{"id":400068,"date":"2002-05-29T22:00:00","date_gmt":"2002-05-29T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/?p=400068"},"modified":"2002-05-29T22:00:00","modified_gmt":"2002-05-29T22:00:00","slug":"teljes-hasonulas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/kritika\/teljes-hasonulas\/","title":{"rendered":"Complete assimilation"},"content":{"rendered":"
\r\n\r\n\r\n

 <\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

On the invitation, or rather on the black and white photograph positioned first in the exhibition, you can see half of the figure of a\r\nsmall chubby boy: he has his hand in front of his face with fingers outstretched in refusal. He is not covering it out of shame or because\r\nhe is shy, his movement is instead instinctively rejecting: I don’t want you to photograph me! Stop, don’t come any closer, don’t spy on\r\nme, don’t look! He says to the person studying the photo. This is strange and disturbingly offbeat at a photo exhibition: it is the viewer’s\r\nvoyeuristic, observing and external position that is put to question. And after this the viewer is not able to look at the photo as an\r\nautonomous aesthetic product, as a picture, getting lost in the light-shadow relationship and in the composition. It cannot be even seen a\r\nsocio-photo snatching a naïve standpoint protesting against the gesture of immortalisation, as you can easily sense that this is a\r\nstudio composition. Just like all the other pictures – a total of 17 – they were all made in the studio using and perverting the schemes\r\nused in portrait photography. The subjects are children who, opposed to the first picture, all look into the eyes of the visitor.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The pictures are split up into three distinct units: the first group consists of three, separate black and white pictures (these include\r\nthe photograph described above), the other two are series of photographs but the similarity between them is that \u201dthe same four\u201d children\r\nappear in them as models. The first series (4×2 pictures) consists of black and white and colour picture pairs. After long\r\nobservation it becomes obvious that on the individual picture pair it is the same child that you can see, it’s just that that has been a few\r\nyears in between the photographs: while the black and white shows the individual as a child (or young teenager), the colour documents\r\nthem as older teenagers (or young adults). The two compositions as almost completely the same: it’s just that the longhaired, flirty little\r\ngirl has become a spiky-haired almost androgyne teenager, the thin, scruffy, lithe naughty little girl has turned into a fat, breathless teen.\r\nThe models – two boys, two girls – visibly do not come from the well-to-do middle classes: although there is no concrete reference to\r\nthis, but I would risk it and say that all of them were Roma, and it is very probable that they all come from a poor, unstable environment.\r\nThis latter feeling – with this I have overstepped myself a little – was confirmed by the texts placed between, beside the pictures, as the\r\nsubjects of the half length portraits hardly wear any clothes that would place them in their social position. The phonological phenomenon\r\nappearing as the title – complete assimilation – can be linked to this photo series the best. This effect in language takes place when a\r\nconsonant assumes the value of the consonant preceding it, this does not happen in English but is very common in Hungarian, and in this\r\ncase \u201dbecoming a teenager\u201d is \u201dkamassz\u00e1\u201d made up of kamasz + v\u00e1 or \u201dbecoming adult\u201d is feln\u0151tt\u00e9 made up of feln\u0151tt+v\u00e9. As this is not\r\n\u00c1d\u00e1m N\u00e1dasdy’s linguistics column in the Magyar Narancs, and I do not want to state that Gabriella Csosz\u00f3’s photographs illustrate this\r\nphonology phenomenon – this would be a folly, almost embarrassing – let’s get back to the pictures. The \u201dbefore-new\u201d type picture pairs\r\nemit pure tension – not only because of the passing of time and the changes in the body conditions – so that the eye is forced into a\r\nstrange, subjective pendulum motion between the compositions: rejecting the sibling hypothesis she makes a short list of things that are\r\nthe same (similarities) and things that change. And in the end who is it that is similar to whom, the younger to the old, the older one is\r\nthere as a young person, or vice versa, and can you see on then the possible picture to come, the future, or if these two young people are\r\nthe same, which one is the real one, what should we compare to what?