The spirit of place and its interferences with universal art – Thesis, MKE 2013

Hungarian University of Fine Arts Doctoral School

The spirit of place and its interferences with universal art axis mundi of Béla Veszelszky and James Turrell Thesis by Janos Korodi 2013 Supervisor: Dr. habil, DLA Zsigmond Károlyi

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Table of contents Abstract / Foreword Space and place – Genius Loci 1.The center of the world 2. Determine the place 3. Genius Loci: Religious Belief or Cultural Evolution?

4. The poetics of space, or Genius Loci as the place of artist's reveries 5. The 21st Century - The Refuge of the Virtual Place Veszelszky Béla 1. Life 2. Work 3. The Gödör James Turrell 1. Community of Friends 2. The experience of flying 3. Studies and artistic influences 4. The period in the Mendota Block (1966-1972) 5. Art and Technology – Scientific Art or the art of science?

6. Skyspace (the Celestial Spaces) 7. The Roden Crater 8. The critique of the Roden Crater My places 1. My previous series in terms of the place 2. Industrial interiors 3. The factory 4. The Masterpiece 5. Máglya Summary References Images Translation by the author, proofread by Michelle Cooke.

Abstract / Foreword 1. It took several years for me to define the direction and subject of my thesis, which stemmed from the main themes of my visual art over the last couple of years and based on the visual imagery that emerged from investigations related to places. In these years I was honing in on a place, on a particular location as a separate entity, a motionless carrier of a kind of time travel.

I came close to the habitation of spirits.

The parallel manifestations of two artists, two oeuvres, two lifetimes allowed me to formulate an idea which became the basis and the framework for a ten year intellectual journey in pursuit of my dissertation. Specifically, I’ve looked at the problem of "space" addressed by both Béla Veszelszky and James Turrell at a specific point in their careers. Additionally I examine how these two artists are both opposite and identical to one another–through their unique yet psychologically common attitude toward and assessment of 20th century man.

At first I thought I was refining and narrowing the scope of my inquiry, but I came to realize that it was not a narrowing, but a grand "optical illusion". My earlier research and interest in visual art had explored “place” as an existential dimension in different social contexts and time. Its point of departure, in the light of these examples, was aimed at the spirit of the place: the socio-cultural environment, the geographical and historical relations in the work of art, and, conversely, how these factors continually change as new artworks are created.

The term interferences in the title of the dissertation is the actual question: does the artwork shape the spiritual environment and create the genius loci (the spirit of the place), or does the genius loci shape the creator who creates his work as a medium, under the influence of the spirit of the place? Or, do both factors persist to interfere and from this interference both the spirit of the place and the artwork are born, and their coexistence has an effect on the recipient at least what the recipient's perception has allowed. Where and how can these impulses be detected if they act at once?

Genius loci is actually an interaction. Hamvas writes, "... so we see clouds, flowers, streets, and duties the same way.”1 The roots of human manifestations carry the lines and gestures of their immediate mediums, their natural environment. And vice versa: the cultural environment eventually shows up embossed in the landscape. To get close to this collision, I had to become part of the interaction.

I painted a series of paintings based on geographically and culturally different locations or with materials collected at such locations. As I traveled I tried to observe all this through a dual lens: "Landscape, a culture mediated by a natural scene, is both environment and what it includes, at the same time a real place and its simulacrum. A box as a “box” as well as the objects in the box.”2 1

Béla Hamvas, The Five Geniuses, 1988. p57 John Mitchell, Landscape and Power, 1994. Quote by Katalin Rezsonya, in: Space and Place in the Context of the Creative Process and the Work of Art. DLA dissertation, 2007. p20 "If we apply all this to 2

2. I had to come to the conclusion that the works of Veszelszky and Turrell, the related life stories and philosophies–in short, the hubs drawn along the virtual axis of the two artists' worlds–not only revealed the role of the place as an existential dimension, but they have also pointed to the personal uniqueness of their character, irrespective of the place they identify with their ideas. The theme that has been raised–which aimed to detect the traceable effects of the space in the work created there (in the place of identity, which is more than just the concept of space)–has gone completely unhinged. I was faced with the enormous almost all-inclusiveness of the subject and at the same time that individual fates were not comparable. Veszelszky, whose work is considered by art historians as having forged a lonely and largely forgotten path, is deeply rooted in Hungarian culture. However, his work, chosen for the thesis is a "non-conscious" piece of artwork, now known as the Gödör (Pit)–even if it carries the features of local social-psychology, I cannot draw a parallel as opposition to Turrell's space-structuring megaproject, the Roden Crater, which, in a way has something similar in appearance and was designed to define the place's relation to man in a cosmic sense.

There is every reason to examine these two works of art and their creators. The consequence of this study is in the imaginings, lessons, and conclusions intimated visually. Naturally, I present my personal opinion, in light of this realization, as an individual remark about the place or story displayed, but I had to abandon use of it as a litmus of a places’ spirituality, which involves things that carry the chance of a very similar experience, created by two individuals with different motives.

3. As soon as I realized this contradiction within my research goal and its probable outcome, I decided to alter my research from the perspective of the site to the specific works of Veszelszky and Turrell, their theoretical approaches in the history of art, and ultimately, the connection of these lessons with my own creative process.

In the dissertation, I identify the place as a stand-alone source of impulses in my painting series.

Initially, however, I write about its theoretical roots with the history of observation and conscious application, and to this end, I touch upon the notion of Genius Loci and its cultural historical role.

I acknowledge the importance of a distinct place for my own work as well as the investigated artists and other historical examples. I examine the role of the site as an autonomous source of impulses in the creation of works.

By examining the life, motivation and art of Béla Veszelszky, I approach the selected work, Gödör, which I identify as fundamental to the artist's existence. I further show that this work, although lacking critical study and its physical existence has been significantly deteriorated, has a unique role in the character of Veszelszky’s paintings, and through its history is located in the no man's land between art and reality.

space, we can say that space is simultaneously influenced or created by the creator - that is, the medium of shaping - but at the same time a place that includes its designer, user, and the product of shaping."

By examining the life, motivation and art of James Turrell, I am looking at an exemplary model of the chosen type of work again, and place it beside Veszelszky’s, as the site for the act of personal perception. The religious affinity of both artists, their personality loneliness, their (rather) separation from society, is parallel to the object-type, which is significant in both lifes and oeuvres.

It is the consistency between Roden Crater (2.) and Gödör (1.) that is my focus. I’m interested in the core activities of these two artists living and working in completely different socio-cultural times and spaces, which suggest a common motivation.

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Space and place – Genius Loci The place can never be defined, so the place has no science, but it has poetry, art and myth.

Béla Hamvas3 1.The center of the world In his book titled Fears and Symbols, Elemer Hankiss* sees the self-defense of man in the illusion, faith or conviction, that has been maintained for thousands of years, which puts the man in the middle of the world; that is, the writer refers to this phenomenon as a manifestation of human struggle against the fear of his irrelevance in an alien and dangerous world. In fact, even the earliest myths have determined man's place in the world for this purpose: “Through their rites, myths and religions, their culture and art, our ancestors slowly and gradually fought themselves from the periphery into the center of the world, at least in their imagination, in their consciousness, in their beliefs.”4 By the time of the great monotheistic cultures, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, man became the center of the world. According to Hankiss, after two millennia, in the modern era, with the collapse of Ptolemaic cosmology, after Copernicus, Galilei and Kepler, surviving the 18th century skepticism, despite the Einsteinian, Darwinian and Freudian revolutions - when we have little or no reason to believe in our central location and importance - Human communities are still struggling to maintain this faith.

As I’ve researched the psychological and artistic aspects of this struggle I try to present archetypal patterns of behavior in cases when art was lived or experienced as some kind of central or centered place, as an axis-mundi or world axis. What is common in the totem poles of tribal cultures, the tree of life, the sacred mountains or later shrines, fortresses, observatories, churches and relic sites, and a meditative place created by a 20th century artist, a site-specific work, or even the essence and the intellectual function of a painting that depicts a distinguished place? To reach the roots of the problem raised, I have to look at the concepts that make up the mindset of this conclusion. Of these, the first is the concept of place, which must be distinguished from the concept of space.

2. Determine the place Human life is always linked to the sites of prominent acts, to a settlement, to the main square of the city, to an institution, to a house. The center usually describes the known, contrasting it with the unknown and perhaps terrifying world around it. Man has always imagined the world to have a center. The Greeks placed the world's "navel" (omphalos) in Delpho. The Romans considered 3.

4

Hamvas, 1988. p55 Hankiss, Fears and Symbols, 2006. p124–125

the Capitolium caput mundi (the head of the world), and the Kaba-stone in Mecca is still the center of the Mohammedan world today. In general, "the discovery or projection of a particular point, the center is equivalent to creating the world" says Eliade, suggesting that the world's meaning and focus somewhat coincide.5 The distinction between place and space in intellectual science and art theories has engendered enormous quantities of literature. Writers and thinkers, religious philosophers, and artists have described their thoughts on the fundamental contradictions of physical space, celestial space, chaos, and the character of the ideal place (the cosmos), each of which is unique in nature.

Eliade sees the formation of the space character as an act of faith of the human spirit, captures it as a performative attitude of creation: “"making cosmic spaces of unknown territories always means sanctification, creating order in a space, replicating the exemplary work of the gods."6 This is the imitatio dei when on the example of creation man shapes the environment in his own image.

Here are some quotes that summarize space and place ideas in the light of important 20th century theories: "Henri Lefebvre (1991) in the Creation of Space (...) is moving from the philosophical approach of space to examining the living space of everyday life. He emphasizes the nature of the process of space, i.e. the temporal manifestation of space; because, in his view, space is undergoing constant changes in the transformation and renewal of social factors. Lefebvre's concept of space is metaphorical, encompassing the physical, social and abstract levels of space as well. (...)

In order to understand the experiential nature of space and the spatiality of social processes, instead of conventionally splitting the idea of space in three – physical or natural, social, and mental space, he suggests that we focus on their relationships and interactions. (...)

One of the most important new elements in Lefebvre's theory is the introduction of the concept of lived/experienced space, the concept of the space of representation. This is the space in which one articulates her own self, this is our unconscious, unspeakable, direct relationship with space, the traditional, emotional, "naive" space experience. The lived space, that is, the space of representation, is also linked to the hidden and alternative dimensions of social life, and is best expressed in the arts. (...)

The fundamental nature of the experienced space is its heterogeneity and character, it has a prominent direction system, the center of it is the person, who in the coordinating system of his space, is the vertical axis, and the ground surface is the horizontal axis. In this system, distances, directions, up and down, front and back can be fixed upon the human. Space is not a subjective perception of physical reality, but part of human existence. (...)

The existentialist, phenomenological tendencies of philosophy, especially the work of Bachelard, 5.

6

Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 1987. quoted by Hankiss, 2006. p151 Eliade, 1987. p8

Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and Bolnow - the common feature of which is the exploration of the existential space involving the basic relationships between man and the environment - have made a significant contribution to the development of a new, experience-based space concept. (...)

The most striking common feature of their findings is that the place, the environment, the lived' space is usually not analyzed as an entity that exists on its own, but rather focuses on the relationship between space and man. (...)

A space can become a place for a purpose, a function; the agreement for proper use makes the place operational. So we can find that space and place are different things. Space is one of the components of the matter from which place can be created. Space provides opportunities and constraints by physical structure, topology, while places reflect social and cultural conditions and attachments.”7

3. Genius Loci: Religious Belief or Cultural Evolution?

In the Middle Ages, spatial considerations were usually organized as symbols and perceived value. The tallest object in the city was the tower of the temple, pointing to the sky, and dominating the smaller buildings, as the temple dominated the hopes and fears.8 Eliade originates the primary mapping impulse of architecture with the separation of holy and profane. He inquires about the sacred space and the ritual building as a form of holy experience. According to Eliade, the holy and profane are two modes of experience, both with their own separate worlds. The former exists in a consecrated cosmos, while the latter assumes all worldly experience is a profane existence. This distinction is also echoed by the relationship between philosophy and poetry. Eliade refers to the work of Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige, published in 1917, the first study that wasn’t about religious concepts or beliefs, but of religious experience. While Otto's study focuses on the formidable and irrational aspects of religious experience, Eliade concentrates on the differences with the worldly and raises the subject of otherness, the “original difference” of the holy, which is communicated through the hierophany (hieros in Greek = holy; phainomai = to show) with the means by which holiness is manifested to man. According to Eliade, all hierophany are paradoxes - all things, including the cosmos are both themselves and manifesting the holy. For the religious man, the holy is both power, strength and reality, and he wants to participate in this reality as closely as possible.

According to Vincent Scully, the Greek temple establishes a reciprocal link between the form of the sanctuary and the sacred place. Its placement as an image in the landscape is as important as the divine quality whose image is incorporated in it. The place itself is sacred, and before the temple was built, it embodied the deity as a recognized natural force - not as a picture, but as true power.9

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Katalin Rezsonya, 2007. p14–26 Mumford, Technics and Civilisation, 1934. p.18 9 Eliade and Scully interpretations, in: http://www.christianhubert.com/writings/sacred_profane.html 8

In his excellent monograph on the spirit of the place, Christian Norberg-Schulz, the famous Norwegian architect-theorist approaches the existential dimension with the concepts of place, this is how he writes about genius loci in the introduction: “Since ancient times, the genius loci, the “spirit of place” has been recognized as the concrete reality that man has to face and come to terms with in his daily life. Architecture means to visualize the genius loci, and the task of the architect is to create meaningful places, whereby he helps man to dwell. (...)

The existential dimension is not “determined” by the socio-economic conditions, although they may facilitate or impede the (self-) realization of certain existential structures. The socio-economic conditions are like a picture-frame; they offer a certain “space” for life to take place, but do not determine its existential meanings. The existential meanings have deeper roots. They are determined by the structures of our being-in-the-world, which have been analyzed by Heidegger in his classical work “Being and Time”, (Sein und Zeit, 1926). (...)

The place represents architecture’s share in truth. The place is the concrete manifestation of man’s dwelling, and his identity depends on his belonging to places. (...)

What then do we mean by the word “place”? Obviously we mean something more than abstract location. We mean a totally made up of concrete things having material substance, shape, texture and colour. Together these things determine an “environmental character”, which is the essence of place. In general a place is given as such a character or “atmosphere”. A place is therefore a qualitative, “total” phenomenon, which we cannot reduce to any of its properties, such as spatial relationships, without losing its concrete nature out of sight.10 Norberg-Schulz speaks of the place as an existential space. Like Gaston Bachelard, he too recommends phenomenology as a poetic, intuitive approach instead of the structuralist, functionalist, architecture-theoretician method based exclusively on science, and he does so exactly in order to "rehabilitate" the spirit of the place, the genius loci. Based on Martin Heidegger's writings and the methodology of phenomenology, in his summarizing theoretical work the Genius Loci published in 1980, he determines the spirit of place as an independent entity, by which space becomes more than a geometric form. “Space becomes a place when it fills with meaning, when its relationship with the world appears. In order to be able to build a place further, it must be understood. Friendship for the environment means respect for the place. We must be able to listen to the voice of the place, understand its genius. Only in this way can we give it a new (and old) interpretation and contribute to its self-realization.11 The author here quotes Le Corbusier holding it against modern architects that they usually work without considering the existential dimension. “The purpose of architecture is to move us.

Architectural emotion exists when the work rings within us in tune with the universe whose laws we obey, recognise and respect.” (Vers une architecture, 1923).12

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Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci, 1980. p. 3–6 Simon, Regionalism – Calling the location (out), 2000.

12 Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci, 1980. p. 6 11

Norberg-Schulz breaks the concept of existential space into pairs - "character and orientation", "identification and expression”, describing space as an existential foothold, as an object suitable for human identification. Things “gather the world” and in effect create and fill the world with meaning. See Heidegger's famous analysis of the Greek temple, as if it gathers the world around it and by doing so, creates the surrounding landscape and world. When defining the existential space Norbert-Schulz borrows the concept of "dwelling" from Heidegger. The existential foothold and dwelling are synonymous concepts, in an existential sense dwelling is the purpose of architecture. Man lives where he can orient himself and identify with his environment, that is to say, where he feels his environment is meaningful. Dwelling therefore means more than a hiding place. It means that the scenes of life are really places, in the true sense of the word. The place is a space with a particular identity.13 “Man made places are related to nature in three basic ways. Firstly, man wants to make the natural structure more precise.That is, he wants to visualize his “understanding” of nature, “expressing” the existential foothold he has gained. To achieve this, he builds what he has seen.

