July 4, 2010

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“UNITED SENSE OF ART”, 1991

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“TRAUM VOM DENKEN”, 1996

“MIRRORS OF THE VOID”, 1993

Place: Galerie de Luxembourg – Luxembourg City (Luxembourg)

Text by Péter Nádas

A WORD, A LINE I WRITE A SENTENCE.

Or does the sentence write me? I draw a line. But can I ask if the line has drawn me? I have four sentences. I have two questions which answer my two state-ments. Who speaks in my sentence and who does the sentence speak to? Wouldn’t it be more correct to say that those speak in my sentence who don’t talk: wouldn’t I be able to say either more or less than as long as their silence spreads? Who would I be? And wouldn’t my speaking up be more than the silence touched in others? Would I be as much and as long as much and as long as I speak to someone else?

I have twelve sentences. Talking about the thirteenth is my fourteenth sen-tence.

This is how one sentence gets piled onto the other. In the pile I am in control of the relationships created by the sentences at the most, something I am even unable to utter, but I’m not either of the sentence or of the word, even though both are in one’s possession. The relationships created by the sentences could at the most be described with sentences, however I haven’t, I cannot have enough sentences to describe these relationships. And it sounds as if I were saying that not saying anything is more: silence. Or as if I had said that more blank space remains on the paper than lines I could draw. There are not enough dots, not enough lines to completely fill the space. And if there were, there are no more dots or lines; space, however, will remain space.

In times immemorial lines and words must have been side by side. Nobody could have thought there was any relationship between them. Why does one think so now, and how long has one done so? If I didn’t carry the words according to my and other’s talk I wouldn’t be able to write down this sentence. Neither would I be able to do so if there was nothing to carry on. In fact I don’t write sentences but loop agreements. One should say perhaps, that the thought behind my words is common. I make others assert them-selves in me.

Punctum- say those who speak Latin. They put the sensory experience of a sting or a bite into a word. The symptoms are actually burning on our body. They blow at them, cool them, put a compress on them, rub them, but only after long contemplation will they become something which, according to Euclid, has no parts. And similarly only later does the line represent a one dimensional geometrical basic formation which has not traverse expansion, because if those who speak Latin say linea, our first thought is a linen thread or the string anglers use; that’s where the measurement and later the notion of the stroke and the line came from.

No one can utter a word or draw a line without the sensuous experience, the source of common knowledge appearing behind it. And even if someone could, who would comprehend it ?

First the sensuous experience, then the object and finally, the notion which breaks away from the meaning it comprises in its from.

A living person stands not in a word or a line, but appears in the relationship. A verified past and a present made dubious. What reaches hack to the sensuous experience preceding words, reaches beyond notions. It touches the silence of others with its own soundlessness; personal silence sounds in this common one. A raw experience which does not have words as yet takes this way to converse with what we have not yet had a common awareness of. Artistic ability is only a possibility “to cash in” this human faculty.

The rest is insidious copying.

Text by Klára Hudra

NOTHING

AFTER AN EXTRAORDINARY EXPANSION of art we had never witnessed before, we have arrived in the present which is dominated by a state of idle-ness. The fact is that the ideals of the avantgarde and progress which prevai-led in our century as well as the forces supporting modern art have been stifled for good.

Although postmodern has become a most suitable and fertile soil for a cer-tain kind of cultural indifference, artists have failed to find anything wrong with searching for their own traditions while looking for their identity.

Anselm Kiefer put it this way: I haven’t got the power to change anything, my only power is to see things with my own eyes and to offer this vision.

SI-LA-GI paints, he is an intermediary artist, a personality who has been an active participant and companion of the events ever since the 1960′s. Similarly to many recognized artists [ e.g. Cucchi, Polke or Kounellis, besides Kiefer referred to above ] he has remained a wanderer through cultures bet-ween East and West, and he extended his search for traditions, and this is an axiom of not only the post-modern but also the classics, for qualities exotic for us, the art of the Far East.

We can view his ouvre, naturally, according to the criteria of the 198o’s as Lóránd Hegyi did when he called our attention to the stations in which SI-LA-GI‘s search for direction from radical eclecticism to the application of the much more volatile generic and medial contents can be pinpointed, which, will finally lead to an individual mythology glittering in the many-colored light reflected by the materials and surfaces. However, this well trodden road could be much sooner considered as a free submerging, a search trying to avoid the required exercises, when ambitions are not exhausted by painting, making videos, constructing installations or the problems of the nature of photocopying.

