Miklós Erdély und die Indigo Gruppe
02 Jul - 23 Aug 2008
MIKLÓS ERDÉLY UND DIE INDIGO GRUPPE
Miklós Erdély (1928–86), architect, artist, writer, poet, theorist, filmmaker, was an mportant catalyst on the unofficial Hungarian art scene during the 1960s, 70s and early 80s.
Hailed as “the father of the new Hungarian avantgarde”, Erdély was a charismatic ersonality, always provocative and often irritating, especially to the authorities. rom 1975 until his death he ran three conceptionally and methodically related ourses in art – Creativity Exercises (in 1975–76, together with Dóra Maurer and yörgy Galántai), Fantasy Developing Exercises (FAFEJ) and Inter-Disciplinary- Thinking (Indigo) – which were conceived as experimental teaching studios or orkshops drawing on avant-garde artistic processes, new theories of creativity, ducational methods influenced by Eastern philosophical traditions and many other ources. By his own admission, one of the aims of his art pedagogical activity was o “create a milieu in which it might be worth working at all”. He regarded his students as the most suitable critics of his own works. The Indigo Group grew out f the third course, which Erdély led from 1978. The name Inter- Disciplinary- hinking refers, as Erdély put it, to the fact that they “did not give up the promising dea of working on the borderline of two cultures – science and art”. They were nterested in questions concerning the functions and possibilities of art and onsidered these inseparable from creative thinking in society and life as well. The ndigo Group arranged numerous thematic exhibitions and group actions between 978 and 1986, which were centred around either some artistic medium (Coal and harcoal Drawing, Sand and Its Forms of Movement, Painting, Avant-garde or xperimental Film, Watercolour, Paperworks, the one-year drawing course at the useum of Fine Arts, 1982–1983), or an abstract concept (Weight, Faith / Loyalty, rtists’ Exit, The Poetic Avant-garde), or other personal experiences and activities My Fondest Summer Memory, Biography, Table Actions). Among the socio-political manifestations, it is worth highlighting the Indigo Peace Call, the Founding rtificate of the Voluntary Legislative Body (1982) and the Pax Action (1983).
In the initial period, they regarded their presentations as joint works: they would ick a theme, gather an enormous sum of individual ideas around it (which are ometimes also exhibited); they select the best ideas together and modify these uring the working process, so that it is impossible to decide who contributed what o the final version. From about 1980, however, it was first and foremost works of individual artists that were exhibited at group shows.
Among these was, in March 1984, the exhibition The Personal and the Sacred (Ami zemélyes és ami szent), which was inspired by the thoughts in Simone eil’s essay La Personne et le Sacré. Simone Weil (1909–1943) was a writer of Jewish rigin, who viewed the world in a holistic way and was opposed to the division of nowledge into separate branches of study. According to Weil, people regard cience, art and religion as separate territories because they are incapable of lieving in a coherent world order. She believed in the accessibility of a higher, ystical knowledge characterised by unity and universality. “In science, truth is sacred. In art, beauty is sacred. Beauty and truth are always
impersonal.” “That which is sacred is by no means our personality; on the ontrary, it is what is impersonal in our human being. Everything that is impersonal n man is sacred. And that alone is sacred,” she wrote. Members of the Indigo roup produced photographic works treating the subject for the exhibition, The ersonal and the Sacred, the large part of which have been preserved within the Erdély estate, and a selection of these is on view now at the Georg Kargl Gallery. he method for the exhibition of photographic works follows the installation of the riginal, which was determined by the group as a whole in 1984: each photo was niformly placed under glass of 70 x 100 cm, and the artists placed their “personal” oormats beneath some individual works.