<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The second, colour series (3×2 pictures) seems clearer, where the models of the units – who continue to stare straight at us (or\r\nat the photographer) – in the similar compositions the poses are a little changed: the fat boy puffs himself up strangely, his chubby face\r\nis distorted, and the girl behaving as a woman (in make-up) with a mature woman’s body turns her hands away in front of her chest. And\r\nit is in this context that it becomes very apparent that the beautiful-eyed sexless girl (we know now that she is a girl), whose thin,\r\nundeveloped, but cute body is twisted into a candidly erotic pose. Although \u201dyou can’t see anything\u201d, still turning the genre and pictorial\r\nscheme of erotic nudes into such a candidly paedophile direction brings up numerous problems. The photographing of underage models\r\n– whatever neutral composition they may be in – in itself causes an exposed condition: they assimilate, start to become similar to the\r\nexpectations (even pictorial) of adults. The strength of Gabriella Csosz\u00f3’s pictures is not only in her models – who have evidently retained\r\nthemselves in these quasi-roles – but she also makes the viewer aware of this exposure and the responsibility that goes with it. I could\r\nalso say that (in my opinion) these works really do have some social-critical content which is expressed in a completely indirect way with\r\nthe minimum of instruments.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The exhibition, however, does not only consist of these medium-large photos. There are eight texts on the walls to read. The mini\r\nstories or mini works of Szil\u00e1rd Podmaniczky, , (I don’t want to discuss this now), in other words his stories are grouped around two\r\nsubjects: family and sport. Although it’s not good to shorten and so castrate texts, I am still forced to emphasise a few motifs. In these\r\nstories the relationship to siblings, to the creation of siblings is strong: the \u201drelationship\u201d of an adopted child to the grown-up, members\r\nof the family who are legally siblings; the child who imagines that somewhere he has a brother (or three); the little boy who is convinced\r\nthat a child comes into a family by the parents choosing a child somewhere far away (on a mountain) and taking him home. The boy who\r\nwas taught to play chess by his father and who is only interested in moving on the board as far as possible without being stopped; the girl\r\nbasketball player who makes a mistake and decides to become a trainer instead; and the boy who comes unexpectedly from a long way\r\naway thinks of Saturn while concentrating. The boy made strong from bodybuilding is still disturbed by shyness, while the top sports\r\nperson who is at the beginning of a career is unable to see himself completely in the misted over mirror in the bathroom. The stories\r\nthemselves have a strong atmosphere, and they \u201dspeak\u201d about the childhood search for security, internal freedom, as well as about the\r\nobstacles in you path on becoming adult and the search for the breakthrough points. If we view these stories as a continuous, linked\r\nstory, then step by step they model the status in which children of uncertain identity and who are hungry for love have only one choice of\r\nadult career, success in sport through bodily strength and skill.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

These texts, however, are dotted all about between and beside the pictures. And this goes against the viewer attitude to order the\r\nstories to individual roles, as it were realising an aspect of personal life – although not excluding it completely. (This is especially true of\r\nthe case of the young man who as a young adult has especially well-developed muscles.) Putting it all together, the attribution is left up\r\nto the viewer, as well is the decision whether these texts illustrate, commentate, explain, illuminate or interpret the photographs. One\r\nthing is certain, the conjunction of Podmaniczky’s texts and Csosz\u00f3’s photos and their relationship is much more than this: his heroes do\r\nnot fit into a unified story, they only get connected in the individual interpretation of the viewer. And in that translucent, sorrowful\r\natmosphere, in the piercing openness of looks that forces the viewer to dive deep into this world. Assimilate. But completely.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  On the invitation, or rather on the black and white photograph positioned first in the exhibition, you can see half of the figure of a small chubby boy: he has his hand in front of his face with fingers outstretched in refusal. He is not covering it out of shame or because he is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":630068,"parent":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-400068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-kritika"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400068\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/630068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}