Ákos Birkás: Catastrophe Situations

Catastrophe Situations by Ákos Birkás presents a group of works employing the format of single-panel comic that have remained virtually unknown and were last seen in public nearly half a century ago. The eponymous series was produced in 1978 in parallel with the conceptual photographic works titled Picture and Viewer, which marked the culmination of Birkás’s three-year artistic project at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, exploring the theoretical and practical relations between museum and art, painting and photography, spectator and artwork, text and image. These last works addressed the literal and metaphorical distance between viewer and picture, the possibility and impossibility of a genuine encounter or dialogue with historical artworks, considering the material and immaterial, artistic, institutional, discursive as well as social layers that shape or inhibit the immediacy of this connection. In several photographs, viewer-models or the artist himself appear before sacra conversazione paintings, symbolically joining the “sacred conversation” of saints and donors from different historical periods as a metaphor for a transcendentally pure form of atemporal dialogue with the artwork. While the Picture and Viewer series thematized this half-ironical, half-sincere aspiration toward the highest form of absorption in the artwork, in Catastrophe Situations viewers seem to gravitate toward the zero degree of immersion. The “sacred conversation” between viewer and picture gives way to profane discussions between one viewer and another, in which the artwork may be the subject, pretext, or context of the dialogue, but no longer its participant. Just as in Picture and Viewer we observe the beholder standing before the painting with his back turned, like a Friedrichian Rückenfigur, in Catastrophe Situations Birkás likewise doubles the depicted scenario: he produces numerous variations and interpretations of a single, identical situation, in which a man and a woman attempt to interpret a painting indicated in the image only by its contour lines.

While in some pieces the comic effect derives from banal, irrelevant remarks, petit-bourgeois bewilderment, or feigned understanding, elsewhere it is produced by over-sophisticated art-theoretical, sociological, or psychoanalytic commentary. At the same time, each piece seems to suggest that, just as the viewers of these works do, the depicted figures look but do not truly see the image before them; and while pretending to engage in dialogue with the artwork and with one another, they in fact monologue toward a surface for projection and reflection. This is also suggested by the formal device whereby the viewers’ comments appear not in rounded speech bubbles typical of comics, but in rectangular “speech blocks” matching the size of the depicted panel painting. In other words, the drawings themselves convey how a textual panel can become equivalent to the visual panel: the artwork turns into a text to be read and understood, while speech becomes a textual layer inscribed onto the surface of the work. Here, the text does not render the image transparent, as the promise of interpretation would suggest, but obscures, covers, or even replaces it.

The other comic-format series, the 1979 Frustration Test (Text-Extinguishing), likewise thematizes the “frustrating” conflict, or even the “catastrophic” collision between visuality and textuality, painting and speech, but under reversed power relations. Whereas in Catastrophe Situations text supersedes painting, in Frustration Test painting supersedes text. The series subjects its characters to various “frustration tests” — a mistaken late-night phone call, the breaking of a vase, or a car accident — but also its viewers: captions that might be expected to turn the scenes’ tension into humour are almost entirely painted over by an expressive gesture, rendering them unreadable. Frustration Test is also an imprint of Birkás’s growing frustration with “the text” — with the conceptual mode of art making, but also the heavy influence of various theoretical texts on his art a frustration that, over the course of a few years, gradually led him toward a period of “anti-textual” expressive painting in the spirit of Heftige Malerei, culminating in the Fej (Head) series.

Barnabás Zemlényi-Kovács