András Visky writer
Antimatter has the same mass as matter but the opposite electrical charge. When matter and antimatter interact, they are transformed into pure energy. Pure energy does exist. Light is released, photons running away fill the space. What is on the other side of the light? The interaction that triggers the release of energy eliminates traditional points of reference: there is no here and over there, north and south, west and east, bottom and top. Talking about opposite sides becomes meaningless.
Although their existence had been taken for granted by theoretical physicists long before, antimatter was first generated in the laboratory of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, north of Geneva, on the border between France and Switzerland, in 1995. The antimatter generated artificially consists of nine antihydrogen molecules. They are waiting to interact with hydrogen and become light. Hungary became a full member of the organization in 1992. It has thus become the blissful co-owner of nine antihydrogen molecules.
Antimatter had already been generated by art – the creative gesture born of the intuition of a chasmic gap – long before CERN’s relatively recent successfully executed experiments. The interaction of matter and antimatter, the whirl of released particles, triggers the “perfect crisis,” after which there can be no other outcome than annihilation or total purification. This is what a work of art achieves. It is born on the periphery of culture, always in borderline situations. A strong concentrate of forms, ready to interact, abruptly emerges. As soon as it closes in on the human Soul, strange light effects are generated. The artwork does not assert its own existence above all else. That would be no more than a mimesis of the void. Which is most appropriately called idolatry.
The sculptures, objects, and spatial arrangements at an exhibition, these interventions – never-ending narratives by nature or rejecting linear narration altogether – become statements beyond themselves rather than mere things. They enter into a space consecrated by tradition; consequently, they voluntarily liquidate their singularity. Straight away, the question arises: are we faced with real statements? We move from one attempt at a statement to another as we visit the artworks in the spaces of a gallery. We become pilgrims, exposing ourselves to hazardous interactions.
Real statements are reality statements.
What, after all, is it that could make us open the door on ourselves?
It will soon have been two decades since I argued that the theatre, and, in a broader sense, the artwork, imprisons and releases the spectator entering into its space and interacting with it. This realization is rooted in the most personal experience that my first conscious memory as a little child was captivity. I was born a human prisoner, and for years, I would live in the well-organized, tyrannical, and thus altogether chaotic spaces of captivity. My experience of myself had, by the nature of things, to be but partial. Deprivations of liberty are dehumanizing projects. But this personal and communal experience would subsequently lead me to the recognition of the universal human. To the true meaning of the human condition. We are all born captive, no matter whether our bodies carry or conceal the injuries caused by our imprisonment(s) within our innermost being. We always have another, stronger self, who is free. It is not where we are. Sometimes it is very far away from us. But it is there. It is in something Other. In an Other who exists.
The artwork imprisons us by gentle means. It captures us so that the resulting interaction can release us. It plunges us into antimatter in order to release us for a life without fear. So that we don't fear who we are. The artwork, if it exists at all, raises the possibility of release. In our eyes, it is nigh idolatrous to claim that an artwork can set up an entire world. In our experience, it references at best the absence of an existing world. Without a world, a view. Or else the strong existence of that absent one. A possibility that correlates deeply with our being human. And with the fact that our communal existence is not essentially opposed to the individual. And if it does, then that opposition may also well be fruitful. It is worth going all the way, down the entire way. With empty hands, with a denuded face.
If we are talking about the mere existence of the artwork, the most difficult statement to make – I find it so at least – is that the artwork welcomes the person viewing it or entering its space as a being with a soul. It perceives them as such. It receives them, we might say, but we know how difficult that statement is. In any case, the utterance in the encounter with the artwork is an event of a non-linguistic nature. It is a statement, so it is definitely an event. In the shift of perspective emerging between the spectator and the artwork, there is a kind of urgency, a happening not to be postponed, an occurrence, a call to a hidden readiness.
The artwork is the antimatter of culture. It is a pure, elemental appearance of sorts. Its performative interventions release energies latent in everyday life. In this luminosity, the references at hand – be they of whatever nature: institutional, oppressive, ideological – momentarily disappear and that blinding light is released. It is blinding because it changes our vision and, in its wake, our thinking. A subversive, uncontrollable happening, let’s face it. Fundamental possibilities. We become dis[1]ciples, not even able to walk for a while. At most, we’re stumbling about in the entity opening itself up to us. We are forced to rely on someone else. And they rely on us in turn. First there are the two of us, then others come along. And so forth, more and more and more.
We sit around the table, think of a supper perhaps. We put our hands together and start a monologue. Soliloquy is a more adequate linguistic description of a monologue situation. A monologue gives the illusion that one can speak alone, “to oneself”. When one hears oneself. When one hears oneself alone. Or when one takes the courage to speak out loud. When one decides to raise one’s voice. But no, one never speaks alone thus. When the Self speaks, it always makes a plural echo. The Us. The human voice is a web of voices. This knowledge is echoed in the soliloquy. The actor’s monologue is performed before an audience, in a space that opens upwards. The first words are to be.