The tools are of equal rank, the aim is not to try and push out the limits by force as in the case of conceptual art, but the interpretation of individual tendencies. The most typical feature of his works is that he does not try to cherish any characteristic marks of style or any emblems, his choices are much more event-like, he is interested in the possibilities of marking of a performance value.

SI-LA-GI clings only to certain motifs which constitute the string of speech for him, he considers the quality of the period according to which one work of art cannot be deduced from another. He clings to his own “archeological” finds, situations typical of Duchamp, just like to discoveries offered by photography and digital picture-recording. In addition he retains the forms of survival of the romantic idea of the lonely creator in his body-copies made mostly at the beginning of the 1980′s.

Modern art often equals talk about talk. SI-LA-GI doesn’t seem to he attrac-ted by that, he makes the construction of a personal system of commu-nication evident: that is he asks the questions. He scrutinizes the usual and at the same time unusual relationships. His paintings where he qualifies the given sight avoiding the heavy weights of tradition in a way that results in mo absence he takes possession of immediately are especially exciting. Thus his repaintings remain legitimate.

Besides his paintings, his installations, photocopy-mosaics and gestures avoid the “deviant” traps of opposing the recipient, he keeps his works in the aura of the aesthetic experience in a way that he does not fall into the trap of “workability”. The keys to his secrets are hidden in his desire for identity which can be described in a most simple way as the passionate desir for freedom of grand art.

We live in an age of idleness, lying low in a silence before the storm, and all this controls our artistic disposition. That is exactly why it is surprising when an artist gets grabbed by the desire to put his own relationship to art and his former activities under a microscope.

In this complex relationship SI-LA-GI, with one of his con stant motivating forces being the ideology of Buddhism, has changed his method of creation instead of changing styles. We may describe what happened through the eyes of a witness: Sabolch SI-LA-GI has changed in the past few years.

In his present exhibition, which is his first in Luxembourg this turn can well be pinpointed, here we can already speak about an attempt to draw some conclusions, a certain kind of desire for purity.

His almost kaleidoscopic world which dominated his past has been replaced by a very exact, almost puritanic method of artistic creation. One of the essential results of this method is his “wall-installations” entitled NOTHING.

The most important knots to untie in this work begin when studying the tangible ensemble of iron, photos and light-bulb-inscriptions- we moat ren-lize that this time there are no visual anecdotes or punch-lines.

NOTHING is a mysterious, paradoxical work in which the artist deprives himself of his message with the passion of a cartographer. Photography occupies an important position within the work, the symmetrical message on a fragile paper locked up in an iron picture mount does not leave anything up to the accident. Yes, we see what we see, the pathetic and truthless nature of copying embodied in wax figures, while on the other hand we sec n true and pure story, a sand-painting. The trace of four lines heading for the infinite doomed to disappearance, in the eternal sand. It perfectly expresses the unavoidable limitedness, the possession of a positive surface [the artist's claim], its contradictory nature.

ART MUST be USED

BENCSIK : After your first exhibition in Hungary in the Ernst Museum you had another one in the Obudai Pincegaléria in the autumn. This exhibition was pointedly built on the teachings and practice of Buddhism; a part of the exhibition room was transformed into a meditation sanctum. When and how did you encounter Buddhism and in what way has the ideology been absorbed by your creative activities?

SI-LA-GI: I first encountered Buddhism through Japanese calligraphic art. Later I had a Japanese master in Stockholm who taught me karate for 12 years after 1968, and through him I got initiated into the living tradition of Buddhism since every training session begins and ends with meditation. The sport itself is a spiritual manifestation where spiritual power plays a very important part. When, in the case of karate, you are supposed to get into combat, the tech-niques you have practised for years will only operate properly if you exclude thoughts totally, and you completely empty yourself, because y

an achieve perfection only in an empty state. This is the true artistic manifestation of karate. You learn the techniques for years, just like you learn the alphabet, first the letters, then the words, later sentences and finally the whole comes together in poetry. True karate is like that. Unfortunately in many places of Europe it has been deteriorated and considered nothing more than a sport, although the greatest masters in Japan are still living and theaching in monasteries. So I got in connection with Eastern ideology, Buddhism through my master. Then, in the early 1970′s I met a lama from Tibet who founded a monastery in Stockholm. He gave me the first teachings and I began to practice Buddhism, to meditate actively and to go in for the practical besides the intellectual part. Later I travelled to India several times, visited holy places where I spent some time to find masters.