Erzsébet Ambrus showed photograms that were made standing on their/her head, ntitled Everything is Upside-Down. Bál int Bori referred to the sanctity of othingness with three – a black, a grey and a white – pieces of photographs glued longside each other. The photo of András Böröcz portrayed the bathroom mirror nd the objects on the shelf in front of it, and alongside the mirror, drawn on the ile are a dancing couple: he and his love at the time. Mária Czakó placed a family photo, recording her with her husband, András Böröcz, and their son, Menyus, longside a drawing of the figures in the photo outlined in red paint. Dániel Erdély’s hoto, in which a plastic mess-kit full of food and a slice of bread are visible, elated o the sanctity of eating and the everyday. Beneath the artwork, he epresented in the form of two slices of bread symmetrically placed on the floor, nd
reminiscent of the soles of shoes, the everyday bread necessary for life as an veryday “entry”. Miklós Erdély’s exhibited work was a collage of paper, bitumen, ndigo-paper, a newspaper cut-out, a photo and a print made with an airbrush, hich could be brought into connection with Simon Weil’s writing in The Personal nd the Sacred, which concerns the sacred as the impersonal existing in man: “There s something that lives deep in the heart of man, from earliest childhood, from the radle to the grave, which, despite every sin committed and suffered, and every ad thing experienced and unrepentant, invariably awaits something good to be one and not something bad. And it is this something, that above all is sacred in very single person.”
Erdély placed three figurative depictions at a distance from each other on a white heet of paper, whose largest part was covered by a dark-coloured material. A ewspaper cut-out is embedded in a thin, brown pulp of bitumen along the upper dge of the work, in which he left a smaller and larger par uncovered. On the eft-hand side, the caption “Messiah appears“, and to the right of this a news story illustrated with a photo can be read, entitled The Absolution of Ali Agca. Visible in he photo are “the Pope and his would-be assassin”, while the text in the space ept free around the photo is as follows: “John Paul II met in private with Ali Agca, who n 13 May 1981 attempted to murder the Holy Father. Yesterday morning in ome, the meeting took place in the cell of the Turkish terrorist. The Pope entered he cell alone. He embraced the convict and forgave him. The two men spoke softly for 20 minutes. As the minutes passed, Ali Agca drew increasingly closer to the ope. They spoke in whispers. Most probably he told the truth about the attack in aint Peter’s Square. At the conclusion of the conversation that appeared to be a onfession, John Paul II said [...] ‘What we discussed will remain the secret of the wo of us. Ali Agca is a brother, whom I have forgiven, and he has my full trust.’ Before Ali Agca was left to himself in his cell, he kneeled before the Holy Father nd he kissed both his hands. The attack is still visible on one of them...” Erdély mphasised the highlighted part of the text in the newspaper cut-out in purple. eyond the band of bitumen, there is a print made by a child’s hand on the ight-hand side, whose lower edge fills the larger part of the artwork, and borders a ark blue sheet of indigo-paper that was once folded in eight parts, the traces of hese folds still visible. Erdély has placed an old family photo at the lower ight-hand corner of the indigo-paper, with the following explanatory caption: “I ance the czardas with my grandmother in 1937”. Starting in 1977, Erdély began to mploy indigo-paper regularly in many of his works, and it was at this time that e fashioned his Indigo-drawing technique using indigo- or copy-paper, in onnection with the Möbius strip, by which the “original” drawing and its copy are endered on exactly the same surface.