Where nature suggests a delimited space, he builds an enclosure; where nature appears “centralized”, he erects a Mal14, where nature indicates a direction, he makes a path. Secondly, man has to complement the given situation, by adding what it is “lacking”. Finally, he has to symbolize his understanding of nature (including himself). Symbolization implies that an experienced meaning is “translated” into another medium. A natural character for instance is translated into a building whose properties somehow make the character manifest. The purpose of symbolization is to free the meaning from the immediate situation, whereby it becomes a “cultural object”, which may form part of a more complex situation, or be moved to another place. All the three relationships imply that man gathers the experienced meanings to create for himself an imago mundi or microcosmos which concretizes his world. Gathering evidently depends on symbolization, and implies a transposition of meanings to another place, which thereby becomes an existential “centre”.”

Art is not comparative science. What Hankiss writes about structure as a power system, analyzing the anatomy of coding environmental information, applies to art as a "power system".

It's not a static system, it's in motion. "The Total System of Self-Regulatory Transformations", where transformation means that the components of the system, on the one hand, converge each other's meaning, direction, value, and on the other hand by transforming the whole structure constantly, being "structuring and structured" at every moment.”15 However, structuralism denies metaphysics, so it is insufficient to reveal our problem. The subject of metaphysical thinking has been the substance, the existent, since Plato and Aristotle, structuralism, however, does not consider the substance to be essential, but the structure, that is, the relationship, the hierarchy and the opposition of things to other things. The tools of science do not enable art to find itself on the basis of cause-and-effect relationships, causalities.

Although art reflects on itself through art history in science, but it is something else inside art.

13

Norberg-Schulz, 1980. p. 10 Norberg-Schulz refers to D. Frey Grundlegung... Vienna, Innsbruck, 1949 ,” As the plastic counterpart to the simultaneous space, (...) the resting mass “Das Mal-Motiv”, exemplified by pyramids and obelisks” 15 Piaget, quoted by Hankiss, The literary work as a complex model, 1985. p. 45 14

Art, in its own (raw) history, sees and makes things visible through the works of art. The work is “structuring and structured” at the same time. The work carries both endpoints. The two endpoints are: seeing and making visible, as the artist is both a recipient and an emissary. If art looks at itself mostly through the works, it does it entirely on a subjective basis, because it is impossible to draw an artist's attitude to his work on the basis of regularities. The artists' creation is based on the fine laws of art itself. However, places can have a lot to do with this attitude. The place, and in general, the effects that the creative man is experiencing are reflected in what the creator will return in his work. Perhaps these sets of effect-complexes can be intercepted and can be described based on the combined effects of the physical space and the intellectual environment; it is captured as a kind of spirit of place that grows to be an inseparable part of the artwork. In any case, we can establish that the spiritual environment that influences the creator - that is not entirely independent of the geographical environment - is fatally incorporated, making the artwork of its own material, as its nature, its "message" is not free from the intellectual and physical environment surrounding its creation.

Attempts have already been made to identify a place, a region, a nation, and draw its character and features, its face. It is enough to read Ernő Kállai's study of Hungarian art that formed a uniform character at the turn of the century (19th to 20th), in his basic work titled The New Hungarian Painting. "The question is," writes Kállai, "how modern artistic aspirations in the hands of specific Hungarian style trends necessarily involve such or such a body. I want to point out the common essence of styles that emerge in different movements and individual creations, including the function of the specific Hungarian national and socio-psychological components.”

In the twenties, Kállai - obviously, promoting intellectual artistic thinking in Hungary and hoping for European integration of Hungarian art - concerned about the same -, as the creator of sociological positivism in the 19th century, one of the main European shapers of naturalism, (the paradigm preceding impressionism) - Hippolyte Taine stated, that the work of art can be learned from its circumstances. According to Taine's “milieu theory”, artwork is determined by three forces: race (biologically inherited factors), milieu (social environment), and moment - ie artistic traditions.16 Recently, similar efforts have been made in the field of architecture theory. István Janáky’s The Hidden Objects of Architectural Beauty in Hungary, published in 2004, is a subjective collection of forms, surfaces and architectural phenomena collected from all parts of the country, mostly made without architectural intentions, which, in general, suggest a never-existing, ancient set of forms of Hungarian regionalism. Janáky believed that architectural beauty could be created without the desperate exploration of the unique path or by mimicking international trends. The material of the book was presented in 2004 in the Hungarian pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale, based on the concept of architect Péter Janesch (only partially realized). Elsewhere Janáky analyzes and draws the curve of the canonized Hungarian architectural history with the inherent and developing architectural behavioral and linguistic history, besides the material use with local characteristics. “Landscape, history, and people's intimate, confident, fateful, say' 16

The effects of the environment, which played a direct role in the creation of the work, eg. the living conditions of the author, the circumstances of the birth of the work. The moment refers to temporal conditions when writing a work, eg. close and distant family, art-historical circumstances. The race, that was called common sense or psyche by Herder–is a nation's general approach.

cathartic inhesion, and other instinctive, tectonic spiritual forces were able to develop a subtle, elegant, eloquent, tonal stylistic alliance.17 All local style communities, if in general terms, refer to the foundations of Jungian-anthropological artistic psychology, which is based on the viewpoint of art stemming from the struggle of the "common consciousness and common unconscious of mankind" and defines its function in bringing the "thousands of years of human experience that has been forgotten, sank into unconscious, condensed into archetypes" to the surface. To raise the social consciousness into the field of the great myths, "the lifeblood of great human traditions", because “the same ancient psycho-psychic energies are buzzing in the literature as in myths, beliefs, religions, dreams, visions, the poet-writer has nothing but to find simple symbols to siphon this huge, overflowing unconscious energy-tank of archetypes”.18 Literary arts can be replaced by fine art and architectural examples. Kállai wrote about the features of archetypes that develop in the region, called national characters, the features of archetypes that had sunk into the unconscious of the artistic psychology studied emphatically not racially, but on a Hungarian civilian basis.19 As Hankiss says, art is best suited for storing and transmitting human experience, i.e. for processing. In the following, we will see that the place of experience that art embodies and conveys with the help of its specific vocabulary, in the depth of the historical life of the place, how it determines the language itself, be it literary, architectural, musical or painterly.

Architecture bears or reflects this perhaps in the most spectacular way, due to its Gesamtkunstwerk character or "synthesis of the arts".

4. The poetics of space or Genius Loci as the place of artist's reveries “...the house images move in both directions: they are in us as much as we are in them.”

Gaston Bachelard20

The place thus communicates by its spirit. Its nature itself is experienced by man as a function of the time spent in it and the spiritual and emotional intensity of this time interval. “Space saves time in thousands of its honeycombs. Space is for this” - Bachelard writes.

17

Janáky, Letters from Arcadia, 2011.

Hankiss, 1985. p. 135 “I see the idea of Hungarian racism as a realistic factor of life and culture, if the work of Petőfi-Petrovics, Munkácsy-Lieb Mihály, Rippl-Rónay, Iványi-Grünwald, Kernstock Károly, Csaba Perlrott /names of great Hungarian artists of different origins/ and the work of other foreigners is also based on Hungarian racial characteristics – by virtue of the melting effect of the environment and history” writes Kállai in the Foreword of the New Hungarian Painting 20, Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1994, Intro. xxxvii 18 19

He speaks of places as a refuge for our memories; in his poetry philosophy The Poetics of Space analyzing the images of inwardness, he meditates about the symbolic significance of the house, its peculiar role in man's spiritual life: Of course, thanks to the house, a great deal of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams.

He makes the psychoanalytic a simple suggestion to take into account the place where our memories are located. In doing so, he introduces Topoanalysis as an auxiliary of psychoanalysis: the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives. With the house image we are in possession of a veritable principle of psychological integration. (...)

The house, then, really is an instrument of topo-analysis; (...) For, in point of fact, a house is, first and foremost a geometrical object, one which we are tempted to analyze rationally. Its prime reality is visible and tangible, made of well hewn solids and well fitted framework. It is dominated by straight lines, the plumb-line marked it with discipline and balance. A geometrical object of this kind ought to resist metaphors that welcome the human body and the human soul.

But transposition to the human plane takes place immediately whenever a house is considered a space for cheer and intimacy, space that is supposed to condense and defend intimacy.

Independent from all rationality, the dream world beckons. (...)

But the complex of reality and dream is never definitively resolved. The house itself, when it starts to live humanly, does not lose all its “objectivity”. We shall therefore have to examine more closely how the houses of the past appear in dream geometry. For these are the houses in which we are going to recapture the intimacy of the past in our daydreams. We shall have to apply ourselves increasingly to studying how, by means of the house, the warm substance of intimacy resumes its form, the same form that it had when it enclosed original warmth. (...)

Space that has been seized upon by the imagination cannot remain indifferent space subject to the measures and estimates of the surveyor. It has been lived in, not in its positivity, but with all the partiality of the imagination. (...)..the calendars of our lives can only be established in its imagery. In order to analyze our being in the hierarchy of an ontology, or to psychoanalyze our unconscious entrenched in primitive abodes, it would be necessary, on the margin of normal psychoanalysis, to de-socialize our important memories, and attain to the plane of the daydreams that we used to have in the places identified with our solitude. For investigations of this kind, daydreams are more useful than dreams. They show moreover that daydreams can be very different from dreams.

And so, faced with these periods of solitude, the topo-analyst starts to ask questions: Was the room a large one? Was the garret cluttered up? Was the nook warm? How was it lighted? How, too, in these fragments of space did the human being achieve silence? How did he relish the very special silence of the various retreats of solitary daydreaming? ”There is nothing like silence to suggest a sense of unlimited space. Sounds lend color to space, and confer a sort of sound body upon it. But absence of sound leaves it quite pure and, in silence, we are seized with the sensation of something vast and deep and boundless. It took

complete hold of me and, for several moments, I was overwhelmed by the grandeur of this shadowy peace.

It asserted itself like a person.

This peace had a body. It was caught up in the night, made of night. A real, a motionless body.”

21

(...)

This being the case, if I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. Thought and experience are not the only things that sanction human values. The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths. Daydreaming even has a privilege of autovalorization. It derives direct pleasure from its own being. Therefore, the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relieved as daydreams, that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time. (...)

Daydreams return to inhabit an accurate drawing and no dreamer remains indifferent for long to a picture of a house.

Bachelard prefers the hut, the simple homestead visible on prints of engravings, and imagines he would love to live on a farm he saw on a woodcut print. I was most attracted by the bold outlines of the houses in woodcuts which, it seemed to me, demanded simplicity. Through them, my daydreams inhabited the essential house. Then, surprisingly, he reads about the dreams he naïvely claimed his own, in André Lafon's 22 poem: “I dream of a house, a low house with high Windows, three worn steps, smooth and green…. …..

A poor secret house, as in an old print, That only lives in me, where sometimes I return To sit down and forget the gray day and the rain.”

The aforementioned dream, in which Bachelard desires a protective shelter, that he calls an intimate hut in the depths of human consciousness, is, in fact, an archetype of a virtual home created by man to overcome his fears. He goes even further when he says: ..this shelter gives strength. It asks to be lived in simply with all the security that simplicity gives. The print house awakens a feeling for the hut in me.. When he recognizes his dream house in a poem, more precisely: he encounters the embodiment of his own dream in another man's visual poem, he realizes that he has visualized a common prehistoric image, the archetypal house as a symbol of protection. The spirit of place can be discovered in virtual communities like this one, as well.23

21

Bosco, quoted by Bachelard, 1994. p 44 Lafon, quoted by Bachelard, 1994. p 51 23 Bachelard, 2011, quotes from the subchapter p 24–64 22

I have a personal experience pointing towards this direction, too. Which is also about choosing a location for a(n invisible) function, where the image as a depiction of the Bachelardian reverie of the place, appearing in the manifestations of independent people.

At a random point amidst the infinite stations and platforms of the incredibly intricate network of the New York City subway system, I shot a photo from behind the iron bars (3), depicting the tiles peeling off of the tunnel wall in about a 3 sq foot patch. Later of course, I learned that it wasn’t too random though (Union Sq.), from the thesis’ point of view, it’s indifferent. (Or not) The composition is framed by the indication of the street number of the station, the tunnel’s structure beams and the platform’s edge. Several months later, by uploading the photo on Google Images to make a search looking out for similars, I found a twin image (4). Someone had turned the camera at the exact same spot and in the same direction, and apparently due to some strange conjunction or coincidence, inspired by the aesthetics of the same piece of wall, took almost exactly the same shot. Let’s skip here the commonplace of the millions of photos of famous/scenic/historic/etc scenes that were made with identical settings, similar angles, referring to the overall aesthetic of public places. In this case, the subject of the "daydream" excludes this type of approach. After all, it was a patch of mortar and tiles, (a flashback of some mosaic?), there was nothing to see there!24 Still, our photos of this seemingly meaningless scene encountered each other in hyperspace, the subject of our reveries engaged a place in the sense of Bachelard’s archetypal genius.

We’ve seen the face behind the wall.

Research that uses the method of aesthetic phenomenology, from this point leads us straight to the concept of the genius of virtual places.25 24

redaction 2016-19// The weirdest fact is that actually it was something to see there. And this is the real coincidence, which I found out only after concluding my thesis. The Union Square Station’s aesthetics were manipulated by artist Mary Miss in the 90’s by her project that aimed to infiltrate the entire space of the multi-leveled station, transforming it into an artwork. She used red frames, highlighting many of the hidden elements of the structure, in order to draw attention to its changing nature with the passing of time.

One of those marked elements appeared in the image I shot, the framed 14th St compartment inlaid in the tunnel wall. The most exciting part is that Mary Miss had created tangible evidence (a form of art) of almost the same notion that I was researching: to reveal information about the nature of space, through its changing life, and to shed light on Genius Loci – The Spirit of the Place.

The oeuvre of Mary Miss is rooted in the Environment – and Land Art, and it connects to my research around the theme of my thesis at many points. As one can read in her Biography: “Mary Miss has re-shaped the boundaries between sculpture, architecture, landscape design and installation art by articulating a vision of the public sphere where it is possible for an artist to address the issues of our time.” If there’s something I can call Interferences of Genius Loci and the Universal Language of Art, then this coincidence is definitely one of those arcane encounters. The art of the public sphere envisioned by Mary Miss was caught on camera by an observer, perhaps accidentally, who went after the signs of interference between the spirit of the public sphere and art.

We can never be sure whether the other photo was taken intentionally, documenting Mary Miss’s work, or not, but in fact, it doesn’t really matter.

25

/redaction 2019 There’s only one thing that makes it round, it works only in case we’re both aware of it, if we share. The person who did the other photo is not aware of this parity, she might, but we can’t be sure, there’s no contact, so it is really a theoretical game until I pass it forward into the “reality of geniuses” and share it at

(...)

3.

4.

3. My photo of the 14th St Union Sq. Station 4. The photo was found by Google Images searching with photo no.3.

5. The 21st Century - The Refuge of the Virtual Place The spirit of the virtual space, as a concept to be defined, or rather as a new form of revelation pertaining to the latest comparison of art, science and technology, is an area which I do not discuss in more detail in this paper. However, this theme was developed by Marcos Novak, an American architect-theoretician, multimedia artist, who contributed to the Bachelardian Poetry of Space in his lecture on Invisible Architectures of the 21st Century: Poetry of Trans-Activated Spaces.26 In a study by Felicity Morel, EdnieBrown, Australian urban researcher, sees the potential of using GIS (Geographic Information System) to define specific content based on the least with her or him. Only then can we talk about the genius of a virtual place.

26 “Spaces are the lightest of media, demanding the greatest subtlety in both sensibilities and poetics.

Initially trained as a physicist, Gaston Bachelard used phenomenology to build a philosophical bridge between the science of space and the poetics of making significant places. Science informed his project but did not overwhelm his subject. Concisely, Bachelard gave precedence to the qualia rather than the quanta of space.

