Particular Value of the “General Reminder”
Every show has a story behind it. Every choice has its motivation, curatorial choice as well. The idea of this exhibition–a János Sugár and Yuri Leiderman duet-was born a few years ago in Budapest in an absolutely private context. We were sitting in a cozy restaurant– János Sugár, Katalin Nëray and me-and in the course of the conversation, I felt that Yuri Leiderman was missing. I felt that he would be interested in the subject we were discussing and that he would have a lot to add. I felt also that his personality fit perfectly with the intimate, confidential and intellectually tense atmosphere we had established. Motivated by this feeling of absence, I said that János and Yuri should meet, should be in dialogue and should in some way do a show together.
In other words, this show appeared not as a professional project, but as a human fact. Is it wrong? Is it something we have to keep secret, unpronounced? No doubt, it contradicts the general curatorial approach and recognized criterions of the art system\’s professionalism. An exhibition should promote the name, should cultivate a discourse, and should justify certain institutional structure. The selection of the artists should reinforce certain formal and political logic, for example–a balance between male and female participants, between international and local and so on. Who cares if the participants of the exhibition had pleasure in being together, if they succeeded to establish a friendship? Obviously, it is not a major point nowadays. And that is a pity! Because, personal relations, shared human feelings are an enormous and productive resource. We know it from our common socialist past. We know it from our common present. It\’s happened to me lots of times when listening to an artist who has come home from some important international event: “The show, frankly, was nothing special, but I met one person!. . .”
In its depths, I think, this Leiderman-Sugár duet is exactly about that. It is about the value of the particular and not of the general, of the separate and not of the universal. It is not about an art process, but about an artist. Or, to be more precise, about two artists, about their attempt to be in dialogue, to look for the common points in their work. There is no a priori in this show, everything is unpredictable, everything is in becoming. This is the reason why there is no hard statement, no clear message, which can be easily appropriated We have to divide this intimate conversation, we have to come inside it. And what the artists are waiting for from us is not just our comprehension and recognition, “but for us to embrace them and this process in confidence.”
Geneva Anderson
How the Dialogue Became a Trialogue and the Witness a Participant
From my perspective, János Sugár started it. It began like it normally does–a friendly request during a phone conversation. Would I look over his correspondence with Yuri Leiderman, give my impressions….and could I. . . “lightly” edit it?
“Sure…” was my reply. . .made over a year ago.
The first time I read their exchange–I realized my privileged position. As artists, brought together by a curator, János and Yuri were in the process of detecting each other through words of an unfamiliar language and I was the outsider privy to that normally private dialogue. I was immediately hit with ideas, affirmations, questions and at the same time I had the sensation of slamming against a conceptual brick wall–something solid, requiring considerable effort to penetrate. What could he have meant by “lightly edit” ?
–the text unfolded in a quasi-logic of made-up (but beautifully efficient and inefficient) words;
–dense thoughts were expressed in short unconnected fragments;
–both artists seemed to converge around polar opposites–rationality/irrationality, fact/fiction, theory/myth;
–I had not seen the artworks they were discussing;
–I did not know Yuri Leiderman;
–I was in California, János in Budapest and Yuri in Moscow–it would all have to be done by email;
–and importantly– what could I offer them?
“It\’s up to you” was their laid-back reply. And so we began. Their exchange came together in its margins and rawness: it should not appear finished but in continual pursuit of open-ends. And rather than polished into perfectly understandable English, it needed to retain its East European poetic. It should be accessible to the reader but only after working–understanding as a delayed reward (as János might say.) And it must stand independently from the artworks as a complete work itself.
The process of editing this text/collaborating with them then was very much a process of entering each others\’ environment, finding and adding value—-questions—-exchange—-further questions—–refined answers—–and rewriting! And that unique process of intense exchange is so critical because it both articulates and produces a state of mind, a special consciousness.
And like a stone thrown into a pond, there were ripples.