In Hungarian, the name for the indigo- or copy-paper corresponds with that of the ndigo Group, and although this may have been the result of chance, this technique f “copying” or “reproduction” could also be seen as a metaphor for his “teaching technique”. The primary motif of Zoltán Lábas’s 16-part photo series was the shadow projected onto the wall of the number cut out from each paper and suspended (though not visible in the pictures): of the six and the seven. Tivadar emesi’s four-part photo series depicts the artist himself while practising some sort f magic activity, which might just as well be a performance as a shamanistic eremony. László Révész showed a found photo, in which objects were visible – a air of scales, a coffee-grinder, a language book and an alarm clock – that could be ound in the flat of Révész’s grandmother. János Sugár’s photo portrays two right spotlights mounted on stands turned toward each other, which were ompared to human figures made from rods. The picture appears on the backing urface from a slight view from below, which served to accentuate the “personal erspective”. In János Szi rtes’s work entitled Our Home is Earth, 16 photos glued ide by side to the upper half of a white cardboard sheet, comprises a 4 x 4 matrix. Thirteen of the photos depict trees and bushes, while the other three show kinned nimal pelts, Coptic reliefs marked with a cross, and a wooden altarpiece Pieta). One of the possible interpretations of the artwork could be that the ersonal nd the sacred become inseparably intertwined in our everyday milieu, hether it concerns pantheism, shamanism, or the ecology. Alongside the works of he Indigo Group, a small selection of photographic works made by Miklós Erdély efore 1984 is also on view. Erdély, who made sculptures, graphic works, paintings, bjects, collages, environments, conceptual works, actions, films and ideos, from the late 1960s used photography and photograms as autonomous ols f expression and as creative elements of individual works. An example of the atter is his work entitled The Personal and the Sacred, which was the last such ork he made. Erdély himself did not photograph, but either found his photos adymade, or had someone (most often, his own sons) photograph what he eeded. e often illustrated with photos or photo-actions his art-theory-philosophical- oetic texts, and often employed photos to observe the phenomenon f the image, mapping and representation, but for his conceptual examinations. ccording to László Beke, in his conceptual use of photography, the metaphor of photography as art stands. At the same time, in many of his photographic works, e placed one or another element of photographic technique, for instance, light, at he centre, as in the case of Evening Action (1969) or Self-Illumination (Light Eats p Man) (1969), from among his exhibited works. The “mistake” of “flash verexposure” in the latter work became the departure point for a metaphor-making process. His 1972 Metaphor Studies are similarly poetically charged, while is No Photographs! shown at the exhibition organised on the occasion of the 1974 onference, Culture and Semiotics, touches upon the question of the interpretation f symbols: it concerns “pragmatic mistaking of rules taken in the semiotic sense” – n the words of László Beke. The conceptual origins of his 1980 Sacred Line can be traced to a conversation with Gábor Bódy on film as material, which Erdély mmented upon thus: “I was arguing with Bódy in a pub about what obscene terial ilm is. ... I explained how much more the concrete meeting of graphite with paper s worth, what a transfigured moment it is when one puts the graphite pencil on a ure white sheet, or anything at all. ... Afterwards I tried to think of ways to make it ven more ether-like. It was then that I came up with that ‘sacred line’ thing: I ut a piece of lead on a pencil, tie a piece of string on the end and then draw the ine. And indeed, this is an absolute moment of leaving a trace, such a noble ompromise of interference and the independent behaviour of material, that erhaps only in the world of God exists something like this. To leave matter mewhat to its own devices to do what it wants to, yet to control it. Sometimes I ave the feeling that with a method like this, one cannot draw an unattractive line.” is photographic work entitled Relaxation or Work is the visual recording of an idea erformed as an action in 1983, which, according to one of Erdély’s sons, can be raced to the following Biblical citation: “And he said unto them, The Sabbath was ade for man, and not man for the Sabbath” (Mark, 2:27).
The first presentation of the exhibition arranged from the photographic works of iklós Erdély and the Indigo Group took place at the Kisterem Gallery in Budapest n May through June 2008. The show was realised in collaboration with the Miklós rdély Foundation, and an unusual timeliness was provided by the fact that at the same time, the exhibition Fluxus East – Fluxus Networks in Central Eastern Europe was on view at the Ludwig Museum Budapest; an exhibition organised from the ontemporary art collection of the Erste Bank Group at the ICA – Dunaújváros; and he exhibition entitled Concept, Conception, Extracts, organised by Dóra aurer (Open Structures Association) in the Vasarely Museum; embedded in the ontext of which, individual photo-works of Miklós Erdély were on view. In parallel ith these, the volume presenting the art pedagogical activity of Miklós Erdély was ublished, in which Indigo works visible in the current exhibition were published for he first time.