I propose that the nature of our relation to space has changed since Bachelard’s time, requiring us to follow but also to augment Bachelard’s procedure. A ‘ladder’ of conceptions of space is offered: passive, reactive, active, interactive, transactive, each corresponding to a level of activation, namely: inaction, reaction, action, interaction, transaction. Current technologies have enabled what I call transactivated space as the newest, most advanced, and yet most minimal architectonic material, and, consequently, have made possible what I have termed invisible architectures.” Novak, 2010.

interpretation of local experiences, which can serve as guides for diverse cultures, contemporary societies living at different geographic locations.27 This short parabola also shows how important it is for people to conceptualize the place.

"I think, therefore I am", anywhere and anytime in history. But the thinker depends on his place at every age. The starting point when formulating the answer to a question, in all cases is the environment, be it narrower or wider - spiritual or physical. At the same time, we can look at it as irrelevant where and when thought and the thinker are, he does what he does, his questions are sometimes unanswered. In other cases they become dust or concrete cores of the pillars of human civilization. From this point of view the place where they were thought is indifferent. But the aspect, as a fact - not only in visual terms, refers to a place again. From here, we can easily get to the point that the "thinking man" is the dimension that can react to itself from outside of the matrix of time and space, can view the place - and relate to the place - compared to where he/she is now.

Here are two more quotes from my own notes, which I recorded about the place and its spirits in poetic texts on the go.

“The movement of displacement or departure brings fresh air through the window of the new host. Moving away from something – grabs a slice of time. When the time slices are called "images" - first "inside" and then "outside" visualizations of their carriers, then the carrier's personal, emotional and conscious perception and the resulting outflow impulses are projecting, mixing - floating on one another the captured and current time planes. By perception is meant sensing and processing of perceived information. Interpreting perceived information in the case of carried time slices, “images”, may coincide with the outward movement, the projection, the time of action. Moving from a physical location and the trajectory of reappearing in a new place can describe the arrival of the stored image in the new “image”. This is how the picture is getting refreshed. The idea of time always losing its focus in the present – it’s blurring. Indeed, what is in between the two phases of the refreshing image (the passing time)? Does it have two phases at all? The points of an infinite line only in space become really infinite - see Veszelszky's pictures. The depth of the pulses determines the degree of freshness (...) – in other words, the real purpose of the shift depends on the personality of the mediator. So there is, or should be, a goal that is formed in space and time independently of man, but without the human being – the movement and communication of the inanimate material, lacking their interactions – it does not 27

The study by Felicity Morel EdnieBrown draws attention to the disappearance of the authentic place concept as a disease of the population in the world of homogenizing global culture. In the face of global interconnectivity where homogenization of culture is endemic, what price individuality and sense of the authentic? While commercial corporate identity is rampant, showing the same branding in Prague as in Pittsburgh, where stands the differentiated meaning of cities and what creates their sense of individuality?

She argues that a sustainable and culturally enriched engagement with place primarily comes from understanding the context of the place — its history, its layered meanings and the contexts that individuals draw from their understandings of their physical environment, mediated by their past experience. And her paper proposes that ‘sense of place’ (‘genius loci’) is the physical manifestation of authenticity (...). The system, acting as the spirit of the virtual space, may appear as a new reality for the explorers of the virtual space. With the help of technology, the generalization-uniforming effect of social value destruction in GIS is replaced by the creation of a vivid, sensual perception of the site, thus creating a "real" reality.

appear. The picture cannot be interpreted by inanimate material. The concept of the refreshing image in humans is repetition.28 It's possible to get from A to B, but by the time we get there, we find ourselves in A again. The Spirit of the Place lives in the Labyrinth of the inner surface of our personality.”

10.06.2008. The Hague “However, there is a significant circumstance that affects the human being as a result of the dual effect of the physical space and the spiritual medium. The root (spiritual, consciousness) and the actual physical and spiritual state (where we are), these two give the direction of the vector, as the Spirit of the Place has an effect on us, but partly comes from us. The new location can generate new vectors. Because you can't "get out of your skin," as soon as you find a new place, you interact with it. The reagent itself is the human spirit - it also produces the (future) environment. There was a reference to the climate in the thesis. This can be very strongly detected in places with extreme climates.

From the point of view of memes, cultural evolution, they also confirm that the Spirit of Place is only a concept in the layers of human consciousness. It would be interesting to compare them to the meridians, the lines of power of the ancient knowledge on the Earth's surface and underneath it, the markings of the sacred places that have changed from simple milestones to roadside crosses over time. It is also a conceivable scenario that, during the evolution of memes, the place-related knowledge or distinctive attention is "stacking", and over time it transforms the environment.29 So the concept may "only" be living in our minds, yet it affects the outside world, as the memes struggling for survival, their sediment has flown around and around by the river of human existence.”

06.02.2010. New York

28

Referring to the witty comparison of Kierkegaard's Repetition: "Hope is a new garment, stiff and

starched and lustrous, but it has never been tried on, and therefore one does not know how becoming it will be or how it will fit. Recollection is a discarded garment that does not fit, however beautiful it is, for one has outgrown it. Repetition is an indestructible garment that fits closely and tenderly, neither binds nor sags.”

29

László FeLugossy: ”...the spirit of one place is embedded in the spirit of another place without changing its origin, but deepening its depth...” from the conversation with the Hungarian artist, 2013

Bela Veszelszky In the autumn, when the light of a lantern is enough to make us feel home–we are in fact reliving the mystery of human fate, the human state. Nature falls asleep–and we wake up. Our life seems shrinking; we're locking ourselves in. But this place without extension–where our room stands and our lights are on–is the "center of the circle". Our real place. Because man, though living in nature, is actually a citizen of the universe. What is more, beyond the natural course of time, of eternity: he's the invitee of God. His real place is therefore symbolic. Apparently a single point without extension. In fact, the timeless spaciousness of eternity. Let's burn our lanterns!

János Pilinszky30

1. Life Béla Veszelszky (1905–1977) was a heroically lonesome painter of twentieth century Hungarian art. His father was a pharmacist and professor, a respected intellectual. In the early 1920’s a serious father-son conflict resulted in a short but forced course of pharmaceutical study, until the family reluctantly accepted the young man's career choice. Wishing to make his own name and legacy, the young Veszelszky turned to the arts and ceased his studies of chemistry. In 1924 he began his career with Oszkar Glatz’ class at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest. Also in the twenties, he became sympathetic with the core of the progressives of the age through the "Labor" circle centered around Lajos Kassák31, Lajos Vajda, Dezső Korniss, György Kepes, Sándor Trauner and others. While these artists were Modern, Veszelszky was attracted to the art of the Greeks, Egypt and the Renaissance. As a reprieve and respite from the depressing socio-political conditions of the age, he, like many others, was captivated by the artistic and intellectual life of Vienna and Berlin. After he returned home from his various visits abroad at the beginning of the thirties the fertile effect of his travels on his artistic views was significant but unfortunately ended up a failure in terms of survival. Veszelszky placed the ethical responsibility, and the role of man in the classical sense, in a respect for the artist as sage, wizard of natural peoples, and priest, and he turned to life with the dedication of clarity. He didn't really find a partner, a path, an opportunity to unfold his principles and ideas in a more and more commercialized, politically unattractive domestic discourse, or art life. An artist who searched for a contrast between the classic, anonymous artistic idea, like the anonymous dome builders’ achievements, and the collectivist and ideological movements of the modern age, Veszelszky couldn't find his place among either of those, and as an artist who was looking for an individual solution, began to question the validity of art itself. The novel gnostic writings of Jenő Henrik Schmitt, (translated by Ferenc Kepes, the uncle of one of the friends among the progressives, the visual artist György Kepes), the essence of esoteric doctrines as a spiritual shelter, later as the basis of his art theory became important for the young Veszelszky. With his oeuvre that 30

János Pilinszky: Őszelő (detail) /János Pilinszky was one of the greatest Hungarian poets of the 20th century.

31 Lajos Kassák, (1887-1967) Hungarian poet, novelist, painter, essayist, editor, theoretician of the avant-garde, and occasional translator

unfolds the spiritual space in idealist realism, Veszelszky transcended impressionism by developing his own phenomenology. Veszelszky had already developed a unique abstract expressionist method based on a vibrating point and line set after his return home from Berlin before the war.32 Although he was forced to take a break for many years and his works were destroyed during the war, his painterly experience nurtured on his early portraits (e.g. of Lajos Szabó33, 1940) and in his still lifes are felt in the unified nature of his outstanding series from 1956 to ’65 that I'm going to focus on in the following.

2. Work After 195634, Veszelszky scanned the city panorama in front of him from the windows of the Pusztaszeri St. apartment–the only visual source of his images. His painting method is, capturing the reality of the vibrational world with the thickening and thinning system of tiny dots and lines, and a compulsive ritual of putting the given point in the "right place". This place is located in a pair of horizontal and vertical orientations along the guides found in the landscape, which he later notes by declaring to Éva Körner, the axles, the cross–these pure forms are important because of his indeterminacy.35 At a young age, at the Academy, he was seized by Van Gogh's flowing, organic air movement; to this end, he combined it with the theory of "mathematics", a concept that is related to Mondrian's renouncement of representation.

Schmitt's General Dimension Theory of his Gnosis also promotes the abstract approach, the theoretical experience of geometry, mathematics and astronomy against the spectacle.36 The proposition of Schmitt's Dimension Theory in Veszelszky's painting can be illustrated with these quotations from Ferenc Kepes's book: “The frosty form of the geometric space dissolves into vibration and rhythm in the light of cognition. (...) Physics is not a space-filling form, not a "material", but a system of point-to-point 32

In this respect writes István Vas in his memoir; it is clear from the description that the image type already existed at the time of the writer's visit at his painter friends' Donáti Street flat before the war. (Mért vijjog a saskeselyű? 2 / Why do the vulture squawk? 2. 1981 p. 305) 33 Lajos Szabó was a Hungarian philosopher and one of the founders of the Budapest Dialogical School.

In the last stage of Szabó's life, a speculative graphic art of abstract calligraphy played an important role. " (Wikipedia) 34 1956 marks the year of the Hungarian revolution, the so-called “counter-revolution” against the Russian occupation, the insurgencies started on the 23rd of October and lasted until November 10, when the totalitarian state moved to crush the revolution by the help of Russian tanks in Hungarian cities against their own people. It was definitely a tremendous rupture of the post-war era and still carries its painful memories for Hungarians. At the time discussed here, Veszelszky was in the aftermath of the failed revolution, with the void of hundreds of thousands that left the city and the country and the retaliations against the ones that stayed, it was terrifying and relates to the introverted way of life of the artist.

35 Körner, A past conversation with B.V., in: Veszelszky Béla, 1997. p. 65 36 The theory of Poetry of Transactivated Space by Marcos Novak, mentioned in the previous chapter, may even show a crosstalk with the Gnosis of Jenő Schmitt, stemmed from the beginning of the 20th Century, acting as theoretical background for Veszelszky. An interesting addition to this hypothetical crosstalk, is that Veszelszky's first public appearance after the war, a 1962 exhibition organized by Éva Körner and Stefania Mándy at the Builders' Club; this show was not a stand-alone exhibition: the theme of the series of lectures presenting the relationship between modern architecture and fine art was illustrated by his artworks.

force centers, line-like radiations and planar cross-vibrations. (...) The vibrational mode of physical forms can be measured, the organic activity is immeasurable. We have more precise dimensions of star distances or movements of celestial bodies, such as about the nervous or digestive activity of animals, which always correspond to the mobile, inordinate, sensitive peripheral activity of imagination. Here, the beam of vibration is infinite, the center of vibration is very fine, as the geometric thought mapping and the point of thought show. (...) Schmitt, by analogy with geometric dimensions, determined the relationship of each group to each other. (...) The individual groups of phenomena represent similar stages of existence as the point, line, plane, body. In this fashion, the phenomena of physics, imagination, logic, the law of thought, ethics and religion are interdependent and towering over one another. (...) The higher form itself contains the lower than its own final delimitation as an element or differential. For instance, the line of the point, the plane of the line, the body of the plane, the space of logic (geometric space) of the optional space of imagination. Higher levels of existence cannot be achieved and built up by the expansion or stacking of the lower forms as desired. (...) The point is immersed in the line, but wherever you border the line, you'll necessarily end up with a point. The line is full of dots, but it cannot be built from points. Similarly, the line is relative to the plane, the plane to the space, the space of imagination to the space of geometry. The lower's direction is toward the higher, but it cannot reach it. What is opportunity in the lower, that is realization in the higher.

The imagination is directed to infinity, though it cannot reach it, but in infinite space, in any theorem of logic or arithmetic, the infinite is realized. It is given. Dimension contradictions are now integrated into the approach as the cube combines its own elements, boundary forms: plane, line, point. The idea (thought) can thus be viewed with its own limitations in the unity of imagination and sensuality, down to the point-center of gravity, which corresponds to the point-like basic elements of the sensation.37 He didn’t use painting to fix the moment with colors of the light. I feel more precise to name it "the color of a photon" to characterize his unsubstantial stains. Accelerated to absolute speed on the path of the insurmountable impressionism38–in an analogous way to the optical slowdown of the rapidly rotating wheel and then to its rollback–he created a floating, vibrating space, developed with meticulous craft on the canvas, facing the day-to-day, inside-out familiar view.

Gnosis has been a good tool for this "rollback" as an optical analogy: pushing the time of contemplation by "long speculation" before each step. “That's why I have pictures that I can't finish”, he said in a conversation. "Finding clarification ... requires that I always put each drop of the color in the correct place. I always speculate a lot because I have to consider my momentary action in relation to the final, conceived perfection.”39 He was trying to grasp the universe in its constant subatomic juggling–in a chosen, cherished spectrum–“like dust in the

37

Kepes, 1918. p. 90–94 “Impressionism is not only the end point of the line from consciousness to appearances, but with its emergence »space disappears and the absolute time remains: the mathematical date ... fixing a single point in time« (...)The opposite of absolute timelessness in the ancient works of painting is the absolute momentum of the impressionism. Impressionism's »great significance is that it has gone all the way to the absolute,« giving another finite pole of the possibility of human perspective, so the conclusion becomes clear that impressionism cannot be continued. quote from Lajos Fülep, the great Hungarian art historian: Hungarian Art, in: Máté, Understandable art?, 2007. p. 39 39 Körner, 1997. p. 66 38

air”40–the vibration of existence from the window of his home, looking out from the origo, recorded in the most sensitive way. “The sensitivity with which Veszelszky scanned the shapes so that he could mark the place of these shapes with a brush stroke on the canvas, well, this is the legacy of Cézanne. But what for Cézanne was still a picturesque composition, for Veszelszky it was only the place of the composition, the vacancy of the almost empty space, and it is only its ethereal impressions of nature, the accents of the center of gravity are the ones that are visible.41 The problem actually emerged from the appearance of the identical space. With the passing of impressionism in absolute time, in the exploratory eyes of the unpaintable moment of art and its relationship to nature. This means that, as Cézanne's many paintings of Mont Sainte Victoire or Monet's Rouen- series and his garden, Veszelszky's landscapes painted from the window and Turrell's Roden Crater project–in terms of the prominent role of the place–refer to each other. At Turrell, the act of elevating the trance to the level of a Land Art art-piece, the space-specific genre is the postmodern realization of the axis mundi. Zsigmond Károlyi talks about similar things: “The technique of the impressionists (...) dictated by the compulsion of speed, they wanted to mix colors not in the palette but in the picture (and later only in the eye) to keep their visual energy clear.”42 No matter what kind of genre they are, these artistic manifestations (and certainly there are many more examples could be brought up), these notorious, almost autistic / addictive researches of a place, the process of systematic exploitation of artistic expression and expanding the definition of being determined by environment–we can say that it is about irritating the spirit of the place, about excitation of its energies by simultaneously using them.

For self-sustaining “intellectual economy” a kind of 'green' power plant. Gábor Andrási's paper on Béla Veszelszky includes a paragraph that highlights the problem (the dilemma of Cézanne and the trap of art history): From the history of painting, we can also get to the insoluble contradiction of "ideal realism" The task–to grasp the "liveliness of the sensual life" and the moments of the law and order that manifests in it all at once–Veszelszky inherited from Cézanne from the turn of the century. The Aix’ master struggled from painting to painting to combat the solutions of the dilemma he regarded as diversions that were unacceptable to him. Neither was Veszelszky willing to simply "see" the spirit by romanticizing nature in the phenomenon. The pantheistic concept (Mednyánszky) was as much avoided as the direct, iconic or symbolic representation of the doctrine or the idea (Malevich, Mondrian). Like Cézanne, he was looking for a par excellence aesthetic way out, and therefore he had to fight simultaneously »unite with nature against the pure spirit« and »in unity with the idea of imagination«–based on his own concept of rejection of naturalism–»against the spirit of empirical nature« (Max Raphael)43.