BENCSIK: What are the criteria according to which you select your masters and what is the relationship between master and disciple like?

SI-LA-GI: On a basic level it does not have a great importance as meditation is the same in most of the Buddhist schools. You purify your body, speech and minde doing these basic meditations, and when you are done,- and they need very serious energy concentration and a long time- you become purified and more and more intuitive. It will become more and more obvious for you in which direction you should go to look for a master and you will find him and receive teachings from him. This is a mutual relationship, because if he consents to teach you, you will form a spiritual relationship, and he takes me just as I take him. It is a profound relationship with no trace of hierarchy, so much so, that beyond a certain point it is important for the student to leave his master in order not to allow a dependency to be established between them. The relationship between master and student does not have any rules. If I have the time and the opportunity I go to live in a monastery, if not I just meditate on my own to my own abilities as it is in my own interest.

BENCSIK: What is your master’s attitude towards your artistic activities ? Does he express an opinion? Does this topic have a place in your relationn-ship at all ?

SI-LA-GI: He does not care about it. It is my personal need to make these works because they help me to understand who and what I am. From the point of view of Buddhist meditation artistic creation has no significance. On the other hand art is a kind of meditation for me.

BENCSIK : That means artistic creation is an aid to meditation and it is not meditation that helps you create ?

SI-LA-GI: They have a mutual effect on each other. What I create has a certain tendency, a direction, but it also contains a large measure of intu-ition, eventuality and chance, but the end result has its washback effect by all means. Basically both are means used to achieve purity. The aim is not to fortify myself, because if I try to fortify my ego all I do is set a trap for myself. The larger the ego you create for yourself in your life, the more difficult it will be to part with it.

You must constantly be prepared, continuously condition yourself and look upon each and every minute as the most important one, otherwise you become lazy and then it will be difficult to grasp what is essential. Just like death that may come at any moment. You must be ready for that, too. You must be alert in every moment. Because you must prepare very thoroughly for death, that is the task of life, then in death you prepare for life. Meditation is preparation for death. It is very important how you die, in what mental and physical condition you are in when the last moment comes. It is like a bullet shot out of a barrel. The soul leaves the body, and this means that, like in your dreams, or in your imagination, everything is possible, every possibility of infinity may come true. The soul flying away from the body however needs a certain direction. After all it is a very great gift to be born in the human form. You are pressed into a dimension but still, within limits, you have the possibility to condition yourself, and, if there is a method, you may internalize it and with its help make certain things conscious in your thoughts, and when this state comes to an end you could use the period of relaxation and fulfil the concept you have have discovered. Everything that happens after your death happens to you still, that is still you. According to Buddhism if you take a drop out of the ocean that is an individual, when you put it back, it will become one with the Whole and it will be inseparable from it. But as long as you cling on too your ego you make it impossible for yourself to fall back into the ocean and become one with the Whole, to dissolve in infinity.

BENCSIK: You’ve mentioned that you have travelled a lot, that you have been to parts of the world strange and far away for European people. What motivated these trips? Is this craving for adventure typical of your ideas about art as well?

SI-LA-GI: I went to different countries, to different places for different rea-sons. But basically I was always intrigued by the unknown, to step on unfa-miliar ground, to experience the unknown physically, in person, and to feed on the physical experience in a spiritual way. The purpose of my trips to India and to Nepal was to visit Buddhist masters. In the majority of the cases I had to overcome serious difficulties, to cross mountains and glaciers, to go through terrifying adventures to reach my destination. During your travels you have to face various kinds of ordeals and the way you overcome them is very important. These are the teaching points of the trips. When you run into a new problem you must react and this gives the stimulus, this brings out your true personality. The same thing is true when pursuing art. I ex-periment with things the final outcome of which I cannot exactly foresee that is what makes them interesting. I am not interested in repeating or recreating things because then I would lose the spontaneity and what I do would be too manipulated and too predictable.