Miklós Erdély (1928–86), architect, artist, writer, poet, theorist, filmmaker, was an mportant catalyst on the unofficial Hungarian art scene during the 1960s, 70s and early 80s.
Hailed as “the father of the new Hungarian avantgarde”, Erdély was a charismatic ersonality, always provocative and often irritating, especially to the authorities. rom 1975 until his death he ran three conceptionally and methodically related ourses in art – Creativity Exercises (in 1975–76, together with Dóra Maurer and yörgy Galántai), Fantasy Developing Exercises (FAFEJ) and Inter-Disciplinary- Thinking (Indigo) – which were conceived as experimental teaching studios or orkshops drawing on avant-garde artistic processes, new theories of creativity, ducational methods influenced by Eastern philosophical traditions and many other ources. By his own admission, one of the aims of his art pedagogical activity was o “create a milieu in which it might be worth working at all”. He regarded his students as the most suitable critics of his own works. The Indigo Group grew out f the third course, which Erdély led from 1978. The name Inter- Disciplinary- hinking refers, as Erdély put it, to the fact that they “did not give up the promising dea of working on the borderline of two cultures – science and art”. They were nterested in questions concerning the functions and possibilities of art and onsidered these inseparable from creative thinking in society and life as well. The ndigo Group arranged numerous thematic exhibitions and group actions between 978 and 1986, which were centred around either some artistic medium (Coal and harcoal Drawing, Sand and Its Forms of Movement, Painting, Avant-garde or xperimental Film, Watercolour, Paperworks, the one-year drawing course at the useum of Fine Arts, 1982–1983), or an abstract concept (Weight, Faith / Loyalty, rtists’ Exit, The Poetic Avant-garde), or other personal experiences and activities My Fondest Summer Memory, Biography, Table Actions). Among the socio-political manifestations, it is worth highlighting the Indigo Peace Call, the Founding rtificate of the Voluntary Legislative Body (1982) and the Pax Action (1983).
In the initial period, they regarded their presentations as joint works: they would ick a theme, gather an enormous sum of individual ideas around it (which are ometimes also exhibited); they select the best ideas together and modify these uring the working process, so that it is impossible to decide who contributed what o the final version. From about 1980, however, it was first and foremost works of individual artists that were exhibited at group shows.
Among these was, in March 1984, the exhibition The Personal and the Sacred (Ami zemélyes és ami szent), which was inspired by the thoughts in Simone eil’s essay La Personne et le Sacré. Simone Weil (1909–1943) was a writer of Jewish rigin, who viewed the world in a holistic way and was opposed to the division of nowledge into separate branches of study. According to Weil, people regard cience, art and religion as separate territories because they are incapable of lieving in a coherent world order. She believed in the accessibility of a higher, ystical knowledge characterised by unity and universality. “In science, truth is sacred. In art, beauty is sacred. Beauty and truth are always
impersonal.” “That which is sacred is by no means our personality; on the ontrary, it is what is impersonal in our human being. Everything that is impersonal n man is sacred. And that alone is sacred,” she wrote. Members of the Indigo roup produced photographic works treating the subject for the exhibition, The ersonal and the Sacred, the large part of which have been preserved within the Erdély estate, and a selection of these is on view now at the Georg Kargl Gallery. he method for the exhibition of photographic works follows the installation of the riginal, which was determined by the group as a whole in 1984: each photo was niformly placed under glass of 70 x 100 cm, and the artists placed their “personal” oormats beneath some individual works.