To overcome this contradiction, Cézanne attempted to enhance the sensitivity (color perception) to the end and by constructively taming the "color forms" (Kurt Badt) thus seen. He experienced Géza Perneczky: Art in a rampart, 2007.

Géza Perneczky: Art in a rampart, 2007.

42 Károlyi, The right place, in: Béla Veszelszky, 1997 p. 55 43 The problem in the wording of Ferenc Kepes: „The purpose of art is to make sense to the universal spirit and to spiritualize the sensual.” (F.K.: Gnosis, p. 336), quoted by Andrási 40 41

his attempts as continuing failure and explained them with his inadequate abilities: “I can't reach the intensity that unfolds before my senses, I barely possess the wonderful richness of color that floods from nature.” In fact, he has gone to the final point in the modulation of colors where »experience is richer than creativity«. He has reached such delicate shades, »which he have experienced but which could not be "hit" with a brush.« According to Károly Tolnay, in these cases Cézanne leaves the canvas white; as a sign of his retreat, which he is more inclined to than bypass the perceived truth. At other times, he turns the picture into a torso, the laws of the space of the construction–the reality of dimensions forced into plains–are not strong enough to motivate the phenomena, "germinated" from color (expression of Cézanne) get elevated in the sphere of the spirit. Because Cézanne »sees this process from the Earth, and the Earth is the only point that is isolated from the cosmos, it only suffers and attracts cosmic light. The uniqueness of the "Provence clot" does not expand to the cosmos« I think Veszelszky–although he has also often voiced his failures–with the works of his great creative period from the late fifties–above all with his landscapes–stumbled upon the solution of the problem.44

Veszelszky escaped from the subject on the one hand, but found nothing more, on the other hand, fled from personality to the accuracy of the raster. (...) A soul defected into a silent philosophical opposition (...) he was compelled to compensate for the lack of gesture, expression, and evolution, the carefree experience of subjective being with the crumbs of joy of color.” In his study on Veszelszky's paintings Károlyi mentions the one similarity of mosaic and its polar opposite, the impressionism: “they are common in visibility, as they direct the viewer away from themselves, the motif viewable mostly only from afar (...) In both cases, it is about the visual interconnection, the liquidation, elimination of separation. Behind the unhurried groping, stemming from the experience of the "graininess" of the world (Teilhard de Chardin), a move towards a more transcendental time is in the works, or at least the homesickness of it.

Veszelszky scans the night, producing an X-ray negative image of the starry sky. The crumbly, granular image is enhanced by the nostalgia of the entire spectrum. He wants to settle in this cosmic dimension, at once, bound to ceaselessly "renewed and washed again the whole figure of the World'' in the infinity of the interior of the painting. Colors it, distills it into ethereal humidity, denaturing the curve of the road as seen from his window, the given "corner of the visible reality". He creates the unconcerned realism of sticks and pins. In this way, the anecdotal worldly facts are omitted, eliminating the depressing, frustrating atmosphere of the outside world, the specific environment of the era. In this sense he's related to the "cell-born"(Tandori) plein-air painters of the 50s and 60s, since the socialist-realist aesthetics did not have a particular problem with impressionism. He abstracts, still, he’s not an abstract. That's how he abides in the so-called normality. Settles within the circle, (and yet as an outsider, stays in the inner projection), denatures the joy of the moment, classifies it into the timelessness with a lengthy, weighing method, (...) translates the floating air perspective into the time of crystals. In the absence of contrast, contour, calligraphy, everything falls equally far, there is no room for 44

Andrási, 1994. Béla Veszelszky, 1994. p 10–11 and his citations: Max Raphael: Artwork and the natural pattern. Cezanne: Mont Sainte Victoire, in. M.R.: How to look at Art? (manuscript, translated by Gábor Berényi, p 63.-71) Paul Cezanne’s letter to his son (September 8, 1906) in. Letters of Paul Cezanne, Corvina, 1971 p. 232, Károly Tolnay: Historic place of Cezanne, Ars Una I/6 March, 1924 p 225–226

deep division on the surface of the confused tufts of the atomized colors, and leaves no space or opportunity for the experiential reality and the "self" to find one another joyfully. Inward uncertainty leads to spasmodic, negativistic (monotonous, monochrome) painting, a vacated "Informel."45 The "subject" of the image unfolds slowly in the spectator, because the primary is the purely abstract visual power, that first touches the senses in its subtlety. However, the support points found in the dawning, Veszelszky's "sturdiness", the column, the road or the curving hills in the distance, the shadows passing through the photons, and the ink traces as accents, give a whole new space experience. (5.)

This already triggers a deep-seated intellectual movement, which places Veszelszky's landscapes between the impressionist predecessors and the act of non-objective art, such as Turrell's site-specific postmodernism. His individual, clear transcendental materialism can be considered as the individual's response to both the aestheticism of representational painting and the alienating anti-spiritualism of the era's society.

5.

Béla Veszelszky's fate and oeuvre is a noble example, it shows in a formula of the diminished world of coffee grounds, the struggle with the difficulties of ascension of CentralEastern Europe's "crippled" human phenomenon, instigated against themselves for life. Veszelszky, who 45

excerpts from Zsigmond Károlyi’s, The right place, in: Béla Veszelszky, 1997. p 53–58

mostly evolved in his landscapes in the fifties and sixties, crawled away from the communities and nestled in his "Pit", staring at the starry sky, which he had projected the negative of in his paintings. This white depth is no longer due to Cézanne's retreat, but a conscious reservation.

His life was followed by resignation and creative loneliness. His youthful despair, later the experience of exclusion during the dictatorship, his deep and intimate religiosity, all together led him to the chosen inward turn that was an inevitable outcome of his basic spiritual form too.

Socially, he restricted his presence to the narrowest circle of family and friends. The vector of his painting was resignation, the "lack of subjective existence", whitening without gestures, painting with white back on, the "lightnostalgia", still not, or no longer recognizable vision with ever less color touch, which is just a detail, but includes the whole cosmic reality. Perneczky mentions Giacometti's example as an artistic equivalent of existentialism, and compares it to Veszelszky's ethereal image design. Giacometti, who "... fought a similar struggle with the natural forms' disappearance into the thin air", "with an almost unbearable void stretched around his portrait models," which "human shapes giving in to the suction effect and being consumed by it".

The parallel seems to be justifiable if we apply the philosophical teaching of "being in existence" to Veszelszky's "Sisyphean fight". “Probably the void is just the sibling of the peculiarity of the place and it is not a deficit, but creation” says Heidegger of the existential space.46 Maybe Veszelszky found the place in the white background of his pictures, in the medium of totality, which he could identify with. This is what György Jovánovics refers to in his review of Veszelszky, which is in line with what Perneczky said about Giacometti's vision. The idea outlined by Jovánovics was previously discovered and published by Jörn Merkelt, director of Berlinische Galerie, a great expert in 20th century sculpture. “Jörn Merkelt claims that watching a Giacometti figure involves implosion. His sculptures are far away and close at the same time, they're shrinking before our eyes. This effect he called implodierendes Sehen, i.e. imploding vision. (Implosion is the reverse of explosion, a reverse boom, an explosive breakdown. The same using a medical word is collapsus.) That is, both the spectacle and the work of art are moving! This is one of the main effects in the works of the artist, who is watching nature very closely and intently. It can be detected in Cézanne's and Veszelszky's work as well, in different ways though. Things are moving until we look at them, so we can't make the moment their internal topic. Because the look is very important (Mondrian), and the movement and time are 46

Heidegger, in: Szabó, 2005 The depth is not a mere absence, it’s the gap separating the recognized shapes and the "volume" filling their interior. The domain in which the deformations and displacements of space are realized is essentially depth and openness. The Buddhist tradition calls it Sunyata (emptiness).

In the existentialist interpretation of the word space in his paper Art and Space–what space can usually be and what makes it a place–Heidegger calls on the language: “in the German word Räum, the Räumen speaks–that is evacuation, removal, insertion.” He writes about the clearance of places by evacuation and then continues: “First the insertion allows something to be. It leaves an open area to operate, that allows, among other things, the appearance of the things that are associated with human dwelling.” The concept of dwelling can be replaced. Heidegger talks about sculpture as a transformation of places into bodies that gather a free space around themselves, which then gives a stay for the things that prevail. He concretizes the character of space, explaining this concretization with the concepts of gathering and things. The word thing originally referred to a gathered thing; the meaning of anything is what it collects. „We should learn to recognize that things are not just belong to a place, they are the places themselves.”.

Emptiness is to create places.”

both in their pictures and sculptures. I intend to coin the term pulsating vision in regard to Veszelszky's paintings. Both implosion and explosion are involved in pulsation, and on top of it it's continuous. Later Jörn Merkelt acknowledged that this was a finer version, than his.”47

3. The Gödör (Pit) From the aspect of our research the most important part of Veszelszky's artistic pathway from the late fifties onwards, is the Óbuda landscape painted from the window. At the same time, partly as a result of this activity, partly to set the conditions for the landscaping–to say his land-art project, as well. It is worth noting that this artistic genre (Land Art) was not born at the time. In the above quoted text, György Jovánovics calls the semi-buried, but still existing place, a fantastic talisman of Hungarian art.

In 1958, while observing the cityscape from the windows of his apartment in Pusztaszeri Street, in order to protect his view from the likely erection of a new building, Veszelszky bought a small garden under his window. He used to take his tea in the small garden after painting, but his solitary ritual was disturbed from the street behind the fence–waiting at the bus stop passersby were watching and addressing him. An idea finally saved him from this harrowing circumstance: he began digging a pit to disappear in it, to get into his trance and to spot the starry sky by night without light pollution. So the people didn't bother him from the street thereafter. Éva Körner writes about it: this facility “… became the hiding place surrounding him, which also served to study the starry sky–the celestial constellation he was heavily engaged with. The Gödör has become a symbol, representing Veszelszky's endeavor to establish a connection between earth and sky. His body was the contact element. Analogy, let it be the least conscious though, we can assume with the idea of the World Tree…”48 As I mentioned in the general definition of space and place, the vertical of the upright man in the coordinate system with the water level of the horizon is not a subjective perception of physical reality but part of human existence. So, we can say that Veszelszky identified himself as a World Tree with the place of meditation of his ritual after his daily work, where he slowly raised a dome from the substantial amount of tea he consumed during the day.49 If we expand the cultural-historical symbolism of the World Tree story, and we go a little further along the abstract meanings following Eliade–as Veszelszky looks at the starry sky from the bottom of the pit, it was as if we were about to climb up Jacob's ladder along his spine. The act that created the Gödör, created the cosmos from chaos. In order to get oriented in a homogeneous space, he founded the world, and this world in Veszelszky's case is nothing more than the observed spectacle from the windows of his home, which is protected by the very existence of the Gödör. The circle shape floor plan Veszelszky drew up with the help of a three-meter long tree branch from the forest. We can see the discovery of the center, the ritual foundation of the sacred space in this act. It apparently tells about a believer, a mystic-minded Magyar Szemle, New periodical, issue XI/6. Éva Körner, B.V. the chooser of the lonely road in: Béla Veszelszky, 1997 p. 26–27 49 “The dome and the negative dome*, the Gödör and the tea-dome beside each other.” Jovánovics, 47 48

man, otherwise he would have been able to measure the floor plan with a piece of rope, but Veszelszky wanted to establish, to consecrate the place, which would guard him, his family, and primarily his work process. The act itself is a heroic gesture, a gesture of a man who cares to maintain his body and spirit.50 The family story preserves the memory of a campfire with friends in a similar ditch, after which the idea of his own pit came up, bolstered by the enthusiasm of the Veszelszky children. The artist probably picked up on the basis of business with pleasure, and as to anything else, he got to it as an artist in the realization. The spatial location of the Gödör is also a hierophany for Veszelszky. The thing in which holiness is manifested, the hierophany can be anything, that the non-believer passes by, because he sees nothing in it. A stone or a tree, and even a pit has a special meaning for the devotee if he sees it as a manifestation of the omnipotent. Eliade says there is no completely profane existence. Even the non-religious man, who rejects all the sacredness of life distinguishes the unique importance of some spots and honors them as sacred places of his private world. Everyone can cite places of special quality in their lives, the home, a bench in the park, a tree from childhood (a place preserved in Bachelard's reveries), where even a non-religious person would declare a reality that would differ from his or her daily life. This inhomogeneous space filled with other reality gives strength.

Inside this guarding and accumulating, regenerating object was realized the observatory of the painter, which opened upwards to the sky. He can get into the cosmic space through it, but we are not only seeing the observation of the constellation here. Along the religious symbolism of the open sky, the door, or the threshold, over this opening the continuity of space ceases. In the complex symbolic system of the Gates of Heaven, the upward openness represents the transition from one way of being to another.51 "The purpose of art ... to sense the universal spirit and to spiritualize the senses." (Gnosis) Knowing that Veszelszky's transcendental belief rooted in gnosis, and imagining as he looked up from the Gödör at the starry sky in the evening, while the paint points he found and placed that day are still burned in his retina, signaling his transition to that certain other way of existence, and there is no doubt that the place where it all happens would become a holy place to him. In the analysis of Katalin Kemény this is also analogue with the painting theme, the notorious practice of looking out from one place. "The eye is open for external reception and inner awakening", as the observation from the window, and thus the construction of the circular panorama of the pictures built up around himself and his loved ones. “The window is the eye, looking out in the dazzling space, and the eye inwards, where we are and we are not. The window separates and connects.”52 Religious historical analogies draw the personality of a lonely artist who has withdrawn to a spiritual retreat and is committed to seeking universal truth. An artist, who practically buries himself in his garden to escape the bluntness of the place, its provincial and cynical 50

At that time, the artist descended on the incline of Mount Szemlő every day, on the undeveloped Óbuda slope all the way down to the Danube, he swam across to Margaret Island and back. That's how he started his day, which is typical of a dedicated person, who takes physical charges and engaged in heroic deeds. (from Sára Veszelszky, his daughter) 51 52

Eliade, 1987 p. 6 Katalin Kemény: The window, the landscape, the reality, in: Béla Veszelszky, 1997 p. 33

environment, the dictatorship that's smothering any living culture. Buries himself to overstep into the transcendental experience of life through the layers of stars and earth.

It is interesting to play with the idea of what would have been the vector of Veszelszky's oeuvre, the “message” of his art, if it did not unfold in Hungary but similarly to his companions, e.g.

Kepes György, he continued to work somewhere in Western Europe or North America after the war. Éva Körner wrote so beautifully, sliding the art-theoretical difference between these two realizations before the nose of the then power, that almost no one realized that she had elevated the Gödör, that had remained after Veszelszky, into art history.

“At the time of the condominium construction started in the seventies, the Gödör became endangered; it seemed they'll have buried this anachronistic object, which appeared both to the residents and the Office incomprehensible. The Kafkaesque correspondence is kept in the Veszelszky family archives. In the end, the Gödör could remain, properly filled to a depth of one and a half meters and covered by grass. (6.) This was due to the decisive role of Éva Körner, the organizer of the legal procedure, and the letter sent to the District Council by both she and Péter Kovács on behalf of the Hungarian Association of Fine and Applied Artists, and fortunately with the highly unusual consent of the authorities, she wrote the following: “The land art object, which has been established for about 25 years (the so-called “Gödör”), is one of the glories of Hungarian art history. Because with this genre, he has gotten far ahead of the world-wide artistic trend of this decade (the 70’s), in which nature itself will be the subject of artistic creation.”53

53

Andrási, 1994. p. 22

6.

James Turrell 1. Community of Friends James Turrell (b. 1943) grew up as a Quaker which is often cited by critics and biographers as a decisive impulse for his later work. The ancestors of the Quaker family came to America at the end of the 17th century with a religious community emigrating from Scotland. The Quaker movement founded by George Fox c. 1650 is devoted to peaceful principles. Central to the Quakers' belief is the doctrine of the “Inner Light,” or sense of Christ's direct working in the soul..