I have never had a theoretical attitude towards the process of artistic creation. But I have always been intrigued by change, transformation, the difference between the phenomenon and its manifestation, the relationship between material and spirit, reality and unreality, the infinity appearing through repetition even in meditation. The manifestation of good and evil energies, the constant and parallel presence of good and evil spirits in man, in the world and in works of art. How is it possible to trap the spiritual in matter? Primitive rhythms for example contain good and evil forces and connect them to a given space, how is it possible to comprise these contents into works of art? In African, Asian and Australian cultures where these things manifest themselves in very emotional and intuitive ways, if you are open enough, you can acquire a lot of knowledge. For me, it is much more important to live through things like that, than process them in a rational and analytical way.

BENCSIK: Does that mean that these are rather emotional concepts than intellectual creations?

SI-LA-GI : Yes, so to speak.

BENCSIK: What are the criteria you consider first and foremost during the process of creation? Do aesthetical considerations have any influence on you at all?

SI-LA-GI: I think if something is made really well, it will become aesthetic to a certain extent, or its innate anti-aesthetic quality will change into an aesthetic one. Anyway, I like to make things perfect for myself, and use materials in a way that they become a compact unity. Eventuality is involved in the process but the final result should not be a matter of accident or luck, presentation should be the framework which emphasizes the essential, so that content should have a form constructed exactly and meticulously. Aesthetic quality however is not an objective in itself, only spirituality is important.

When I create something I want to convey the feeling that is in me at the moment. It is almost like a conversation. If you paint a mark in a picture it will change it immediately. The painting reflects like a mirror. A conversation will be established between the work to be born and myself. This appears in the “fine tuning” of the details at times, at other times when I feel that I have been too preoccupied with the details and neglected the essential, I need to gather some more energy to fill my own work with spirituality again.

BENCSIK: Do you have a desire to record this process on a canvas to make the various phases of the “conversation” retraceable?

SI-LA-GI: Of course, because this is what makes or keeps the work alive. The subject emanates the spiritual energy, the spirituality which I have always wanted to express. To make it operate on its own, without me, to make it become a spirit, a spiritual subject. When you are working on some-thing it happens that you get stuck, you cannot go on creating it any more. In order to get moving forward again you need to grasp the essential again and not to struggle but to put the spirit that is the essence of it all into it.

BENCSIK: Is it possible to control it consciously?

SI-LA-GI: Just like in the case of karate, you need to achieve an emptiness that the process of action and reaction can take place in an absolutely pure environment, because that is the only one where it can really work. Analysis slows down and weakens action. There is only an empty space. Meditation is a great help. I don’t always begin painting with the same attitude. Sometimes I begin to work in an entirely spontaneous way, just looking my photographs or situations around me in a different way with certain tendancy. But is it not unidirectional. It is like warming up. Softness and hardness- these two pulsate in everything, creation as well. You cannot maintain the moment of orgasm for hours, you can push it up close to the peak but it can only last for one single moment. Similarly, in the process of creation you can only grasp the really fertile moments at times and not for long, but that is inevitable.

BENCSIK: Are you interested in the fate of your works after you have finish-ed them? Do you attribute a certain function to works o f art beyond the emotional and intellectual excitement o f artistic creation? Do you consider it important to show your works to the public?

SI-LA-GI: Once I have completed something I like to show it even for myself in a new context, to place it in a strange environment where it usually acquires an entirely different meaning from what it had in the studio. At the same time a piece of art is a surface for communication between the people and me. It is very important how much they can draw, how much they can learn from it. Whether communication has been established or not. The most important thing is that my works should have some kind of impact because that’s when they fulfil their task properly. As far as I can see, unfortunately art does not have a real function in Hungary. Very few people are involved in it as much as it deserves, nobody calls the attention of the public to it, although without it, the majority do not know how to use it. And art must be used.

BENCSIK : Do poeple elsewhere know how to do it ?

SI-LA-GI: In West-Europe many people can benefit from a strong manifestation. The owner of the gallery who sells the works, the critic, the journalist, who writes about them, the art-directors designers who steals ideas from it. The museum that exhibits them and the viewer whom they may jerk out of his normal way of thinking and in this new state he might have a different view upon his problems, his own life. Art has very far flung effects. People are happy when something good and extraordinary happens because everyone benefits from it and not only in the financiel sense. the task of a work of art is to emanate positive energy; to pull down walls in certain cases to create firm spiritual foundations in others.

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