Ván Hajnalka (szerk.): Bepillantás a kintbe. Kolozsváry-Stupler Éva művészete - Munkácsy Mihály Múzeum Közleményei 9. (Békéscsaba, 2017)
Ván Hajnalka: Bepillatnás a kintbe
friendship that is really deep and has roots in memories from Hungary. Objects The object, that is the issue of an everyday object reinterpreted by the artist, or more exactly, interpreting an everyday object as a work of art has its roots in Dada, in one of the most radical trends of avant-garde. In the 1910s, dada artists discovered that an everyday object in certain relations or certain context can concentrate new meanings; moreover, it is able to become a work of art. Surrealist tendencies, forming in the next years, and surrealism itself exploited the possibilities lying in transitions from everyday objects to works of art. From photo-montages, through collages (that is objects, labels, cuttings stuck onto the surface of the picture) to surrealist object-compositions. To object-creations that are made up of many objects heterogeneous in everyday life, in their practical function. In the genre of assemblage, a term from the history of art, objects gain a new sense. More exactly, it is not the objects that gain a new sense, but by the help of objects a new side of the world is revealed. Life of objects What is so exciting in the life of objects? In the 1910s, Dadaism turned to objects, to randomly selected everyday objects, with a radical act to prove that they could be just as suitable to become works of art. This act can be understood, of course, as if it had destroyed the state of work of art in its ’traditional’ sense. In fact, this act has broadened the limits of works of art and art, completely tearing off the concept of work of art from the requirements of being done, of handicraft, and extending it with possibilities of mere thoughts and ideas. For this reason, it is not important which one is the ’original’, what the concept of ’origin’ means in case of a Dadaist work. Marcel Duchamp’s Spring or Mona Lisa are known in many copies, as we can buy them like any other things in shops. What made these objects works of art was the artistic act. The act by which the object lost its original function and, based on the artist’s purpose, it gained a new sense with a new title. Another great age of reinterpreting objects was the American pop art around the 1960s. Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns and others stepped beyond the radical act of Dadaism to an extent that in their works real object creation, the fact of being done has a far too favored role. They created real or ’classical’ works of art which preserve the aura of ’originality’ even if these works were ’only’ copies, transcriptions of common, cheap and everyday objects enlarged, colored and made of a material that was foreign to the character of the object. Objects of pop art were those known by modern mass production, mass consumption and welfare mass-societies: food cans, cans of beer, bottles of drinks, ice-cream, hamburger and, of course, the American national flag itself, American banknotes, and the American mass culture’s almost materialized icons, such as rock stars, politicians and celebrities. In the world of pop art, the process of making objects heroic and insignificant things monumental went on, and in addition, it was declared, even if ironically, that the world is about material goods and money. Nevertheless, in pop art there was a romantic ideal that boundaries between art and life can be demolished. The trivial truth of pop art is that all things can be art and all people can be artists is actually