In various interviews, Turrell talked about being fascinated by light from an early age. He was delighted with the flood of light in the holes cut into the curtain, and later, in the university lecture hall, he was more excited by the beam of the slide-projector than the projected image. “Go, greet the light!” –the parental instruction said; this is how the community of friends called each other to enter the sacred space, the friends’ meeting house. Everyone among the Quakers can be a pastor, and the temple is simply a designated building.There is nothing but a beam of light from above the altar. In his subsequent statements, in response to questions seeking to interpret his art, Turrell repeatedly emphasizes that he considers himself to be non-religious, and does not consider religion to be decisive for his art, since it was not a strict practical requirement at an early stage in his life either, they lived it as a cultural practice or tradition. But the documents related to him show that he was not always so distant from religion as a source of inspiration. "I was raised differently than Christian or Jewish children, and it certainly had an impact on me, but I don't think they were pivotal." He adds that the thought that most influenced his work later was the commandment of "..You shall not carve idols for yourselves in the shape of anything in the sky above or on the earth below or in the waters beneath the earth; ". “It has to do with simplicity, the lack of ornamentation as virtues. I like this kind of thinking in many ways, I respect the straightforwardness of the expression, the honest approach.”

Even though the command of the carved idol manifests itself in his works–made of light, lacking verbal references–, this is only part of the story. Although he accepts the virtues of simplicity and puritanism in his statements, the effects of the practice of Quakerism are detectable in many of his works, he is generally quick to deflect this subject. Richard Andrews interviewed Turrell about his childhood, what it was like to grow up in a Quaker family, and how this influenced his later work: “It's hard to answer because maybe I'm too close to it. (...) The things you mention are self-evident, these kinds of interpretations are natural, and the tendency towards an inornate world also refers to that form of Puritanism.” He goes on to state that even general religious dialogue created by the symbolism of light is not explicitly aimed at in his work, and if it is worth referring to religion at all, then only strictly on a secular basis. He highlights the intention of welcoming the light by entering the Friend's house as the most attractive scene for him; considers the interior floor plan and the wooden seats important, the seats that resemble temple benches and turn up in some of his Skyspaces, too.

2. The experience of flying Turrell became a passionate pilot and with the help of his father, an aeronautical engineer, by the age of 16 had earned his pilots licence. His visual experiences in the air have, in his own

interpretation, shaped much of his artistic concept in a life's work designed to mimic the extreme situations of perception. Originally a test pilot, Turrell, according to somewhat contradictory documents, sometime between 1959 and his university graduation year 1965, completed an alternative military service as Lockheed's flying pilot in the CIA's Tibetan action. Supporting the uprising in Lhasa from 1959 through years of guerrilla fighting, the intelligence organization rescued Buddhist monks escaping from the Chinese regime by flying them over the Himalayas.

Turrell is reluctant to talk about it, though it was a dangerous assignment as it involved flying over the Soviet Union from a Norwegian base and flying at an altitude of nearly 150,000 feet.

Participation in such a deployment is considered to be voluntary, mainly due to cooperation with the CIA (no matter how humane the political intervention in China's Tibet conflict was in this case). The artistic experience he gained from high-altitude flying, Turrell said, was the distortion of vision under extreme circumstances. He tried to bring to life this experience in his project for Art & Technology that was related to space exploration, and later in many of his works. After more than 500 hours of flying on the western edge of the Painted Desert, Roden Crater was found to be the most appropriate venue for his vision. Located just a day's drive north of the Grand Canyon, the scrub desert is called Painted because of the colors of its pink rocks in contrast to the black quartz sand and its vibrant colored flowers. Turrell often associates his flying experiences as a source of optical illusions and other sensory manipulations in his works.

3. Studies and artistic influences In college James Turrell studied mathematics and cognitive psychology at Pomona College in Claremont, CA. He reportedly turned to the fine arts mainly as a result of the 1963 Marcel Duchamp retrospective exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum and the John Cage performance he saw and heard that same year. Cage's famous 4'33” silence piece deeply impressed the budding art fan. “I didn't really understand it, but I knew it was important." he said later in an interview.54 He was admitted to the University of California, Irvine School of Fine Arts, where he studied art history but dropped out after a year and a half to create his own works full time. He started out as an experimental artist in the genre of minimal art and perceptual environments that focused on the use of light and environment as part of postmodern development in the second half of the sixties.

He collaborated in the Light and Space Movement with West Coast artists Robert Irwin, John McCracken, Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Craig Kauffman, Maria Nordman and others, who often use light and space as their only medium and refer to their works as perceptual environments.

He opened his first studio in the interior of the Mendota Block building in Santa Monica, California, and initially used beams of light to create the illusion of three-dimensional shapes. He showed these works at his first official exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1967. Early collaborations with Sam Francis using colored fumes and gases as artworks can be highlighted.

They made colorful scattered smoke sculptures in the air, a genre close to the Happenings of the late 1950’s - early 1960’s. At that time, Los Angeles and its surrounding areas were home to an extensive, casual group of artists, many of them living and working in Dogtown, a neighborhood between Main Street and Ocean Park Blvd in Santa Monica, which at that time was a rundown neighborhood and which attracted emerging and mid-career artists with 54

Turrell, quoted by Adcock, 1990. p 4

inexpensive studio space. Along with many forgotten artists, later celebrities like John Baldessari and Richard Diebenkorn rented studios there. The Light and Space movement brought together artists working on the renewal of conceptual and minimal art concepts and art forms, as a group that exploited the capabilities of a given place. The special quality of light near the Pacific Ocean informed the classical abstract paintings of Richard Diebenkorn during that period of his career. In the works of other artists renting similar store fronts, the environment commonly appears as an artistic element. This is also evident from an interview with Diebenkorn55, when he talks about the colors of light entering his studio and the appearance of the geometry of doors and windows (large framed glass surfaces with small ventilation windows) in his paintings, or of the parcel divisions he photographed from a helicopter above the city.

Developed in vertical, horizontal and 45 ° graduations alternating large areas of color, the artist continued the series until 1988.

In addition to the specific physical effects, Turrell's experimental work with light is also characterized by the “Golden State spirit” and the use of natural versus artificial light, and perhaps all the popular attractions, too like the nearby public camera obscura, which has been a local feature and welcomes visitors to the oceanfront more than hundred years. (7.)

7.

4. The period in the Mendota Block (1966-1972) “Many artists obsessed with the art studio -cult, that is, they love hoarding art-creating tools and substances. These often receive much more attention than the thing itself that should be created with these tools. Similarly, artists are investing heavily in the design of their studios, often paying more attention to the studio than to the creation that comes out of it. I was exactly like that! In fact, it became the subject of my art, I made studios that later became spaces.56 At first, Turrell created carefully stripped clean spaces in the Mendota Block building, by completely eliminating outside light. He lived in the back, and used two large square rooms facing the street as a studio. In addition to the live & work function, he also used the former hotel building to host private exhibitions, which, thanks to its literal and abstracted sense of self-sufficiency, functioned as a hotbed for exploring non-traditional art forms. It was also ideal for tackling the economic 55 56

Cudlin, Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series, 2012.

Adcock, 1990. p 85

and cultural pressures of the art market. As outsiders rejected by the establishment significantly affected the young Light and Space movement, and Turrell was particularly marked by this. His 1967 exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum was a notable exception to the art world rejection.

Perhaps the museum - not a commercial gallery - context was the only reason that made the artist amenable to the exhibition. Artist and critic Douglas Davis wrote after his visit in 1969 that the 26-year-old Turrell was rejecting any outside influence that might put him in a box, including the term "artist", with all its limitations. After exhibiting at the Pasadena Art Museum, he continued exhibiting his Projection pieces at the Mendota Building, and increasingly cut ties with official art circles. The only simple sentence I could pull out of him - quotes Davis an anonymous gallery employee at the time - was that he didn't want people to see his work in a context where they felt they could take possession of it.57 In fact, the "Projection pieces" were already hard to classify as "for sale": the interior was completely sealed off of light and functioned as a dark chamber, he projected geometric illusions of hidden spheres of light onto the walls and corners.

Due to their precise design, these projections turned into positive shapes as bright, three-dimensional objects floating in space. The upswing with a New York Exhibition began in 1968. After a lucky encounter with Jasper Johns, he got in touch with Leo Castelli, who's 77th Street gallery proved too small for Turrell's projected work. Eventually, with Castelli's mediation, Turrell's introduction in New York occurred in the larger spaces of the Pace Gallery. The monthly check paid to the artist by Pace and a year's contract along with a promised exhibition failed due to the artist's new art form, which could not be considered for sale as fine art. Pace gallery preferred Turrell’s earlier work which frustrated Turrell and led him to pledge to repay his annual stipend and cancel the second exhibition in New York. Instead he chose to present the new work in his, as he called "own alternative" location, in the Mendota Block building in California.

As a refinement of his rejected cycle, Turrell developed a happening-like, two-hour show, in a very hard to define genre on the border of op-art and happening, called Mendota Stoppages. He used the exterior-interior interaction here at first, which made his first site-specific work. (8.) This interaction is the most important element of the later Roden Crater, too, which in terms of content, "only" jumps in quality due to its gigantic size, and by being embedded in the natural environment. The work was a completely choreographed event, using manipulated doors and windows in two separate spaces on the ground floor of the building, Turrell presented the audience a light play composed in ten movements. He created an accurate drawing and sheet music titled Music for Mendota Stoppages, based on static and moving light sequences of the evening city. (9.) On the drawing he depicted the control of the alternating lights in ten consecutive steps so that the actions of repeatedly opening and closing the various apertures, was fixed and repeatable. He went so far with detailing and timing the installation, that the light beam of the bus, which turns every half hour around the corner, "washed" the walls of the two separate spaces at the right moment, flooding them with psychedelic gleams of stripes and squares. The note records which smaller or larger opening he chose to illuminate eg. the cold blue light of the opposite laundry as the most constant source, or the rhythmic changes of the traffic light, and of course the moving light of the cars passing by. For many viewers, he achieved a variety of physical and mental experiences of meditation with the "light chaos" that did not directly affect the intellect verbally, and which for the artist was an exhausting but 57

Douglas Davis, quote by Adcock, 1990. p 87

liberating experience. As so often at this time, he refers to Zen Buddhist practices, meditation and its positive effects.

8.

(9)

5. Art and Technology – Scientific Art or the art of science?

At the end of 1968, like many other artists, Turrell was given the opportunity to participate in the Art and Technology (A&T) program, which was organized in the spirit of collaboration between the science and tech communities, and artists. Turrell and Robert Irwin ran a project of perceptual experiments to observe visual perception under extreme conditions.

The multi-year process of this gigaproject (1967-71)58 was presented through 1970-71, consisting of the work–and other useful knowledge for further research–created by several educational and research institutes, various industrial, military and IT companies, as well as more than seventy artists. The massive exhibition at the LACMA and the American pavilion at the World Expo in Osaka the year before, have been a repository of quite interesting endeavors.

The spirit of the program parallels the technical-scientific upswing of the era: the Apollo '68 moon landing, Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and the rise of pop art through mass media.

Turrell signed up through Robert Irwin, due to his earlier perceptual (cognitive, experiential) psychological studies and his artistic orientation in exploring new forms of visual perception.

In 2015 LACMA organized a remembrance show - “From the Archives: Art and Technology at LACMA, 1967–1971” http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/2640#.XdsD9UVKhE4 58

Irwin was one of the first artists contacted by A&T. To get the project started, Turrell provided him with theory material, first and foremost a relevant bibliography from his previous studies.

Edward Wortz–the scientist Turrell and Irwin coupled with–was a senior psychologist at the Garrett Corporation's Laboratory of Natural Sciences, an aviation and aerospace researcher, who previously worked with NASA's Apollo program on extraterrestrial experience, weightlessness, space travel, and exploration of the Moon. The three men formed an ideal team: Wortz, like Turrell, had a keen interest in Eastern philosophies and Zen, which further cemented their common endeavor. The artists were mainly interested in the new technical discoveries and information that could be used in their field. The scientist was interested in contrary, the research method of the artists, which was shaped playfully along freer associations. Like the artists, those were looking for new forms of perception and extensions of genre constraints through transitions of artistic paradigms (such as the Light and Space movement)–so in science, a new generation of scientists "dripping Zen Buddhism into the test tube"59 –it was the zeitgeist in the late sixties.

A plan was soon up for a parallel experimental process of a Ganzfeld Space, a special place for the study of altered visual perception, and a sound absorption chamber at UCLA. (10.) The Ganzfeld effect was developed for psychological research in order to "silence" the spirit, and in many cases it also sought to observe mystical phenomena. The experience that has been researched since the '30s is based on the brain's hallucination effect in reaction to blurring vision. In the Ganzfeld-space, one could observe the work of the human psyche under the influence of total sound insulation, in a 360° panoramic impulse-free space with perfectly homogeneous lighting designed by the artists. Their work was aimed at engaging the experiment subject with interviews to observe the subject's own attention. The experiment subjects under a perfectly homogeneous blur, and the monotone sound effect of white noise or other sound tests, lost their orientation and had the opportunity to observe their own perception from an 'outside' position. In a space of homogeneous light and sound, after a while the altered perception is limited to internal stimuli with directed external impulses, and the vibrations of the nervous system, the signals from the subconscious mind can be observed. These signals can be also considered as tools of metacommunication. While one sees the nothing itself with their eyes open, slowly begins to see images of the brain forming on the retina. This creates a sharpened state of attention that can make the brain fit for non-traditional contact, such as collecting images transmitted through (with) collective concentration. Ganzfeld-spaces are also used for experiments similar to this one, in the field of parapsychology.

59

Turrell, The Wolfsburg Project, 2010. p125

10.

These elements appear again and again in Turrell’s later works, sometimes by name. (11.)

11.

The subject of the experiment thus became an art observer; the much-repeated slogan: You are looking at you're looking is a basic aspect of the above study. For most of Turrell's work, he uses this silencing effect to put perception in the heart of his piece.

After a year of hard work, the research of the sharpened attention of the quieted mind ended for Turrell. In addition to deteriorating his relationship with Robert Irwin (for reasons not disclosed), Turrell got disenchanted with the results and the objectivity of their experiments. His comments on his resignation in fragments from a report published by A&T a year later, which has also served as a catalog for the exhibition: I don't know that anything really startling came out of the whole thing .... I sometimes feel I've found some things out, but they don't apply to anyone else unless they come to them in the same way ....

If either art or technology becomes a religion, maybe this stuff will start getting more exciting.

There's got to be an Art and Technology Christ ....

We're going to have to work through this time of ego, and of separating artists from all those around them .... We're very involved in our roles as individuals right now. The thing that happens with technology, or [something like] the Manhattan Project ... in which people put their energies into a cause where they have to forget themselves .... People are afraid to dissolve themselves into any sort of human cosmic consciousness .... We're standing next to a swimming pool a little bit frightened about jumping in. But everyone's going to get pushed in, or jump in finally. It doesn't make any difference which. There are forces which are about to push us in.

All of this is very Pavlovian. You're not really asking much of the person, or yourself. And all you can watch are the surface responses. People were often going through a dance with you ....

Then [the project] began to change, and move into sensory interaction, where the senses influence one another. And then into alpha conditioning, which is sort of taking a Pavlovian approach into spirituality. It has no end ....

Our culture is going through a strange time—looking at Eastern thought—their work with meditation, their sense of the body and mind and soul. We're approaching it through psychology.

We're very physical. When we want to go into the universe, we can't look at a rock, like the Japanese. We have to actually go to the moon. We're so literal. We totally ignore the Eastern way. There are actually meditative sciences, or sciences of the soul. We have devices, sensors, alpha conditioning machines. The machines are just manifested thought. Technology isn't anything outside us .... We just go about it very clumsily and very wastefully.60 An interesting addition that illustrates Turrell's mindset is a story he partly mentions above, one of the lessons of his Osaka journey after leaving A&T. In 1970, he traveled to Japan for the planned but never realized work in the American pavilion at the World Expo. Some of the stones from the moon brought by Apollo's crew were on display as well, which the Japanese crowds watched with fantastic enthusiasm in packed queues. A year later, the moonstones were exhibited in Los Angeles too, with little interest. In Turrell's interpretation, the story receives symbolic acoustics: he sees the manifestation of the gap between Western and Eastern cultures in the way that "the Japanese people, opposed to Westerners—through their orientation based on meditation and inner attention—were able to imagine themselves in the space of the universe looking at a rock, that was enough for them to grasp the sublime of our cosmic existence.”