Erzsébet Ambrus showed photograms that were made standing on their/her head, ntitled Everything is Upside-Down. Bál int Bori referred to the sanctity of othingness with three – a black, a grey and a white – pieces of photographs glued longside each other. The photo of András Böröcz portrayed the bathroom mirror nd the objects on the shelf in front of it, and alongside the mirror, drawn on the ile are a dancing couple: he and his love at the time. Mária Czakó placed a family photo, recording her with her husband, András Böröcz, and their son, Menyus, longside a drawing of the figures in the photo outlined in red paint. Dániel Erdély’s hoto, in which a plastic mess-kit full of food and a slice of bread are visible, elated o the sanctity of eating and the everyday. Beneath the artwork, he epresented in the form of two slices of bread symmetrically placed on the floor, nd
reminiscent of the soles of shoes, the everyday bread necessary for life as an veryday “entry”. Miklós Erdély’s exhibited work was a collage of paper, bitumen, ndigo-paper, a newspaper cut-out, a photo and a print made with an airbrush, hich could be brought into connection with Simon Weil’s writing in The Personal nd the Sacred, which concerns the sacred as the impersonal existing in man: “There s something that lives deep in the heart of man, from earliest childhood, from the radle to the grave, which, despite every sin committed and suffered, and every ad thing experienced and unrepentant, invariably awaits something good to be one and not something bad. And it is this something, that above all is sacred in very single person.”
Erdély placed three figurative depictions at a distance from each other on a white heet of paper, whose largest part was covered by a dark-coloured material. A ewspaper cut-out is embedded in a thin, brown pulp of bitumen along the upper dge of the work, in which he left a smaller and larger par uncovered. On the eft-hand side, the caption “Messiah appears“, and to the right of this a news story illustrated with a photo can be read, entitled The Absolution of Ali Agca. Visible in he photo are “the Pope and his would-be assassin”, while the text in the space ept free around the photo is as follows: “John Paul II met in private with Ali Agca, who n 13 May 1981 attempted to murder the Holy Father. Yesterday morning in ome, the meeting took place in the cell of the Turkish terrorist. The Pope entered he cell alone. He embraced the convict and forgave him. The two men spoke softly for 20 minutes. As the minutes passed, Ali Agca drew increasingly closer to the ope. They spoke in whispers. Most probably he told the truth about the attack in aint Peter’s Square. At the conclusion of the conversation that appeared to be a onfession, John Paul II said [...] ‘What we discussed will remain the secret of the wo of us. Ali Agca is a brother, whom I have forgiven, and he has my full trust.’ Before Ali Agca was left to himself in his cell, he kneeled before the Holy Father nd he kissed both his hands. The attack is still visible on one of them...” Erdély mphasised the highlighted part of the text in the newspaper cut-out in purple. eyond the band of bitumen, there is a print made by a child’s hand on the ight-hand side, whose lower edge fills the larger part of the artwork, and borders a ark blue sheet of indigo-paper that was once folded in eight parts, the traces of hese folds still visible. Erdély has placed an old family photo at the lower ight-hand corner of the indigo-paper, with the following explanatory caption: “I ance the czardas with my grandmother in 1937”. Starting in 1977, Erdély began to mploy indigo-paper regularly in many of his works, and it was at this time that e fashioned his Indigo-drawing technique using indigo- or copy-paper, in onnection with the Möbius strip, by which the “original” drawing and its copy are endered on exactly the same surface.