The deeper I got into the text, the more I researched, consulted experts—librarians, philosophers—and involved friends from all the world as I inquired about chemistry, catalysis, mythology, polytheism, psychology, Tonio Kršger, Russian cosmology, analytic geometry, the Cold War, design theory, meta-communication and numerous perplexing small things like what does “sucked out of a finger mean”? And those people began to take interest and started having their own conversations about this dialog. I was amazed how after months had passed, they remembered and could quote lines back to me about goats peeing, “radiant-floated moments,” “nonsense models,” so forth. And my attitude toward the project changed and I began to assert myself more actively and János and Yuri did as well. The decision to print some of my comments (which normally are not shown) and change the dialogue to a trialogue was the decision to publicly reveal the novel behind the dialogue. The story of art coming into being, the Aufheben of Hegel.
If there is a moment when one comes up against the limits of one\’s known universe, something that separates us from words, codes, the familiar, I confronted it in this exchange. It is out of respect for this limit and its subsequent demise in its own time that I encourage you all to keep reading.
Viktor Misiano
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Continuing the Dialogue: the Background of General Reminder
My special dialogue with Russian non-official art goes back to the late 1980\’s when I organized the exhibition of the Furman Street Group in Budapest. Than I had no chance to meet with other Russian artist groups. It was in 1991 at the Hague, Netherlands, that I met the Medical Hermeneutics and Yuri Leiderman during a conference dedicated to the cultural-political change in Central and Eastern Europe (plus a big Russian show at the Stedelijk Museum). Viktor Misiano was there also and the Medhermeneutics performed their contribution as a serious lecture about history and politics (e.g. World War II was interpreted as a sexual intercourse between Hitler and Stalin) which left a lasting impression in my memory.
At that time, I had no idea about our future collaboration.
When I took this position at the Ludwig Museum, I was searching for the Russians in the collection and found a very funny and ironic tripyich by Yuri Leiderman where the German words are written in Cyrillic letters. For me, that was evidence of the strong linguistic tendency typical in Moscow Romantic Conceptualism. “We try to build a meta-level of tradition in relation to it” – said the MH member Peppershtein at a discussion with Jury Leiderman and the group.
Some years later, when Viktor Misiano and I worked together on the Manifesta I project, one of the so-called “Open House” seminars took place in Budapest with the participation of János Sugár, one of the most important figures in Hungarian post-conceptualism. At that time, the idea that Viktor writes about was born.The real communication of the two artists started in Rotterdam during the Manifesta but it took two years until the first result emerged, the Budapest joint exhibition.
Both artists ask questions of art – its meaning, its position and interpretation. They both like to confront noble and cheap materials and sophisticated and simple techniques.They both try to keep a certain distance from the product. This modest show which travels after Budapest to Gdansk and Zagreb is just one station of their personal correspondance. They are going to develop it for the Jeu de Paume in Paris as part of a bigger series about the region.
The documentation about this process is as important as the exhibition itself.
Katalin Neray
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General reminder or Answer to the Question Not Posed
In May 1998, János Sugár and Yuri Leiderman overlaid the hall at their disposition (140 m2) at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest with masonite sheets, dividing it into cubic spaces. They thus established a common situation, in which they arranged their various connected works in a truly enigmatic way. Within the thinking process of Sugár and Leiderman – the visual depiction of the mental system of their art – the raster symbolic of some type of system is a fundamental element.
Their preceding correspondence determined the selection of works: since 1996, they became acquainted with one another’s thoughts by way of a regular exchange of (electronic) letters, with the objective of delineating the parametres of a dual exhibition.
The two artists agreed that they were both interested in unintelligible-uninterpretable (nonsensical) structures, that they would assume responsibility for the contextlessness, by which invisible correlations would be generated subsequently (in relation to all this, see their correspondence published in the catalogue).
Yuri Leiderman treats real life events or inherited historical knowledge (e.g., airplane disasters, Greek epics, ancient burial customs) and develops them further (in this exhibition, the depiction of the concocted tattoos of Eskimos, or the drawing-like appearance of scalding poetry). With storytelling fantasy, he creates a new genre of logical order, by which everything interconnects with everything else.
His Lobytangi is a mythical species of dog, made of paper, and expandable, with harmonica legs (as shown in the animation film of similar name), which „from out of nowhere” materialises on a mass scale as a legendary animal. Similar is the fantastic story of the fantastic Tlin civilisation – one of whose representatives is the exhibited hedgehog-baby, standing on stork-legs, traveling the world in gigantic boots – which conquers the entire universe. („In the 586434th year of the Dissemination, the Tlins civilisation broke through the borders of the Ring and flooded the entire Galaxy.”)