A&T eventually came to be a very successful exhibition, though there were critical voices calling it a collection of hollow, sad technological "surprises" cleansed from art. Many artists were able to accomplish work that could not have been created on their own due to the lack of materials and tools, and the program likely contributed to the development of new art mediums, from kinetic sculptures to video, from industrial minimalism to digital data visualization. Although one of the criticisms is that the most relevant statement may be that the collaborations between artists and scientists have often resulted in "magnified and mechanized, automated mirages", but the collaborative work of Turrell, Irwin, and Wortz did indeed tapped on the grey zone, the 60

A Report on the Art and Technology Program, 1971. p 140

obscure realm between art and science. In the words of Jane Livingstone, their contact person with Garrett, "the branches of their project go far beyond the direct program of A&T".

There is an interesting theoretical parallel to the work of Dan Flavin, an East Coast participant in the program. His neon work Monument to Tatlin refers to the hero of Constructivism, who proclaimed a productivist creative practice, subordinated exclusively to daily goals, engaged in the practical, actual construction of the New World. Indeed, Tatlin and Rodchenko believed in a new world of art-as-science, and Kassák tried to believe it, too, when he wanted to embody a new way of life rather than a new aesthetic with his Image Architecture. The classical avant-garde spirituality is felt in some of Turrell's statements when he closely echoes Kassák, who in 1922, in the Foreword to the Book of New Artists, said, "And there is no more separate society, and no more separate art.”61 There's no room here to explore the parallels between the Classical Avant-garde and the European and American art of neo-avant-garde emerged in the late 1960s. But it is important to note that there are points of connection, presumably concerned with modern social systems, especially those working with a sense of boundlessness such as the great realms of Soviet Russia in the first half of the century, the United States after the war, and today in China's economic, social expansion, through the accumulation of energies, and the crosstalk of technology and art.

“While it is a common fallacy to believe that no matter how a scientific idea is stated, it retains the same intent, whereas no word can be changed in a poem. Anyone who knows the language of mathematics is aware that a theoretical physicist or chemist is looking for the same simplicity, beauty, harmony, precision and elegance in his theory as the poet writes. Both the theoretician and the poet strive to explore the meaning and content of the text by exploring the properties of the descriptive language.”62

6. Skyspace (the Celestial Spaces) The most important element of James Turrell's oeuvre is the "eye" open to the ceiling, as a new tool to induce trance. He first cut out a piece of the ceiling in 1973 at the Live Oak Quaker Community House in Houston. This was the prayer house of his childhood, in his family’s religious community, where, beyond the rim of the thinned ceiling, he reached out to the infinite sky. Looking at the sky through the opening cut into the ceiling, the beholder actually faces himor herself exclusively. Their trance is inspired by the solitude of the empty, circular space, the natural light penetrating the opening and the sneaky artificial light show - from sources hidden somewhere along the rim, inside - installed by the artist to boost the effect. According to Turrell, this is also the place for observing the experience of the individual from some outside point, on the blurred border of vision and imagination: “You are looking at you're looking”.

Today, there are at least 36 Skyspaces in the world, including the United States, Ireland, Israel, Germany, several states in South America, and Japan. Rooms painted in neutral color, usually 61

Lóránd Hegyi: in: Zoltán Fráter and András Petőcz (edit.): Kassák Lajos Emlékkönyv (Scrapbook), 1988. p85–90 62 Robert S. Root-Bernstein, quoted by Adcock, 1990, p82

in shades of gray, show light play manipulated by LED lighting at sunset and dawn. The natural light entering the opening mixes with artificial colors during the day, changing the perception through the contrast between the quality and depth of the (cloudless) sky and the material of the interior. It is interesting to mention the complexity of the interpretations of the Turrellian skyspace genre, in a study Valerie Gonzalez compares Turrell's Jerusalem Skyspace (12.) with a dome room at the Alhambra in Granada (Comares Hall) (13.) The student of architecture puts forward her thesis about coincidences within the aggregations of secular and religious, Eastern and Western worlds, in matter of fact, she binds it with the common in perceptions defined by geometry as a medium in the compared works.63 The site-specific work called Skyspace is also the basis for Roden Crater, Turrell’s magnum opus in the genre of land art, that is not only at the first glance shows similarities with the Gödör (The Pit) left by Veszelszky on the Óbuda hillside.

12.

63

Gonzalez, The Comares Hall in the Alhambra;... 2003.

13.

7. The Roden Crater

14.

In the 1970s, Turrell joined the trend of using earth, turning the material of the landscape into his artistic medium. In order to develop his light works embedded in the landscape, he envisioned an extinct volcanic crater (14.) as a piece of art. With its observatories built over three decades, he created one of the most ambitious land art concepts. The Roden Crater, towering over a piece of land in the Arizona Desert, had been acquired with the help of the DIA Foundation, one of the main contributors to the great artistic transformations of the time. Reminiscent of prehistoric cult places, his land art piece designed to model the ancient Indian and Babylonian observatories, built in the volcanic horn - and using other openings focused on various astronomical events, solstices, eclipses of the sun and moon - creates a direct connection between the deep skies and the observer / beholder / spectator (?). He created the work in the spirit of "evoking a sense of geological time," the intention of placing man in cosmic space. It is nothing more than the "search for divine light" as he put it in a lecture.64 The structure is made up of more than 1,000 feet (300 m) of tunnel and 7 observation chambers built beneath the surface of the crater. The main location, the "Crater's Eye" is a spacious chamber 38 feet deep below the surface of the funnel bottom, with a 36 feet high ceiling. The Skyspaces under the classic vaults offer views from different angles and depths. One of these spaces acts as a camera obscura, giving a projected image of the moon and sun to a stone slab, sitting on dark grey quartz sand in the middle of the space. Another chamber only captures the light of old stars (billions of years old). The Roden Crater is ideally located, being completely free of light pollution. At the top of the crater, the enormous concave surface beneath the flange is an open 64

Hogrefe, Turrell’s lecture at Cooper Union, 2000.

observatory, from which the spectator can observe the dome of the sky “up close”. It accommodates 14 visitors at a time, with 6 day and 8 night units, furnished with Turrell-designed furniture. There are several types of light of different ages: from the northern side, the light of distant stars, which emit billions of years old light and project it almost palpably on the surface; elsewhere we can see the "young" light of the sun, that is only about 8 and a half minutes old. In his lecture on Roden, Turrell talked about the "artist's megalomania" almost in ecstasy. "You make a plan on paper, and you've almost unobtrusively moved 610,000 cubic meters of land to get it in shape while barely changing anything!" In a report a few years ago Vanity Fair wrote about Turrell as an artist who has almost pushed the DIA Foundation to the brink of bankruptcy, and actually he himself was reluctant to give accurate figures for the cost of his project. It is currently estimated at about $ 22 million.

After the project–originally sponsored by a Guggenheim Foundation and the DIA–was bankrupted in the 1980s, Turrell had to look out for new supporters. (The DIA has since restored its operations and re-funded the work, which only opened in 2013.) The work was later sponsored by Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, an Italian art collector and the MacArthur Foundation, recently became supervised by the Flagstaff based headquarters of Skystone Foundation created by the Lannan Foundation of Santa Fe. According to Turrell, "it may have worked out well" that not enough money was immediately available for construction, so he could continue to elaborate the final plan. Nor did he count on Arizona's building permit policies, that the local committee had called attention to a few years later in the late '90s, to which Turrell's answer was that it wasn't a building, but a piece of art. Architects believe it is one of the tallest structures in the state (600 feet - 180 meters), but Turrell later succeeded in arguing that Roden Crater, as the equivalent of a navajo "kiva" (Indian ritual building), due to its religious, ceremonial function would be exempt from taxes. In the same year, a new local law was passed by the Coconino county Housing Department, which exempted Land Art as a new building type.

Experts find Turrell’s classification as an architect or sculptor controversial; an article directs his past, studies and artistic performance–moving at the crossroads of light, architecture and mysticism–all into one set, into the field of aviation, which–according to this article–is the starting point and the unifier of his activities. Speaking of the sky as his "big studio", Turrell cites the example of what he experienced in flight about the difficulties of perception. The feeling of disorientation is especially experienced in flight, hence he defines his work as nothing more than the transfer of what has been experienced in such extreme circumstances to the field of architecture and the fine arts. He calls his art Topological Architecture, which does not mean that it doesn't not have to deal with the form, the closure of the space, but he wants to achieve it in the simplest way, embedded in nature, with the help of the intermediate shaper, which is light itself.65 I’ve read, ”Turrell says,“ that we live in an age of total distance from God. And indeed, in the age of scientific rationalism, we do not say of light that it's God, but at the same time the experience of light is a phenomenon that somehow leaves no rest. There is something in the light that 65

Beyst, 2007.

science cannot fully reveal or reduce.”66 Turrell himself provided the clue to one of the forerunners of his work in an interview, referring to a 5,000-year-old burial structure called Maes Howe in the land of the artist’s ancestors in Scotland. (15.) The Maes Howe, like many other Neolithic rock tombs around the world, is an artificial hill built of earth and stones that hides a tomb under its vault. The hills, built primarily as tombstones, were sometimes built just to mark an event or place. The artist also lists other sites, architectural monuments of different eras (Borobudur, Angkor Wat, Pagan, Machu Picchu, the Egyptian and Mayan pyramids, Herodium, Old Sarum, Newgrange), which he respects as precursors and which influenced his thinking, and coincide with the basic idea of the Roden Crater as a cult place.

15.

8. A Critique of Roden Crater Turrell erected a public memento, a monument, at the site of his contemplation. The gigantic project, which has been built over decades and uses the chimney of the volcano as observation openings adapted to cosmic events, both in terms of its material scale and the time of its realization, stems from a very exciting basic idea for the present dissertation. How did the “spirit of the place” work here? But according to an expert eyewitness, the work does not “fly".67 During construction, the land-art piece lost its original resultant, Turrell created a conformist site that was wasteful to the idea at the cost of gigantic material handling with disproportionately large technical equipment. The design of the space is not negligible, i.e. the architectural aspect of the solutions, which distorts the work in the light of the amount of energy invested and the lack of coherence of the aesthetic content detectable in the small details. One example of aesthetic distortion in the use of materials: the light-shadow effects appearing on the marble surface, which could also be presented on a delicate cladding, instead Turrell delivered an enormous 66

quoted by Tillmann, Turrell and the sublime.. 2009. from a conversation with the architect and interdisciplinary artist Péter Janesch, who is personally familiar with the work.

67

block under the incident light, which inflates rather than enriches the artistic quality of the place-as-art. The Roden Crater is an experimental work rooted in the perceptual environment movement, but complemented by the element of happening, a performance that involves time (with a suggested visit time of one day), and surrounded by Turrell’s now-formed legend, deviated from the original blow. The voice dreamed up by the artist, and still clearly sounding at Mendota Stoppages, seemed to have become echoed, ghostly. Making my point I’m relying on the Projected Objects I first saw at the Kiazma Museum in Helsinki, then the Meeting at PS1 in New York and at SMoCA in Phoenix, AZ, the skyspace works I personally saw on site, written documents, and personal communications. It seems that Turrell at first was actually acting in a new genre, then eventually became the creator of a large-format spectacular show, which may be based on the use of new methods of art developed in the 1970’s, but essentially–by academicizing them–it is the apotheosis of pop art. The ideological content dissolves and the salvation by money and the means, an idea strongly rejected by the young Turrell triumphs. The expectation of compatibility with mass culture may generally apply to American art, it can also be the starting point; however, knowing several examples that are very close in time and space, the Turrellian journey cannot be described merely as a general product of American spirituality, the American genius loci, as the fulfiller of Taine's milieu theory.

A good example of this is Donald Judd, who was also supported by the DIA Foundation and worked in the Marfa area of Texas from the 1970s to the early 1990s. Judd, with a subtle artistic sense, created a system that oscillates on the border of environment and land art, which turned buildings with different functions and their surroundings into “works” with much less effort, perhaps yet more efficiently. (16.) The buildings built on the ranches, designed by Judd, were finished houses or remodeled urban and former military buildings, all furnished with furniture also designed by him, each corner from the fireplace to the window frame, from the sink to the front door are influenced by subtle aesthetic sensitivity. (17.) In addition to the works of art placed in the landscape (18.), a system of several separate units designed as residential house, library, architectural studio, community space presenting the art of Judd and others, both individually and collectively expresses the artist’s truly new relationship to the environment, building artistic expression and reception. One of the main figures of the minimalist movement who contrasts industrial form-making with the touch of the artist, Donald Judd, who stripped the artistic “object” to the notion of a demarcated three-dimensional space by breaking down composition and individual features68. Almost any of his work radiates the light of the treasure, called by Turrell common cosmic consciousness at a young age, tapped from the energy reservoir of the mentioned Jungian archetypes, which is a hallmark of the aesthetic quality preserved and faithfully conveyed by the artist.69 In his manifesto Specific Object in 1964, Don Judd registers his thoughts on objects, as opposed to the previous categories of works of art, pointing to their change.

69 My attempt to conquer the Roden Crater.

As an artist of the Pace Wildenstein Gallery in New York, Turrell communicates with the outside world through the gallery staff, so in 2010, several months before my trip to Arizona, I wrote a letter about the purpose of my planned trip: visiting the crater and possibly interviewing the artist for my doctoral dissertation. The response rejected the encounter, referring to the unfinished state of the work and promised to return to it at a later date. Of course I couldn’t stand, and while visiting Arizona, I approached one of the city’s cultural committee members in Phoenix, who, as a gallery owner is well acquainted with 68

16.

17.

18.

the artist’s relationship with the outside world. He informed me that I did not have much chance of a personal meeting: Turrell is reluctant to meet people who do not want to improve his financial situation–he said– he doesn't respond to theoretical dialogue with strangers, to simple artistic, professional interests.

Of course, I visited the volcano on the edge of the Painted Desert, the highway that leads there a mile from the foot of the mountain was closed with a serious iron fence, so I didn’t risk getting in (Arizona, like the Southwestern United States in general, has a tradition wild style for the protection of private property, even with the use of firearms). Instead of illegal intrusion, I took a deep look at the environmental impressions around the mountain. Impressed by the lunar landscape of many qualities, including black and gray quartz sand, the spherical shape yellow-flowered desert shrub, the red grass (!), the fantastic scenery of the volcanic rocks under the huge dome of sky. The Heideggerian breeze of “thrownness to the world” one can feel on own skin here, the infinity of the landscape, the distance of the civilized world that throws you almost to the solitude of an alien planet.Two years later, unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to return, so as a result I had to accept the lack of results for the time being, which I do not consider a failure, as I was able to get an approximately accurate picture of the work from the available documents - and from the communications of luckier, visiting acquaintances. The only thing I regret is the missing interview and the failed opportunity to show Veszelszky’s work to Turrell.

My places As a painter, I work primarily in the genre of panel painting, which is not specifically a site-specific genre. Nevertheless, the places that surrounded me in the time of creation, first unconsciously and later consciously became participants in my work; they evolved from an invisible director to a visible character. Therefore, today I also recognize “site-specific art” in the form of the appearance of the classical panel painting, and I apply this definition in my work. In my own experience and my practice of painting–which I have carried out in many places over the last twenty-five years–the spirituality of a given place, or at least something that becomes a characteristic, that can be described by metaphors–in my case pictorial metaphors–in the works born in the longer or shorter time spent there, has an elementary effect. Later, this effect also appears in the yield transported to the new environment after the relocation, through the permanent and automatic processing that acts as an internal mirror of the content. Many times even prosaic reasons rearrange artworks, and through artworks, artistic destinies (e.g. light conditions, climate). Added to this is the also not very conspicuous additive, which leaves an utter but invisible imprint on the works of the given environment and the lifetimes lived in the given environment, which can be felt, but can hardly be described. Must see. A good artwork brings us this, it evokes a spirit–the spirit of the place, too.

In my urban landscape-series I emphasized the role of light with expressive painting–according to the tradition of twentieth-century abstract painting, I found the relationship of things to each other in the formulation of pictorial structures arising from nature: content lives in everyday spectacle. The ever-simplifying “buildings” in the paintings were actually transformed into rhythms, musical systems created by painterly methods. Every thing, every place vibrates at some wavelength. By selecting the right detail and using the right tool or material, the given compositions and image clippings preserve the character and visually acceptable complexity of the given place: they can be set to emulate, therefore resonate at the frequency of the place.

