Most of the artworks and collages for the exhibition were created recently. Collage is one of the characteristic genres of the avant-garde art movements of the 20th century. The technique was often used by cubists, dadaists and surrealists.
Among the many renowned artists known for their work in collage, we shall mention only a few: Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters, Lajos Kassák, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jacques Villeglé… The practice of collage is deeply connected to pop art, graffiti, and street art. Ottó Fenyvesi has been creating collages for over forty years; his earliest works were inspired by punk fanzines. Since then, he has become increasingly immersed in the genre. He lives and works in Lovas, a village on the shores of Lake Balaton.
www.fenyvesiotto.hu
Ottó Fenyvesi on his collages:
"I perceive reality as a kind of collage. In the traditional, narrative universe, there was always a first and a last chapter, a beginning and a temporary end, and higher-order rules that governed individual events. Stories were concluded with a moral. This stands in stark contrast to today’s social reality, mediated by the digital world, in which events unfold simultaneously, divergent intentions coexist, and occurrences often follow each other in unforeseeable ways—without any definite beginning or end within a given framework.
Visual media and the 'anarchy of communication' fragment and diversify human perception. The transformations taking place in systems of production, power, and experience are converging towards a reconfiguration of the material foundations of social life, space, and time. The flow-space of the information age dominates human culture. Time becomes timeless, as the societal tendency towards technological annihilation of time displaces the time logic of the industrial era. Capital circulates, power governs, and electronic communication whirls through the currents of exchange between remote, chosen locations, while fragmented experience remains rooted in place. Technology compresses time into a few random moments, thus disrupting the flow of society and 'dehistoricising' history. At the same time, the virtuality of our present era dismantles and disembodies social relationships. This is the dilemma I attempt to grasp through my artistic instincts and abilities.”
According to Walter Benjamin, the reproducibility of art leads to the desacralisation of both art and the human being. The involvement of the masses in cultural consumption has clearly shifted things in the direction of entertainment and tabloidisation. Alongside the artwork, the individual, too, can easily end up on the factory production line, losing the elevated experience of uniqueness and singularity in existence—the sense of the sacredness of human life.
It is interesting to note that, parallel to this desacralisation of the human, processes of emancipation were also unfolding—expanding human rights and freedom. During the major transgressions of the 1960s and ’70s, countercultural phenomena emerged in opposition to mass culture (rock and roll, the hippie and punk movements), which promoted the “crossing of boundaries” and “the great refusal,” while at the same time amplifying hybrid identities and fragmentation.
Instead of the familiar old value system, incongruous worldviews now intermingle in irregular, shifting, and hard-to-define spaces. The overall image of the metropolises at the turn of the millennium resembles a collage more than a still life. We live in the very midst of a vast collage. Within this “anthropological collage,” we arrange and define the elements—along with their interrelations—in accordance with our awareness of our position and identity.
Amid diversity and distinctiveness, our feelings, thoughts, and judgements are increasingly shaped by what might be called a “collage-based mode of existence.” We are ever more lost in an enormous and seemingly endless jungle of information, created with vastly different intentions and in vastly different forms. The torrent of information is overwhelming—not only in the printed press, on television, and on the radio, but now also on the internet, where everyone is pushing out words.
As a kind of protest—and perhaps by instinct—I cut up this vast ocean of text and try to shape something to my own liking, a new construction that also captures the spirit of the age. It’s a daunting task to sift out a few gems from this gigantic hyperproduction of information—those few rare pieces that truly hold value, that enrich and elevate an intellectual like myself. (It’s a bit like the work of the old-time gold prospectors: much toil, little result.)
Yet human curiosity and attention rush ever onward. Still more information floods in. The temporality of the moving image makes the viewer—immersed in a deluge of visual stimuli—increasingly impatient. One of the most radical experiences of contemporary perception is the challenge of dealing with speed and acceleration, which condemns us to a kind of “mosaic-consciousness.”
As Hölderlin once wrote to his brother: “The more threateningly the abyss of Nothingness yawns around us, or the more we are pursued and consumed by the shapeless multitude of human affairs—devoid of soul and love—the more passionately, fervently, and forcefully we must resist.”
From time to time, I turn and face the tidal wave—I try to swim against the current. In these moments, I collect materials, sift, sort, cut—and construct my own little “collage-world” in which I feel at home. “Something within me makes this so,” as Catullus might say. In contrast to the so-called “use paradigm,” I look at reality with a critical eye. My collages, then, can be seen as instinctive, countercultural responses.
