Ván Hajnalka (szerk.): Bepillantás a kintbe. Kolozsváry-Stupler Éva művészete - Munkácsy Mihály Múzeum Közleményei 9. (Békéscsaba, 2017)
Ván Hajnalka: Bepillatnás a kintbe
28 Harvey Stupler The Assemblage as Object Lesson In the interest of full disclosure, I must begin by stating that I have been the lifemate of the artist for over two decades. Whether such a position affords me privileged insight into her work, prejudices me in its favor, or both or neither, I leave up to the reader. Eva’s work is classified as assemblage: the use of found objects placed in new relationships. As she herself has said, the act of combining gives these objects “a new meaning.” Her collecting of such objects can only be described as an obsession. Dressed for the opera and looking rather like an empress, she would spot something hanging out of a garbage can, stop the car and inspect the trash. This otherwise meticulous woman would completely forget about her appearance as soon as the chance arose to gather work materials. Assemblage is a problematic medium despite its having existed now for over a hundred years. Picasso, for example, made use of three-dimensional objects in some of his early Cubist works. Due to Surrealistic influence, the juxtaposition of disparate elements became a goal in itself for many later assemblagists. The Surrealist aesthetic - the beauty of an umbrella on an operating table - was, in turn, influenced by a Decadent poetic concept of the late nineteenth century, that of “épater les bourgeois.” Once such a concept comes to be taught in art schools, it is completely defused. When shock becomes a publicly accepted goal of the artist, the artwork soon loses the power to shock: “épater les bourgeois” is reduced to merely another element in a bourgeois aesthetic. Giving assemblages, by definition an additive process, the illusion of organic interconnection has been achieved by, indeed has only been the intent of just a few artists working in a medium that notoriously lends itself to superficiality. In the United States, if you ask the average person what art is about, the most frequent answer is “self-expression,” an answer that reflects the culture’s general concern with the self and the selfie. If, however, the art does not meaningfully communicate, it cannot rise above the level of chasing one’s tail. Eva’s art communicates. It draws on deep-seated emotions and difficult experiences that can be shared in numerous ways by many others if they allow themselves to be open to it. This ability to communicate through her art makes it an expression of love. As she would comment during interviews, through her art she speaks for the many who would otherwise remain inarticulate. In her work, Eva is concerned with producing an image that is held together by dynamic unity, a formalist idea that until recently was seen as a rational expression of a dynamic order shared by both art and nature. This very quality may make certain of her more obviously formalist constructions, such as Scherzo, look perhaps somewhat old-fashioned to an eye brought up in a Postmodernist world where the artwork tends to be deliberately more and more shattered. But long before the concept of dynamic unity itself was turned into an academic discipline, taught in art schools as Modernism, the relating of the artwork to a belief in a natural order had a long and noble history, beginning with the Greeks and culminating in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries in the painting of Cézanne and Matisse. This conception was turned into pure abstraction in the works of her earlier compatriot, Moholy-Nagy. Eva is among those artists who have carried this tradition into the realm of the assemblage. Such formalism is anything but “empty.” Among Eva’s most beloved materials are
