The First Images
"It is in you, O my mind, that I measure time. Do not bring against me, do not bring against yourself the disorderly throng of your impressions. ...Yet still there is in the mind a memory of the past. Would anyone deny that the present Time lacks extension, since it is but a point that passes on? Yet the attention endures, and by it that which is to be passes on its way to being no more. Thus it is not the future that is long, for the future does not exist: a long future is merely a long expectation of the future; nor is the past long since the past does not exist: a long past is merely a long memory of the past." (The Confessions of St. Augustine: XI. 27; 28.)
Some time ago, the Bartók 32 Gallery was a cinema. Correspondingly the room is elongated, its plan is a slightly irregular rectangle. We enter at one end of the room. Balázs Beöthy placed his mostly black and white First Images on the shorter wall of this room, opposite the entrance. The tunnel effect is enhanced by the lighting, the pictures draw the visitor entering the room; we have to walk the whole length of the entire empty space to take a good look at the exhibition itself. And when we're close enough to look at the pictures, we still haven't reached the end: we find there a door left slightly ajar. The space is not enclosed by the end wall, though we cannot enter the other room, for there is a TV behind the door.
The exhibited works are transformations of pictures Beöthy encountered first in his childhood. They are on the verge of the artistic, the mundane and the sacred world. (Among others there is a photo of the Turin shroud, many portraits, a forest; there are photos, oil paintings, drawings and a porcelain relief; works by unknown masters, a portrait by Beöthy's father as well as a picture by Bertalan Székely.) They might be intended to present a picture of the disciplined, middle-class surroundings into which Beöthy was born, yet the transformation is so strong, that the pictures from the walls of his home (partly because they are lifted out of their environment) gain a different meaning: the original pictures in themselves become unimportant. Their originality disappears, for they went through a multiplication process. First they lost their colours, their sizes, material reality (Miklós Sulyok took black and white photographs of them - thus someone else also is involved, the intimacy of the family is lost, as is the sacredness of private property), then the prints, enlarged from a negative, go through multiple transformation, the xeroxing procedure. The images, originally different in technique and quality, become homogenous. This process has a double character. On the one hand the mechanical filtering suggests that the artist himself is not taking part in it. On the other hand exactly the 'running them through technology' makes it possible for the artist to 'intervene' in the old objects. The sizes of the pictures correspond to their importance for the artist: big ones may shrink, smaller ones may grow bigger. And it is not only the size of the pictures that may change but also their cropping: at places the artist shows only one or another detail of certain pictures, particular details important to him.
The xeroxes are on tracing paper which makes the original pictures - just like memories or dreams - become more transparent and at the same time more contrasted, the details disappear. The video is seemingly at odds with all this: we see live, moving colour images, speaking of the past in the present: Balázs Beöthy's parents (mainly his father) talk about particular pictures as independent entities, about their history. This also lifts the past into the present, though in quite a different way: the images are in colour and they move and here we don't even see the actual pictures. However, the video and the xeroxes are somehow identical in quality, in their hiding-presenting character - both transformations of the same thing.
Similarly, the installation of the exhibition serves the same transformation: only one person at a time can watch the video, from the side, in a narrow slit, intently, as if she or he was peeping; the picture in the dark background is hardly approachable as if the parents' explanation came from somewhere far away. The xerox copies, however, were installed like 'real oil paintings', fixed on stretcher frames, with passing reference to the valued originals. At the same time he placed them on the wall close together, almost too crowdedly, in 4 lines, in regular order, like the growing number of ancestor portraits in the ancestral galleries. With this systematic arrangement he supports the proposition that the pictures belong together, that they represent a unity, that the messages of the individual pictures have no importance.
This is not something entirely personal, as we might think initially: it is not supposed to present the artist's starting point, for Beöthy's art has nothing visually in common with those pictures which surrounded him as a child. It was not these paintings of differing qualities that shaped his way of looking at the world. Something deeper, more elemental calls for this retrospection.
During Beöthy's transmutation the pictures obtain - according to the rules of the soul - a dream-like character; one might wander around, deform, select, always find different things important, stress certain details. Some of the details get blurry, and at the same time gain new character; others get simplified, become sharper or their outlines disappear, others again become translucent, or get lost all together, the soul labors on supplementing them.
Beöthy keeps a distance from these pictures, yet, what he selects, the way he transforms and arranges the pictures demonstrate his original way of looking at the world. The subject matters and pictorial qualities of the paintings were most effective in their original setting, the world they referred to, in which they could exist at all. Of course, the particular reality a work of art evokes is inherent in the work, and thus -according to the rules of the present - when the work undergoes changes, the world it evokes also changes.
Similarly, in the video the concrete information - who painted which picture, what are their values or what is curious about their composition, how did they get into the family - are not the most important. Much more so the fact that Balázs Beöthy's parents tell something, the way Beöthy's father tells stories, the atmosphere his speaking creates. It is not the facts that are interesting (actually, he talks about pictures the copies of which are not even exhibited).
The actual objects, the mediums of looking back into the past are only used as excuses for Beöthy's work; they bring to the surface something in common in all of us: even unaware we carry our memories, even the ones we deny, we forgot. Even the ones we were fighting against, we objected to, build into us, are working in us. In vain we deny our past, in spite of all protesting, this vague lower world operates us.
The past working in the present might be the issue here. It might be about the relationship between the declared or denied 'luggage' and revival, about the way the past dissolves into the present. Certain events, things of the past only count as much as they can become part of the present. Only that part of them is interesting.
Erzsébet Tatai (translated by Miklos Bodoczky)