I painted the visualization of the seemingly insignificant details of the public space–the effect of the Genius Loci–by observing and displaying the homeliness or alienation of the given place outlined by light. This influence or character determined the physical and then the spiritual environment, the architecture, and all genres of arts, including the totality of man-made things, which is a kind of interpretation of the world and also a basic condition for spiritual survival. In the language of existentialist philosophy: man is the being “whose existence is about this being itself”. In my series, I have accordingly sought to reflect on my current situation, the direct over to the universal.

1. My previous series in terms of the place My fur series back in the very beginning–as a kind of ancient act–played with the idea of camouflage, covering and concealing, the notion of substituting the place by hiding (folding) it with an object. The series wove a picture from Maya’s veil drawn in front of the face of the world.

These were paintings distilled from the pictorial memory of the animal fur patterns used as atavistic protectors and soul guards, later a series of images stemmed and repeated the

arabesques of carpets, in which the surface replaced the empty space with man-made motifs.

The industrial interiors (my next series I started from 2002) pulled down these veils, and I was confronted with nothing in my new works. Although I have been consciously dealing with the intellectual resources carried by places only since the interiors, my series has been about obscuring or exposing it even before, the place showed in everything I did, or a kind of definition of place in its own natural and metaphysical reality. Viewed from the perspective of several years, all my pictorial work so far can be woven around the concept of location–as if it were a theme or terrain to try to explore again and again–which envelops and imbues my world of thought and feeling associated with painting and life through universal art in general. We are said to do the same thing all our lives, to paint a single picture over and over again, to have a dialogue with ourselves that monologues within us. I got this “topic”, or it probably got me, if I may put it so simply.

2. Industrial interiors After facing nothing, my captures of industrial interiors conceived in the buzzing space of an empty warehouse building, ‘behind Maya’s veil’ and started slowly filling its walls. The work of several years led through the depiction of the interior, to its evocation, to the formulation of its atmosphere on transformed, elemental levels, to the formation of a new, richer pictorial language. The white walls and columns became sites of psychedelic visions expressed in colors and shapes. On the plane of the concrete floor, the strands of incident sunlight drew out the elongated shapes of the windows, the silence of the steps of dim corridors turned into a concert, the monochrome of the whitewashed wall turned into a color-storm. The lonely, concentrated time spent in the industrial space made the duality of movement and immobility a basic experience. To express this experience plastically: a clearing in the scorching, sultry summer forest is seemingly motionless, but the afternoon spent there reveals its inner movement, the zigzagging of insects, the vibration of the blades of grass, the wobbling of the branches and the play of light, the slow passage of shadow through the space. Similarly, though not in the organic rhythm of nature, but in a different naturalness, this interior also moved. Both the natural environment and man-made are places.

The story of the seemingly motionless life of the empty industrial space and its colonnade, depending on the length and intensity of one's presence, will begin to play out in the realm of human imagination, and this in itself will evoke movement. When painting, I unleashed the layered information inherent in the spectacle, the spirit of the place–I have articulated the life of industrial interiors into images of my personal story.70 This movement later took on a role in the inner life of the paintings. By using the visual elements around me, incorporating composition and many other circumstances of this particular atmosphere, storing in a vibration-based imagetype something that the environment has also suggested or facilitated: which I could seize from the spirituality by filtering through its pure visuality. The image was created by acquiring and 70

„Our understanding of nature can help us to understand the place, as man builds from nature: he further shapes it, complements it, or symbolizes it with his work, as–says Norberg-Schulz–just as we use elements to interpret our natural environment, we use the same to shape our artificial environment. These elements are the things, order, character, light, and time, which appear in the relationship between the natural and the built environment.” quoted by Simon, 2000.

then using a language - that is, by conveying a unique intellectual form built along the structures of the given language. The Sunset-series portrayed the experiences of the different nature, mentioned above–in vividly colorful and more sophisticated, warm versions. The orange-red blocks of sunlight migrating on the lime-white and concrete-gray surfaces of the columnar space, its disintegrating and melting squares realized the pictorial aspects of a secondary nature by dividing the architectural space upon simple light-shadow relations. (19.)

19.

3. The factory When the possibility of space as an independent intellectual and then a visual source of impulse first arose in me in the early 2000s, I rented a studio in one of the factory and warehouse buildings in the outskirts of Budapest. The building was newly rehabilitated and I was the first tenant, which meant painting completely alone for long hours every day, for weeks, months, and later for nearly three years in this completely stripped-down, hundred-year-old industrial space lined with colonnades and huge halls. This loneliness, the gaping silence of the chilled workplace, was awesome and exciting at the same time, where I thought the sounds of the ‘work brigade’ of the past were still heard between the whitewashed walls, it echoed on the cold artificial stone cladding, on the sheer concrete. In the silently suspended system of heavy iron traverses, the shadows of the lives and sufferings of the twentieth century, the souls of the workers reflected in the cool light gliding on the tiles, were almost visible, the passing figures here and there as they made their turns following the marked routes for forklifts. The memory of

the walls, a tactile, audible, visible past surrounded me here, although the new age tried to erase it with white wall paint, new glass, and lots of concrete. Industrial space as a studio is the neutral space, almost the non-lieu, the faceless space of the non-place (Marc Augé); but still not chaos, rather a cosmos of function. When designing an industrial building, there is not much room for aesthetics, only the perfect engineering implementation of the operation. In the industrial space, I am far from everything that can be connected to life: home, community space, in a word, all sorts of environments that I have ever identified with. From a technical point of view, however, the spacious, light-saturated, high-ceilinged space surrounded by white walls is an ideal studio. High doors, huge windows, concrete floors, sink in the hallway or the corner of the space--perspicuity and impulse-free environment does help painting. The place was also separated in that I had to travel to be in it. The warehouses were usually built on the outskirts of the cities, where the factories were located, so it took an average of an hour to get to the studio, the place of work. This journey, with its regular, monotonous repetition, by learning its route, flies? me on the working principle of the change of consciousness towards a place that is outside of any other environmental experience of my everyday life; it prepares, at the same time transports me to a state, which with the activity, the painting also tries to find new places outside the experiences of everyday life.

Details from a report to my mentor at that time: Summer 2002 - February 2003 I spent the beginning of the summer in Pécs, in excellent conditions, in a bright, north-facing room of an industrial building. Such impulse-free places have always been the most suitable studios for me - the blank virginity of the space inspires me to focus on the image that unfolds within me. (...)

The instrument itself is the space, work is regular, like an endless line of mantras; images are born and not their individual content, but their totality, their succession gives meaning, which can also be non-meaning. (...)

The painter can change his place, get into a variety of situations that affect his work, and shows in many ways on his paintings. Different things are born in a 2000 sqft space than in a 200sqft.

The size of the space - the airspace - moves into the atmosphere of the image, filling or extracting the air. (...)

After a series of different types of images, I thought that a particularly personal image should be developed, unfolded, that the place “where I am right now” suggests a kind of nostalgia, and this should be captured.

Here again, life intervened and I had to leave the rent. After not much searching, I found my current studio in an industrial building, which will also be available to me - I hope for a longer term.

After not much searching, I found my current studio, which is also in an industrial building - and will be available to me, I hope in the longer term.

The vast, almost dizzying spatial experience captured me from the first moment. It made my aspirations clearly transparent - I had a chance to breathe (got relieved). I immediately started making sketches of the still empty, unoccupied spaces and decided to paint a series based on them.

I finally had the pictorial thematic “framework” in which I could process an image type using existing technical experience (process). This type of image was realized by the play of patches drawn by the incident sunlight in space, with the help of the template, mask, the obscuration.

The obscured part of the canvas, which remained white, referred to the dazzling white sunlight in some pictures, so it became logical to use very strong, loud colors playing with complementary color-pairs while depicting the otherwise gray, whitewashed walls. The architectural element, the fact that the pictures show concrete interiors, was new; the perspective and the self- and cast-shadows gave a psychedelic image of an interior in the classical sense. At other times, the base was colored and masked from the next layers. Using an airbrush was also a new process, which I used as an excellent contrast, for a space-sensing (enhancing the sense of space?) effect when combined with wilder, more pasty surfaces.

The space of a silent, dead space came to life through lights and colors, and in this I found a new artistic self.

2-14-2003 So, the spirit of the place touched me on the first day and it didn’t leave me alone while I was there, and beyond––the thought seeped into my work. The fact that all what surrounds us in space, is more than material reality slowly permeated everything, that in this new reality “the word of times” can be heard, and through it we can connect with the spirit of the lived / experienced environment.

Another text, which was written shortly afterwards, is a personal letter to Ernő Tolvaly, my supervisor at the time, linked to one of my semester doctoral reports, and which also expresses an approach to a topic that had already arisen at the time. It records the legitimacy of expression / the manifestation in painting and my thoughts related to the place: The spirit world, if you like the invisible, was captured by all ages, and it tried to record the captured one way or another, to pass on the most important of it. Changes in the process, attitudes, expansion and simplification of methods did not change anything about the basic thing: the subject it wanted to document. To show the invisible––the goal is always this, and to do this always by observing and showing something visible!

The avant-garde wrote itself in history with a sentimental or "spiral, dialectical" attitude—its strong / beefy traces progressing, enchanting the future as a minefield (no future)—returning to itself or around its own ovum in the visual-cultural-historical space of human civilization. Then there, as if waking up from a coma, remembering only the beginnings - it started from the stove walked through the ladder again, and keeping pace with industrial development, it got very quickly “beyond (even) the figure of representation”. The neo-avant-garde and then the Punk one of the most fashionable iconoclasts of our time since then - a business of lifestyle really -

also came to the surface in the late sixties and seventies with this strictly left-wing philosophy of life / art psychology. (I’m referring to Hungary) To tempt the simplest, to charge elemental force from the udder of urbanism, to proclaim absolute communication with the gesture of omnipotence - to laugh at death and then to die in the name of truth / in the heat of injustice.

Then, as if we were replaying everything again, the age of remixes is reliving the full evolution: first the epigones, now the clones filling the stage, yet here we still assume a consistency - but there is no longer a consistency. There are multi-layered, multi-directional consistencies that ignore each other's intellectual content and purpose, and interact only by interest, and the vast majority of which are unfortunately conceived in the magical bondage of false, blinded superstitions and exist in perseverance by deception.

Once everything is questioned, Nothing remains. In painting, since Ad Reinhardt, the use has been the meaning, the carrier of information. His manifesto “Art as Art” formulates a new place of meaning, not only in painting, but also through the use of tools for painting, of the medium that was not lost, only transformed.71 Concept and minimal art, does not exterminate, but renews painting.

In painting, there were, there are traces of this transformation, of a physical, material nature. In the case of the existence of doubt as a factor, of its displayed, materialized idea of the efforts made in the hope of getting from somewhere to somewhere else, these are the telltale traces of the small, barely perceptible signs that cover everything - or are just bleeding like open wounds.

4-5-2005 Budapest It is interesting to note that Tolvaly, with his particular attention, highlighted the item I formulated as Nothing and encouraged its picturesque unfolding. Perhaps this also helped to form the image entitled Antispace, which was born shortly afterwards in Pécs, and which I presented as my work (Masterpiece 20.) at the end of my doctoral studies.

71

Reinhard,‘Art as Art’. in: Art in Theory 1900-1990. 1992. p 806–809 https://theoria.art-zoo.com/art-as-art-ad-reinhardt/

20.

4. The Masterpiece Presented as a Masterpiece72, Antispace belongs more closely to a family of four paintings from 2005. To provide a wider scope, I supplement the analysis of the Masterpiece along with a brief description of this family.

Strung in their succession, I painted a depreciating, decomposing, and then reborn system within the “industrial spaces” series, and the works underwent a major transformation in the process from technical aspects as well. Regarding the chronology, the order is as follows; the first two images are identical in heavy color saturation and development technique.

Electric Fire (65×79“) was made in transparent emulsion with light pastel on a dark base/background of pigment mixed in transparent acrylic, using some blue and greens as a counterpoint to the warm colors–red, alizarin (krapplack) and yellows, oranges. A color saturated image effect that evokes natural space. A space I felt within was formed on the canvas along structures likely to columns and a distant "exit or escape" area that is the brightest in the picture and also identical to a long-developed composition auxiliary point. When I got to a dim state, I realized I had a hidden image, not just in my head, but already a sketch on my computer. The colonnade of the industrial hall, an almost central perspective, a sketch traveled in time and the semi-finished painting photographed and loaded into a computer–are one and the same. I finished the painting based on the composition that placed these on top of each other floated with careful adjustment. I have been developing this method for years (I have a few pages in my Vienna exhibition catalog that illustrate this process), but its application is not automatic. After all, this is a method of self-correction, that isn’t important because of the “technical idea”, but the description of the dimensions of equipment use and the pictorial presence of the time factor that applies to me.

The Inner Sea (54,5×74,5") is an airbrush-developed monochrome image, based almost exclusively on different shades of cobalt green, ranging from a dark background to dark poison green to cold-glowing greens that emit almost neon light. The image is a layer montage (superimposed images), using a cardboard relief of an architectural model and an interior photo I made, highlighted from the source of the series mentioned above. My concept, as with several 72

In April 2014, before the Doctoral Council of the Hungarian Univ. of Fine Arts

other pieces in my series, was to represent a fictitious “place”. The fictional place here also became doubly interesting to me because the relief was exhibited as a blueprint for a future outdoor spectacle designed by Zaha Hadid and the light reflections of the plexiglass box it was installed in, that appear as a dominant image-forming element in my painting–so, the interior blends with the exterior and a perfect non-site73 is realized. My dominant technique creating the piece was the airbrush, as the “ultimate” quality in the gesture driven system of application technique–in the physical sense. The perfectly homogeneous, scattered surface acquires personal character by the way of obscuration, only the drawing (design) evoked by the template can be called a gesture. I used this for the most part in the Inner Sea picture.

Demolition and Antispace articulate in a new way, rather through montage–the fragmented internal order of the image–and a more differentiated use of the pictorial toolbox. Demolition (54,5×74") is an attempt to induce communication between the subject and the texture of an image. In the picture, a huge building is partly demolished by machines, viewed still from inside, but the painted structure itself is eroded, and there the white priming–(the) nothing emerges.

The montage character appears in the classically subtle, Constable-like solution of peeking clouds through the crushed walls in the background; the sky, which is almost nothing, is just a quote, and this quote relates to the coarser, heavy structured, almost abstract-expressionist surfaces in its gestures. Most of all, the deconstructivist nature of the composition does the montaging by the multi-directional sight and the primary view of the image–the demolition of the building, and the second, hidden under the image seen from the demolished building–the image of a car just exiting a tunnel.

I named the Masterpiece Antispace. It is the largest piece in the series, a 95×126” canvas, painted with pigment in transparent matte acrylic, the third in the line of the mini-series that is unfolding the basic image type that summarizes my program of the painterly use of architectural elements, implemented in a lyrical form.

The two versions preceding the image: (21, 22)

21.

73

22.

Robert Smithson the Land Art artist defined the “non-site” as the final form of the site-specific genre he developed of moving, relocating space, the material of the “other” place moved into the art gallery (heaps of soil, stones etc.). In my case, this is created within a picture, by floating the negative and positive space (interior, exterior) into each other. As I exhibit the painting, the “non-site” - and the “space” already used by someone else somewhere, in some way, grafted into my image - gets not only to a “non-place,” but takes the “non-trip” also coined by Smithson, while travels its path towards its imagined new identity.

Antispace's reference is a pictorial metaphor that injects the perception of time into the representation of space to an unscientific position [that is] closer to philosophy, yet mostly poetic. Sunlight penetrates the space and dazzles you. I may not see the walls and the floor because the motion (my movement and the slow progress of the sun) and the contrast blurs, deflects geometry and perspective, the light burns into my eyes, and suddenly the interior is no longer the space of the image. the walls become translucent, and I find myself in the infinity of space. In the dark background of the image, even darker, matte surfaces appear in segments--negative construction elements–and the glowing colors flash to us from within these two dark surfaces. It's not clear whether there is light or dark. As many others, Antispace was also created by overlaying several images. This binocularity, the multi-faceted oneness, was interesting to me. A method modeled on the analogy of the two eyes of man–human eyes located at a certain distance from each other and in constant motion relative to the observed object (viewing space) never record facts: the position of our point of view is practically unreconstructable in space. The common dock (source, receptor) for our eyes, its resultant in the brain–exists in negative space. Given two images that flip and project on each other at the same time. In 3D, the point or spot where it is formed can be spotted, but in reality it is only a virtual place–the chemical process is not related to the concept of space in the strict sense.

