possibility of a new form of artistic or human communication. On another level, the tubes are the sculptural counterpart of the accidental paintings discovered by the artist on the neglected surfaces of buildings, creating unexpected configurations of physical matter in three dimensions. The aesthetic qualities again do not appear to reside in the objects themselves, but emerge from their reconfiguration within the frame of the image, as the artist enacts the transubstantiation of building waste into the photographic equivalent of a still life. The pathos of empty and abandoned notice boards forms a natural part of Szombathy’s investigation of the erased and neglected spaces of the city. This most recent series of city signs illustrates the variety of framed signage systems while highlighting the odd effect created when their form is left without content to produce a semantic void on the street. Notably here we are no longer confronted with the fragmentation and decay of the socialist everyday but instead with the ravishes of post-communism and the visible scars left by rampant capitalism on the East European cityscape. In this context, a vacant light box is the moral equivalent of the empty plinth, although nine times out of ten the subtraction of meaning from public space is about economics and inevitable processes of social decay rather than political change. Curiously these objects are reminiscent of the technologies of artistic presentation, from the simple frame to more sophisticated elements of installation art. It’s hard to not to look for aesthetic or semantic values inside the frame, signification in a padlock fixed to a metal grid, the image of a lamppost provided by a reflection on a sheet of glass, or a circle cut roughly from a rectangle to form a brutálist flag, random conjunctions of material and site reclaimed by the artist through photography. The purity of found forms in this series merges with emotional reactions triggered by indications of human failure from the demise of a corner shop to the automatic oblivion of having nothing to advertise. The most highly dematerialised signs of the city recorded by Szombathy in these series of photographs are the faint lines left on a wall after it has been scratched by a sharp object. Like trails that lead nowhere, parallel white markings stretch along the surface of buildings leaving no indication of how or why they were made. These unconscious etchings look like gashes cut by prisoners on the cell wall to mark the passing days, or periodic marks made to measure the height of a growing child, except that these lines were realised without any a priori meaning through purely accidental and careless actions. Although they may have the look of imagined hieroglyphics, like the disclaimer at the end of a Hollywood film, any resemblance to actually existing language systems is purely coincidental and unintentional. If the empty notice boards are the equivalent of accidentally occurring installation art in an urban environment, the erased posters and trial blotches of colour random