Speaking aloud is the most labyrinthine way of per[1]ceiving space-time. I listen to myself, I hear at last that my voice is made up of the voices of many. A confluence of voices in immeasurable time. I am an intersection. A soliloquy necessarily places next to, above, or near the speaker a present Other. My reason enters into a dialogue with the voices of my soul. Who are these two? Or are they far more than two? We converse with ourselves aloud, that is, we dive into echoing time. To sit to a table and listen. To listen to the Other, who may as well be ourselves – a hazardous decision. A situation of radical transcendence.
The absence of people in the representations is staggering. But children are scarcely to be seen at all. Just one at any rate. He sees in his head the city which the adult, presumably his father carrying him on his shoulders, is watching through his darkened glasses. We cannot consider this posthuman perception of the world a purely curatorial decision. This shortage of love weaved through with terror. Which is clearly an exaggeration. I mean, to call posthuman the absence that howls like desert winds.
We like exaggerations. We sense in them the gestures of overreaching and expansion. A person, if a face, is mostly a mask. Just as the iron god of war is. Oppressive sequential patterns of destruction. For, as a matter of fact, the frequent and increasingly insolent reference to “power” is a dark synonym for destruction. “A matter of fact”: we write this with a heavy heart. For we ourselves do not know what is “matter”, let alone “fact”.
For thousands of years, the presence – literally being here and now – represented the divine in the human. The genes of an artwork keep track of this, for the experience of the encounter is written all over the reliable memory of the genes. Nothing to be done. Or, rather, there is something to be done – above all, there is something to do. The mask is the grasping of the timeless in passing time. A reflection on the fragmentarily enduring. The mask states that there, indeed, exists a face. The human face, all crushed and disgraced human visages are a grave testament to eternity.
The mask, the enumeration of skulls in a painting or their hanging as sequential patterns on the wall, well, considering their object, these acts are rebellions. A rebellion against the status quo. But an imperative at any rate. Try looking into a hated face! Long and persistently. The liberating event of presence may well happen to us. Only in the other can you wash your own being. In the other, who is a person.
What does language know, anyway? Here is a modest example. A sample sentence: Humans are ungraspable.
Is there someone to grasp them? When they fall, too? Will they, finally? Do we?
Consider truncation. A human is always a whole. It pains one to write “whole” and then “always” next to it. We all know history, even if we don’t know it. Not our own, for sure, let’s add. To know history means to become a story. A personal story that can be told and passed on. It means: to be atoned. But enough of that for now. That is another – necessary and postponed – conversation. The work of art proposes that “other conversation” by necessity. Provided it is a work of art. Not to be afraid of anyone or anything. Not to conform to anyone or anything. To abandon institutionalized language and speak as a human being.
The subject as a subject, the subject as a personal apostrophe is a wandering with an inherently “religious” character. And, for that matter, the statements of contemporary art – “in these days”, as we are wont to say – are considerably more audible than those of religion. It stitches days to these days – which is a psalm paraphrased. This divine stitchwork and patchwork is awe-inspiring.
From a religious point of view – which I not merely like in general but also find inevitable – there is hardly any doubt that art, this autofiction thirsting for freedom, is moving more and more towards mysticism. What this means to me, and perhaps no more than that, is that contemporary art has abandoned mystification for good. It addresses the thing, it presents us with the event of confronting the thing. The thing – why does what exists exist? – is in itself the single object of mysticism.
The thing is thus, with this question – nolens volens – translated into the existent. Hoc est enim corpus meum. Sometimes the voice goes off or slides off. One must speak in Latin. We must stammer with the help of unknown languages. We gather fragments of disintegrated liturgies, we try to hear wandering echoes from white noise. The going off and sliding off is the artwork itself that can be exhibited.
What might it be that is being readied? What is about to be born? What makes the age we live in pregnant? When the alien waters of beautiful colours con[1]nect together, what is born? What do we see when we look at the gaze of two statues facing each other? What times are we living in when we find on the table the untouched bread and the wine concurrently with the useless silver coins of betrayal? How have we plunged together, holding hands, into this chasmic liturgical amnesia? Who has dropped the human being? Who shot at them, and from whose cover did they fire to claim this supreme trophy for themselves?
I keep wondering without rest whether our capacity for happiness has survived. In other words, are we (still) meek, crying with those that cry, humble in spirit, transparent in heart, and merciful? Or can we only triumph now? Is that all that remains of humans? Is it over? I hear the flapping of the wings of the dark angels of unleashed, raw power.
Sometimes, when something truly extraordinary happens, it is touched by the willing linen, flown around by the melting bronze, the unremembering stone moves, the brilliant glass opens endlessly inwards, the laser rests on vine leaves. And all these events testify to the existence of the human Soul.
There is, for example, such a thing as a Mountain of God. And maybe even a chair of God, somewhere. I have not been there, words and images open up the unknown landscape in me. A running woman appears before me, barely older than a girl. I can hear her blissful panting. She is at home in this all-pervading homelessness. The particles of the Soul interact with the antiparticles of the Soul. Light emission. On the other side of light is light too.