Cities on the river – English

THE MODERN CITY,

THE CONTEMPORARY CITY

In the nineteenth century Haussmann transformed Paris. The French capital became a new city – well-ordered by avenues and broad boulevards which eased communication and allowed traffic to speed up. At the time of industrialization many other European cities which for centuries had been restricted to the narrow confines of the Roman-Medieval walls broke out of their shell and started to expand and undergo radical transformation.

The city came to be the stage of modernity, the symbol of progress, and the place where the new forms of production and exchange proper to industrialization took firm root.

The nineteenth century – the century of the modern city par excellence – was also the century of the Romantic landscape. Caspar David Friedrich placed the human figure into the endlessness of the landscape. The human being – urban, the protagonist of progress and civilization – gazed at nature with fascination and reinvented him/herself in its wild, untamed beauty.

Contemporary post-industrial society defines itself by the new maps drawn up by globalization. One may speak of the formation of a new type of urban environment going well beyond the traditional nineteenth-century concept of the city: extensive urbanized zones made up of homes and week-end houses, shopping malls, production sites, ports, airports, theme parks and other centres of leisure and consumption. These zones – interconnected by rapid transport – offer the same goods and services as the traditional city: you don´t actually have to live within the city any more to experience an urban lifestyle. In today´s globalized society these new urbanized areas – including their constantly fluctuating streams of production, information and settlement that adapt to the dynamics of the world economy in a similar way as the cities – have come to play an increasingly important role. One gains the impression that a huge urban network on the global scale is coming into being at present and that soon no place on earth will be able to escape the control of civilization.

After having expelled the Romantic paradigm with its notion of an idyllic landscape offering withdrawal from the world the urban space is turned into one of the stages par excellence of contemporary artistic practices. The typically urban is now viewed as an aesthetic and contemplative element. Furthermore, the city is now turned into the focus of critical perception and into the object of artistic discourse of obviously social implications.

Global city, local city

The cities are the main points of attraction and centres of exchange. Globalization turns them into an unpredictable mixture of different cultures and lifestyles, changing their inherited local identity. This leads to a new plurality on the one hand, and on the other hand the city experiences a process of homogenization of certain forms of culture and certain types of consumption behaviour brought about by globalization. The change undergone by the historic centres is paradigmatic for this development: everywhere the genuinely local architecture is restored, restructured and adapted in a similar way to fit the needs of the same mass tourism that has the maximization of profit as its main goal.

Faced with all these totalizing developments, one wonders if it is actually still possible to talk of local identities in the case of cities.

The cities constituting the topic of this exhibition are among some of the stages of the so-called “Central European culture”, which never was a unified culture, but has always been a mixture of many cultural traditions and languages: Magyar, Germanic, Slav, Jewish…cities with a unique common history symbolized by an anthem that was once sung in over ten languages (1); cities that experienced deportations and mass murder in the name of the superiority of a people over all others; cities as centres of democracies, totalitarian states and – more recently – as battle sites of another devastating war.

All of these cities are furthermore placed into a common geography: the same winter sky of a greyish, pearl-coloured patina covers them, the same melancholic, soft light shimmers through them. But first and foremost the same waters flow through all of them: waters so blue, they remind one of a joyful waltz; waters so grey and murky, they tell a tale of contaminated nature and destroyed villages. Who knows, maybe the essence and the identity of all of these Central European cities – so similar, so different – is to be found only in the incessant flow of these waters.

Cities on the River

The exhibition presents works that show the city as the backdrop of a report (political unrest in Budapest, in the video by Csaba Nemes) or in such a way that the history of a city determines the fate of the main characters of a narrative (the fabulous story of the daughter of Albert Einstein and Milena Marić, in the video by Helmut § Joanna Kandl). The city is shown as a place with a collective memory (neighbourhood youths using remains of the destroyed bridge of Novi Sad as a football ground, in the images by Dragan Zivančević) or as a place that seems to have lost its historical memory (ghost-like impressions of the pavilions of the old Yugoslavia, on the photo collages by David Maljovic). Some images identify a specific city (the architecture of Bratislava, on the photos by Romana Hagyo, or the map of this city, in the collage by Agnesa Sigetovà) and others are images of anonymous places, corners of suburbia that mutate into parts of the city that could be anywhere, inhabited by anonymous masses (photos by Gábor Arion Kudász). At times the view of the city is decidedly subjective, full of aesthetic significance, and gives the impression of resulting from first-hand experience (paintings by Milena Putnik). At other times the artist´s position is distanced and the images of the city are constructs (various photomontages using the same motive, by Kramar), or else they are of documentary character and drawn into the absurd by the artist´s humorous gaze (photos by Martin Kollár). Side by side with two-dimensional images one finds the

three-dimensional stage settings built with objects of everyday consumption, luxury items and throw-away products that seem to represent the city that generates them (by Anna Meyer).

The only work referring to no specific city whatsoever evokes – precisely because of this fact – an idea of that perhaps undefinable identity that is common to them all (installation by Inés Lombardi).

Side by side with photography and painting – artistic languages that have traditionally served to represent the city – the new digital technologies are also present in the exhibition: new and traditional techniques come to form a hybrid system of mutual influences. Some of the paintings were at first photographs of a given environment that were subsequently transferred onto canvas: the viewer is still able to discern the original camera view and the extreme gradation of light made possible by photography (painting by László Fehér). What could almost be called the opposite process is also represented in the exhibition: images that are actually photographs are shrouded in profoundly aestheticizing and aethereal atmospheres of strong painting-like qualities, creating them anew (photographic images of Budapest, viewed from the artist´s – the painter Deszö Váli´s — studio). Tools stemming from more recent technological development allow for new forms of symbolic representation of the city (use of topographic images from Google Earth, in the work by Nikola Djordjevic); at the same time new narrative formulas originating in these new technologies make their appearance (video clips with narratives that avoid completeness presented as loop, by Csaba Nemes; television documentary style, in the video by H. § J. Kandl; simultaneous over-all view of images belonging to different sequences, in the installation by Inés Lombardi).

The city is thus narrated, interpreted, reconstructed and remembered, with the approaches varying from documentary distance employing conceptual and symbolic elements to a more personal, autobiographic attitude. Thus viewed from different perspectives – political, social, historical, architectonic, aesthetic – the questions regarding the global-local-Central European identity of the city are to be found within each of the artistic proposals that attempt to offer answers which are intentionally kept very open. This is the goal of the exhibition.

(1) Claudio Magris: “Danubio”, 1986

Translation: Heinrich Blechner

(Catalog CITIES ON THE RIVER)