Eliost, Karen (szerk.): Szombathy. Városjelek 1971 - 2012. Művészet Malom, Szentendre, 2012. szeptember 28 - november 11. (Szentendre, 2012)
A város törlődő jelei
Signs of the City under Erasure The artistic practice of Bálint Szombathy is not overly concerned with adding to the global stockpile of art pieces or material objects of any kind, since for the artist, 'creativity is not connected with production’, but rather with establishing 'models of new linguistic systems.’1 His lack of interest in producing objects has led him to tackle the effect of absence, the sentiments provoked when objects, signs or meanings go missing. The artist is concerned not with the fetishized objets trouvés of the avant-garde, but with the discovery of lacunae or inconsistencies in the urban fabric and exploring the visual and emotive effect when something we expect to see is not there. Just as this work is not about objects, neither at first glance is it about aesthetics. It is safe to say that on the whole aesthetic decision was absent from the human acts that resulted in the creation of the scenes or situations presented in these photographic series. The plumber who left a coil of tubing sticking out of a wall did not arrange the material to create a particular impact, while the decorator who left a patch undone because they ran out of paint or it wasn’t part of the job gave no thought to the Malevich-style square that accidentally came into being as a result. While aesthetics were absent at the beginning of the life of these situations, with the entry of the artist on the scene something has changed; a transformation takes place rooted in the framing of the original act of erasure or carelessness through the eye of the camera. Balint Szombathy has been described as an 'artist-nomad whose role is to act in hybrid artistic and cultural registers’2, both because of the itinerant lifestyle he enjoyed for several decades, alternating between Novi Sad in Vojvodina and Budapest but never confined to one reality or another, and for the freedom with which he shifts between modes of artistic expression. In an attempt to place the broad scope of his artistic activities within a theoretical framework he has suggested four headings to categorise his output: committed (political art), conceptual art (idea art), behaviour art and the art of signs (semiological art). Typically he tends not to mix these parallel modes of artistic investigation, inhabiting just one artistic identity at a time, and in this exhibition we’re clearly in the realm of the art of signs. Connections can also be made between this series of photographs of erased, discarded and rediscovered signs in the city dating back to the early 1970s and the artist’s separate investigation of electro-photography. Created when errors arise in the transmission of photographs using analogue fax machines to produce distorted images, the artist saved hundreds of examples of this accidental phenomenon from the wastepaper basket of a regional newspaper and, in a Duchampian gesture, elevated them to the realm of art. In common with his collection of found electro-photographs, Szombathy’s revelation of a plethora of unnoticed and randomly created signs in the city also speaks volumes about the 'disintegration and deconstruction of the tangible world and its revelation as a fragmented series of random visual signs.’3 1 Quoted in Nebojsa Milenkovic, ed., Szombathy Art (Museum of Contemporary Art: Novi Sad, 2005), 174. 2 Misko Suvakovid, 'Performing of Politics in Art-Transitional Fluxes of Conflict,’ in Szombathy Art, 171. 3 See our review of Bálint Szombathy’s exhibition Motion-Pictures at the Mai Manó House of Photography: Time Out Budapest no. 28 (June 2011). 12