His work entitled The Perished Team comprises a memorial to the football team that perished in an airplane crash. The sepulchral urn holder on the rastered surface of the wall exerts a centrifugal force. It is as if the dispersion of the football team were to appear, whereas only the well-known patterned ball is recognisable.
With his works, YL seeks evidence that in this world everything can happen in a variety of ways, and their causes are also manifold; nevertheless, in only one way does it become reality.
According to János Sugár, it is worthwhile to seize the future in the present because this leads the closest to perfection. It is for this reason that he strives to think in the future, so that when that point in time is reached, he can already stand ready with answers to those questions that could not have even been asked in the present. (Or, as he expresses elsewhere: to advance the deadline, or to create the present from the future, is to anticipate the future.) The Breakfast of Logos also refers to this: by the time that “dinnertime” comes, the artist is able to produce these answers. In Sugár’s Practical Transparency works, composed of idiosyncratic repetitive elements – spatial (car taillights) and projected commas, blue box material, black squares, cast(?) negatives, wire net, numbered balls – he permits a glimpse into the imperceptible coherencies. With relentless repetition, all at once he carries it to excess and represents his message in the most simplistic way possible (he invests and saves energy simultaneously). The „Big Bang” rendered the onset of events… That of which there is an idea exists and is evokable, is imperfect because it is forgettable.
A walless column divided the exhibition space. The triangular floor-space generated two main sides: on one side, on two TV sets, a video of each of the artists was running (JS: Ariadné Unemployed (1996); YL: Lobytangi (1997)). On the other side, in a niche redolent of two urns, they each placed one of their multiples produced expressly for the exhibition – from Yuri Leiderman a Lobytangi, and from János Sugár an aluminium cast. With the two objects placed in the unintentionally created „places of internment”, divergence and similarity meet and are equally manifest in the works of the two artists. The dog pair of weak paper is the offspring of fantasy, while the durable aluminium cast is the objectification of the negative, the „nothing” – in a plastic bonbon form. The one is volatile, while the other is more enduring. Yet they are practically merged into one artwork, as an enigmatic power is established between them; within them, an as of yet unforeshadowed coherence is embodied.
Works figuring in the prominent space, as quotations, or synopses, exerted an influence within the exhibition.
The scheme of interdependence of the exhibited works – within the works themselves and in relation to each other – was not concerned with the direct transmission of something (i.e., not communication for communication’s sake – The Medium is the Message), but rather endeavoured to remind us of something, to revive events in the collective unconsciousness, which we are not even able to formulate.
Let us recall…
Dóra Hegyi
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Yuri Leiderman
Born in 1963 in Odessa, USSR (now Ukraine). He graduated from the Moscow Institute of Chemical Technology named after Mendeleev in 1987. Since 1982, he has taken part in unofficial exhibitions of contemporary art in Moscow and Odessa. He was one of the founding members of the Inspection “Medical Hermenautics conceptual art group. He left the group in 1991. He frequently takes part in international exhibitions such as Sonsbeek\’93, Venice Biennial (1993) and Manifesta I (1996). Leiderman is the author and co-author of several books as The Best and Very Dubious (Moscow, 1992), Electrons Names (St. Petersburg, 1997), etc. He is a permanent contributor to Moscow Art Magazine and Kinoart magazine. He resides in Moscow.
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János Sugár
Studied in the Department of Sculpture at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest from 1979 to 1984. Between 1980 and 1986, he was actively involved in the exhibitions and performances of Indigo, an interdisciplinary art group led by Miklós Erdély. Sugár has participated in national and international exhibitions since 1984 and has also created numerous performances, films, and videos. Between 1990 and 1995, he was on the board of the Balázs Béla Film Studio, Budapest. Since 1990, Sugár has been teaching art and media theory in the Intermedia Department, Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, Budapest. In 1992 he exhibited at the Documenta IX, Kassel. In 1995, he published the book: Minus Pathos (Budapest, 1998). He completed an Artslink residency at the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1994 and fellowships at Experimental Intermedia, New York, in 1998, and 1999. His films were screened at the Anthology Film Archives in New York in 1998. He resides in Budapest.