Here, Time also comes into play, because the impulse must reach its destination, and this distance certainly takes time. By displaying the two phases of this path, time enters the chemical (spiritual) space of the image. A friend of mine said my image “is like life is passing by and we don’t notice it”. It was touching to me because the vision of the double beams of light, which disappear separately in two perspectives—evoking a double moment, alluding to the pictorial appearance of the aforementioned time factor—gives me a similar, rather romantic feeling.

5. Máglya After a few years, my circumstances changed and the painting practice in industrial warehouses came to an end: I moved into a loft, an art studio equipped flat in the apartment building designed especially for artists. The fundamental difference between these two creative spaces is the level of isolation. The space of work and life is still separated in the loft, but the distance is much smaller–both physically and metaphysically–from the known, inhabited world. You could say it’s just inside of it, but endowed with a special feature. Nor can I ignore the historical, sociological aspect, since the notion of the “art studio” appears to be a strange, magical place in the public eye: so it is still within the known world, and not outside it as an improperly used industrial space. As soon as I got accommodated in this definitely more comfortable position, my focus was entirely on the environment around me. I continued to develop the visual language and image types I've dealt with in the industrial studio, the architectural structure surrounding me defined my work, and I built my series from its elements. Thus, it was not surprising that I immediately started to focus on the vicinity of the studio building, this socialist-realist-style housing project in Angyalföld, a traditionally blue collar neighborhood in Budapest, which was built in the nineteen fifties–and drew raw content for my new pictures from it. The architecture of the site surrounded me here, expressed in a unified style–an environment built with massive use of material, in many respects very sensitively developed by taking the human scale into account. It was built with more aesthetic speculation than the functionalist

world of turn-of-the-century warehouses. A proletarian idyll formed with the asperity of the uniformed style of socialist realism, in our case a housing project built of five-storeyed blocks for the middle management and working class, which refutes with humanistic overtones the genre that sounded almost as a swear word in the art and architecture history of recent decades. I call details humanistic that, while hiding from a superficial look, largely determine not only the course of everyday life, but also, in this particular case the pictorial work dealing with the subject. What I mean on a human scale is mostly the sum of simple things–like the lush vegetation that has transformed a 10-15 block settlement into a huge park over decades. It can be seen that the designers thought about the future, leaving room for an expertly designed park culture between the houses. Windows framed with off-white highlights, rectangular shapes communicating with the dimensions of the houses, almost classicizing gestures of articulation by protruding loggias, balconies, restrained pastel-colored walls all strike the embarrassing idyll of a worker-paradise surviving in an inclusion, a bubble. Each house is a different color like in Burano, one of the pearl islands of the Italian glass industry, not only so lively, but bearing the misty unsaturation of earth tones, the smoggy air of socialist realism in a figurative sense, too.

The studio building is located on an arch on the bank of the Rákos stream, between the large landscaped courtyards and playgrounds of the housing estate, arranged along the parallels and perpendiculars, in the geometric center of the settlement. The house of the creators on the site stands as a symbolic source of energy in the area, functioning as a heart–at least it seems that its designers intended it to be so. From the point of view of artists, this is an ideal place for authentic motif immersion in the relationship created by public space. The propagandistic distortions, the blinding positivism are the core characteristics of the art of socialist realism–the false self-image of the system–seemed to represent the coveted idyll here as a model, and this idyll was realized in some respects. The agora, even if only a simulacrum of the public space, gives new inspiration daily with its impulses in an idealized living space, a world realized as existing for the socialist experiment humans. The secret in the details, which will not let sink even after 60 years perhaps the only authentic dogma of this ideology implemented in urban architecture, is shaping according to needs and function, a real support for any operation.

A highlightable example in this case in Angyalföld is the anecdote, kept by the occupants of the house about the coloring of the two closing front walls of two rows of houses perpendicular to the studio building on both ends, parallel to and facing its studio windows. The unwanted color reflexes of these pastel-colored house walls would literally be absorbed in the studios through the large studio windows that receive diffused light in the north orientation (in this case it would've been light mold-green as the other sides), so tailored to the needs the contractor suggested the color of the house walls should be mixed by the artists themselves. The closing wall, which preserves the optimal gray surface to this day, is a very important detail that fundamentally determines–for example, on a dazzling summer day–the scenic work going on in the studio. One of the basic elements of my thesis is that such and similar interferences, in many ways, influence the work of the artist.74 The needs, in the sensitive relation described above, are common needs of a large system. If the studio light shifts towards the green through the reflex, the person working there will not be able to perceive the real, so not only will the picturesque balance be upset, but the building of ideology may be shaken (i.e., realism). It can be mocked, but if we think about how true it is –a genius living in detail, the real face of the 74

Rezsonya Katalin DLA deeply investigates the topic in her essay.

place is revealed here. Like the geniuses of Hamvas, as opposed to schematism and map-likeness, the numbered space.75 So it is a place, and not a mere space, the identification of the public space with the personal, giving the opportunity to identify the personal, the individual with the environment. Other examples could be given to show the different features of this face.

Taking into account the paths trampled by people between the houses when laying the walkway tiles later, or the building itself, and in it the humanized proportions of the art studio. It is interesting that the much-criticized socialist realism now stands up as a good example, if we take into account these aspects beyond the ideology attached to it, as well as the expressions of the design intent hidden in the details. From my point of view, this relationship became the most interesting, the picturesque synthesis of the formal identity found in the unified architectural environment in order to express the sense of life evoked by the place.

Summary The two stories outlined the embodiment of the spirituality experienced by the place in the world of two artists distant from each other in space and time, where, despite the differences in the mental and physical environment, a sharply illuminating parallel can be discovered between its nature and function.

In the case of Veszelszky, we see the world-navel, which acts as a “reactor”, while the artist is fleeing from the scene of his age to this nest of existence, the Gödör, to his hiding place. It doesn’t occur to him to show it, he doesn’t even share this secret with anyone; the place is surrounded by almost religious reverence in later legend as well. The relationship is complicated: the connection between the creation of the paintings and the sight and with the Gödör, dug in the corner garden to preserve the existence of the panorama, which he may consider a sacred place, but nothing like a “work of art”. An interesting development is the survival of the Gödör; on the one hand, a wonderful metamorphosis, a change of state of a place–a pioneering object of Land Art in Hungary! On the other hand, it raises the problem of the ambivalent reception of the oeuvre, as a “pit” is not built into any regional culture: it is not a place in the eyes of cultural evolution.

As a result of Károlyi's above-mentioned rather depressing finding, the groping around the spirit of the place has given an obvious explanation in the fate of this Hungarian artist. The Turrellian road has the opposite sign (in its Central-Eastern European reading): it shows an unfolding, upward movement along the same axis in the other direction. Contrary to concealment, it is a movement that performs the original function of the volcano. What is the force that drives these two artists in opposite directions along the axis mundi, the axis that connects the earth to the higher reality? What is really personal about this and what is place-dependent? Or: what is really the role of the spirit of the place among the factors determining the final character and 75

„...while space has a number, place has a face”, Hamvas, 1988. p54

direction of the work of the artist? And to what extent is the work shaped by a particular place to which the medium, the creator “belongs''–with which he or she identifies, which shapes her/his cultural identity? What prompted Veszelszky to turn to the sky as a “world tree” between two paintings? And what incited Turrell, staring at the same sky in a similar way, to highlight from his activities this “gaze” as the medium, to mark it as sacred, the work of art? What is the difference between the two of them–apart from the uniqueness, the unrepeatability of their personalities–if not the places? The difference in the basic experience given by their cultural contexts, the need that gives rise to creative behavior. Heidegger's existentialist philosophy states that man is the being “whose existence is about this being itself”. The one looking out of the Crater faces him/herself. "It is a glimpse of the depth of space, our original celestial face, touching the unspeakable," writes Katalin Kemény in connection with Veszelszky's paintings. But she could also have written about Turrell’s skyspace works when she writes about the “essence of the reality of the mirror,” and its “two faces''. "One radiates from above down into nature, the other is the human creation, human realization (which exposes the things hidden by the Mayan veil), and it turns out, we are reality ourselves."76 Where does this second movement, the reflected human creation go in Turrell’s case? Or, in different times, in other stages of cultural evolution, in different languages of their spirits-of-place, memes and genres–are they only expressed differently? The principle of "You are looking at you looking" is the creator of this particular work, is it the focus of the realization of the work itself?

I had the opportunity to see Turrell’s works in person, and I also saw Veszelszky’s paintings.

The universe in the rock piece from the Moon, as imaginary Japanese, I can see in Veszelszky's paintings. This moonstone is a litmus test of the difference between East and West in the symbolic story highlighted by Turrell. In my case, it’s the attitude that accepts Veszelszky over Turrell as a creator formulating in an understandable, livable language. Maybe it’s a heritage, I’ve acquired simply by being born and reared in Hungary.

But does all this say anything about the spirituality of their environment in general? Isn't their individuality, artistic quality, cultural background decisive, and is the result of the combined effect of the Genius Loci that has a direct impact on both of them–and me? That is, it is a personal experience, so it cannot be generalized in any way.

The place is a tool that has physiological significance for Veszelszky, yet determines his ritual, and the process that forms his daily activity. For Turrell, however, the place is the experience of perception that he publishes as an artwork. The channel as a tool, or a memorial. The axis mundi–through which the painter brought himself to the right state of consciousness by the day–becomes an artwork, a soul endowed object under the hands of the Land Artist. This is coupled with the perception of place elevated to the level of mysticism, the role of the artist as creative medium, the quasi-sacral overtone present in both their cases. Turrell by the Quaker patterns, perceptual psychology, experiments with the Ganzfeld Space, and then the new art forms and finally Roden Crater mark this path.

For Veszelszky it's the Central European world alienated in the dictatorship on the periphery, the theoretical crutch of gnosis, and then the desire for finding the “right place” in the stream of paintings and the Gödör. They both move along the same axis. They create on the fringes of human perception, in the spirit of vibration, light, and universal connection. And the two objects 76

Kemény, in: Veszelszky Béla, 1997. p34.–35

discussed, represent almost exactly the same thing. The difference in scale qualitatively, and the art-theoretical aspect of their difference–the lonely (Bachelardian) reveries of Veszelszky's journey in life, as opposed to Turrell's daydream, a product consciously commercialized by individual mythology–also distinguishes the two things paradigmatically.

I write about things, not artworks, that can still not be defined more closely in relation to each other than places. However, these places have their own cultural environment, within a cultural-historical movement defined by many things. Today, we are talking about memes that preserve the patterns as genes for our mixed cultures. These patterns, cultural motifs, characters, archetypes, atavisms—survivors or extinct—also dominate the lives of societies by keeping the social roles of human civilizations in motion. The artist as an artist (Ad Reinhardt77) had previously been closer to the cult figure of the wizard, the priest. He dealt with the “soul” of society, contributed to the incomprehensibility of the world with communal self-healing in rites, worked in the processing of the past and the exploration of the future. Referring to Hankiss’s previously quoted idea that humanity is moving from the periphery to the center, to the center of the world, where humans have a place, where knowledge, faith, and prosperity reside—where God resides—and where she feels safe from the attacks of the incomprehensible and frightening world, the artist in the classical sense was destined to weave the cover of this system of beliefs built of imagination, myths and art.

What this orientation has accomplished today is the secularized, “democratic” art industry created by the expansion of mass popular culture, which does not necessarily cure diseases of the human soul, but operates according to the needs of consumers in an “advanced society”. It is as if the one-time transcendent voice is spoken in the language of statistics.78 Forgetting such role models is not necessarily a forward-looking process. We are confronted with the fact that a person conditioned on the impulses of the Turrellian capsule–the language of popular culture, the set of its characters of reception (its mindset) in general–is not really susceptible to Veszelszky's reveries lived in the same capsule.

In this respect, I consider it my task to seize the place of personal experience in painting.

Emphasizing the importance of the quality of intellectual presence, even with the help of bachelardian topoanalysis, by evoking the image of this practice. My creed in painting is the purified essence of human perception and consciousness unfolded by simple visual means.

The object I create is a memory of a place where I was human. In this sense, I referred above to the way of life represented by Veszelszky as to be preserved. This is the attitude I would like to pass on.

It was my intention to describe the Veszelszky story in an imaginary scenario of a conversation with Turrell. This, of course, as an art history document or oral-history record, at first glance, seems disproportionate to the star artist’s large-scale oeuvre. But perhaps this is what motivated it: among other things, the impossible possibility of telling an old Hungarian story about the artist, who had been peeking out of his “observatory” of Óbuda nearly twenty years before 77

Lengyel, Tolvaly, Contemporary art anthology v.II., 2002., p17, see also https://theoria.art-zoo.com/art-as-art-ad-reinhardt/ 78 Reference to a line in his song Posthuman by American pop star Marilyn Manson: "God is just a statistic"

Turrell's Roden Crater, outlining a precedent for future researchers and artists for the American mega-project. After all, Turrell’s studies of perception in the late 1960s were very similar in their orientation to Veszelszky's "vision of art theory" based on gnosis. The visual perception of the world made up of vibrating points, the need to share the transcendent experience with others is in many ways related perhaps to Turrell’s practice: the use of light as a medium. In the case of Roden Crater, all this is coupled with the commercialized form of designing the site and initiating it as a cult site. Perhaps this is where the spirit of the place is most palpable and can be separated from the basic concept. At the location in Óbuda, a ticket booth for visitors is unthinkable.

It is telling the way Veszelszky said goodbye to the dominant environment of his oeuvre. When he resignedly acknowledged the end of the world on Pusztaszeri út and burned his semi-finished and unsuccessful paintings in the Gödör before leaving, it also hints at his relationship with the spirituality of the place.

There is no way to compare artists, nor was that my goal. However, following the chosen path, it was perhaps possible to feel an artistic-cultural, almost natural force that permeates the oeuvre of all creators.

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Veszelszky Béla gyűjteményes kiállítása – kiállítási katalógus, Műcsarnok, Budapest 1997.

Images 0. Preface, Janos Korodi: Approximate Draft, infographic of content starting points in the initial stages of writing; wrapping paper, felt-tip pens, wrapped candy, ~67×98”, 2012.

1. the Gödör in the garden of the Pusztaszeri St house in the sixties 2. The main peephole of the Roden Crater 3. 14th Street - Union square subway station - photo: Janos Korodi 4. The image of the station found by Google 5. Béla Veszelszky. Landscape detail, 1963. III. oil on wood, 47,5×31,5” 6. The Gödör today (photo: JK) 7. the camera obscura in Santa Monica, postcard 8. James Turrell: Mendota Stoppages, 1969-74. BW photo of phases 5. and 6. 20,3×25,4 cm 9. James Turrell: Music for the Mendota: Ink, paper, 1970-71, private collection © Friedrich Rosenstiel, Skystone Foundation 10. Robert Irwin and James Turrell in the sound absorption chamber at UCLA in 1969 © Malcolm Lubliner 11. James Turrell: Ganzfeld Space - Wolfsburg project 2009.

12. James Turrell: Space that sees, Israeli Museum, Jerusalem 13. Comares Hall, Alhambra, Granada (built A.D. 1333-1354) 14. James Turrell: Roden Crater Dawn, Carbon Print 61 х 76.2 cm.

15. Maes Howe ‎after excavation, Fantoman400, wikipedia

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Donald Judd: Marfa, Texas, the exhibition space Donald Judd: Marfa, Texas, exterior, Don Judd’s garden Donald Judd: Untitled, concrete, Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas, 1986.

Korodi János: Sunset, 105×160 cm, pigment in acrylic, canvas, 2003. Irokéz collection Korodi János: AntiSpace, 240×320 cm, oil, pigment in acrylic, canvas 2005 Private collection Korodi János: PR01, 50×80 cm oil on canvas 2002 Private collection Korodi János: Space Deconstruction, 160×240 cm pigment in acrylic, canvas, 2003. Irokéz collection