A gőz mégis marad (Budapest, 2004)

Wehner Tibor: A gőz mégis marad

Steam still remains Although it has been a distinctive element placed in an honourable position of publicity and community (with shorter or longer intermissions) for 120 years, it is hardly known; the allegory of Transport, otherwise known as The Creation of Steam was designed by Gyula Rochlitz and positioned between the statues of J. Watt and G. Stephenson on the facade of the Eastern Railway Station opened in 1884 (and called Central Station until 1891). The creators of the sculptural group - Ede Mayer and Béla Brestyánszky, following Leó Fessler's footsteps - must have been among the first artists to encounter the problems of representing and objectifying steam in a work of art. As a phenomenon, steam might have been a medium saturated with meaning and suggestivity in many periods of the 20th century and the millenium. However, probably due to its elusive, transient and volatile nature, it could not become a respected and significant theme of art (and especially sculpture), it could not convey symbolical or metaphorical messages. Only a few works of art can be related to iteam; perhaps the best-known of them is Along the Railway by Gyula Derkovits, in which the grey stains of steam play but a rather inferior role in the composition. Aside from railways, we should realise that steam may exist in various forms; the vapour of heating and boiling water in a loosely closed pot; the steaming soup of a Sunday lunch; the small cloud released when an iron touches damp clothes; the whistling spirt coming from a ; engine (a locomotive, a boat or old agricultural machines); the heavy and moist air in a steam bath; the evaporation of hot or cold outdoor springs and ams in a cold season, steam can be dense and nontransparent or dissolving and unnoticeable, heavy or light, wet or dry, refreshing or inconvenient. In the temporary exhibition of the Textile Museum, in the shows exploring the extended range of the phenomena and meanings of the textile, in the works displayed to the public we must examine the kind of m that forms a superficial but extraordinary relationship with textiles. For the moment we must ignore the factual and abstract elements of the rather divergent conceptual sphere related to st ( m plough, steam chamber, steam heating, steam engine, steamboat, steam locomotive, steam laundry, exhaust in, save your st m, letting off steam, going full steam ahead, etc.) and concentrate on the process and result of steaming, on the incentives and goals of the procedure. We seem to have plenty of material to examine, since more than forty artists have put in for the competition announced by the museum; most of them work as textile artists, but some are active in other branches of the applied arts. In the textile and clothing industry (and also in textile arts) exposing textiles to humidity and treating them with steam is done with a heated pressing iron, a pair of rollers or two plain boards, which smooth creased surfaces (or crease smooth ones); in the process the aerial substance called steam is created by simple evaporation, which may even be classified as the noticeable sign of a mysterious action being in progress. Infiltrating the material invisibly (and leaving it visibly), is meant to create and preserve an appealing state of the textile in the short or long term. The artists who replied with their works to the invitation of the Textile Museum undertook to tackle this world of phenomena and meanings of steam. Applying and displaying the extraordinary variety of textile (and other materials attached to textile), they found their artistic possibilities in the realm of the abstract. Some of the objects-quotations-pictures refer to the iron, other abstract works are composed on a flat surface or layered to form a relief; they create an aura of easiness, sophistication, airiness and intimacy, they objectify senses and feelings on the refined level of associations. Textile works of art elaborating the manifestation, existence and nature of steam are also created with ironing and ;l ing; therefore, this process is summoned in a double, complicated and metastatic way at the exhibition. It is an indication of the fact that although steam escapes, somehow it still remains. nbor Wehner