In Hungarian, the name for the indigo- or copy-paper corresponds with that of the ndigo Group, and although this may have been the result of chance, this technique f “copying” or “reproduction” could also be seen as a metaphor for his “teaching technique”. The primary motif of Zoltán Lábas’s 16-part photo series was the shadow projected onto the wall of the number cut out from each paper and suspended (though not visible in the pictures): of the six and the seven. Tivadar emesi’s four-part photo series depicts the artist himself while practising some sort f magic activity, which might just as well be a performance as a shamanistic eremony. László Révész showed a found photo, in which objects were visible – a air of scales, a coffee-grinder, a language book and an alarm clock – that could be ound in the flat of Révész’s grandmother. János Sugár’s photo portrays two right spotlights mounted on stands turned toward each other, which were ompared to human figures made from rods. The picture appears on the backing urface from a slight view from below, which served to accentuate the “personal erspective”. In János Szi rtes’s work entitled Our Home is Earth, 16 photos glued ide by side to the upper half of a white cardboard sheet, comprises a 4 x 4 matrix. Thirteen of the photos depict trees and bushes, while the other three show kinned nimal pelts, Coptic reliefs marked with a cross, and a wooden altarpiece Pieta). One of the possible interpretations of the artwork could be that the ersonal nd the sacred become inseparably intertwined in our everyday milieu, hether it concerns pantheism, shamanism, or the ecology. Alongside the works of he Indigo Group, a small selection of photographic works made by Miklós Erdély efore 1984 is also on view. Erdély, who made sculptures, graphic works, paintings, bjects, collages, environments, conceptual works, actions, films and ideos, from the late 1960s used photography and photograms as autonomous ols f expression and as creative elements of individual works. An example of the atter is his work entitled The Personal and the Sacred, which was the last such ork he made. Erdély himself did not photograph, but either found his photos adymade, or had someone (most often, his own sons) photograph what he eeded. e often illustrated with photos or photo-actions his art-theory-philosophical- oetic texts, and often employed photos to observe the phenomenon f the image, mapping and representation, but for his conceptual examinations. ccording to László Beke, in his conceptual use of photography, the metaphor of photography as art stands. At the same time, in many of his photographic works, e placed one or another element of photographic technique, for instance, light, at he centre, as in the case of Evening Action (1969) or Self-Illumination (Light Eats p Man) (1969), from among his exhibited works. The “mistake” of “flash verexposure” in the latter work became the departure point for a metaphor-making process. His 1972 Metaphor Studies are similarly poetically charged, while is No Photographs! shown at the exhibition organised on the occasion of the 1974 onference, Culture and Semiotics, touches upon the question of the interpretation f symbols: it concerns “pragmatic mistaking of rules taken in the semiotic sense” – n the words of László Beke. The conceptual origins of his 1980 Sacred Line can be traced to a conversation with Gábor Bódy on film as material, which Erdély mmented upon thus: “I was arguing with Bódy in a pub about what obscene terial ilm is. ... I explained how much more the concrete meeting of graphite with paper s worth, what a transfigured moment it is when one puts the graphite pencil on a ure white sheet, or anything at all. ... Afterwards I tried to think of ways to make it ven more ether-like. It was then that I came up with that ‘sacred line’ thing: I ut a piece of lead on a pencil, tie a piece of string on the end and then draw the ine. And indeed, this is an absolute moment of leaving a trace, such a noble ompromise of interference and the independent behaviour of material, that erhaps only in the world of God exists something like this. To leave matter mewhat to its own devices to do what it wants to, yet to control it. Sometimes I ave the feeling that with a method like this, one cannot draw an unattractive line.” is photographic work entitled Relaxation or Work is the visual recording of an idea erformed as an action in 1983, which, according to one of Erdély’s sons, can be raced to the following Biblical citation: “And he said unto them, The Sabbath was ade for man, and not man for the Sabbath” (Mark, 2:27).
The first presentation of the exhibition arranged from the photographic works of iklós Erdély and the Indigo Group took place at the Kisterem Gallery in Budapest n May through June 2008. The show was realised in collaboration with the Miklós rdély Foundation, and an unusual timeliness was provided by the fact that at the same time, the exhibition Fluxus East – Fluxus Networks in Central Eastern Europe was on view at the Ludwig Museum Budapest; an exhibition organised from the ontemporary art collection of the Erste Bank Group at the ICA – Dunaújváros; and he exhibition entitled Concept, Conception, Extracts, organised by Dóra aurer (Open Structures Association) in the Vasarely Museum; embedded in the ontext of which, individual photo-works of Miklós Erdély were on view. In parallel ith these, the volume presenting the art pedagogical activity of Miklós Erdély was ublished, in which Indigo works visible in the current exhibition were published for he first time.