{"id":400264,"date":"2004-12-06T23:00:00","date_gmt":"2004-12-06T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/?p=400264"},"modified":"2004-12-06T23:00:00","modified_gmt":"2004-12-06T23:00:00","slug":"a-felfedezes-termeszete-exploring-exploration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/kritika\/a-felfedezes-termeszete-exploring-exploration\/","title":{"rendered":"Exploring exploration"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It is not every day that a festival manages to accommodate the art of the contemporary community that functions primarily in the urban context and has a strain of\r\ncritical impulse \u2013 without dulling its encompassing critical scene. It seems that the organisers of the renewed Budapest Autumn Festival counted on just such a challenge, if\r\nwe consider the event series that they assembled, which not only occurs in present time, but to the same extent in the surrounding, living space. From the perspective of\r\nengaging with the events of the festival, the invitation extended to the e-Xplo group (from New York and Berlin) was a bull’s-eye as far as urban context is concerned:\r\ne-Xplo’s performance \u2013 taken one step away from the direct excitement of the discovery and re-introduction of urban space \u2013 examined the nature of discovery, to\r\nbe exact, circulating the question of sustainability of critical and documentarist approaches.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The members of e-Xplo, Rene Gabri, Erin McGonigle and Heimo Lattner, undertook, with the aid of “local experts”, and following several weeks of\r\nBudapest reconnaissance, and the gleaning of experiences and materials, to disclose for us through multimedia bus-trips “the unknown side of the city, the cultural\r\nand social stratification of Budapest”, in the same way they had done previously in New York, London, Turin and Rotterdam. The bus-trip attempted to shake up not\r\nonly our view of the city, but moreover, our fundamental attitude concerning “others” that is traceable in our own city.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The concept of the e-Xplo bus refers directly to classic methods of discovering cities as occurs with the vehicle of the bus. Typical tourist routes that use narration as\r\nmere background noise, sightseeing “for professionals” with images illustrating a central problem formulated linguistically, and “bus performances\r\n” experienced as events or spending time in company are all brought to mind equally. The route, the windscreen that has been turned into a viewing screen, the\r\ndarkened “auditorium” of the bus and the sound-stream surging from the speakers are all fundamental, reflective components of the piece. The Budapest city-\r\ntour that has been christened Something About (Revolution) Repetition<\/i> simultaneously makes assertions about the space that we traverse, about the words that\r\nconnect to the emerging spectacles of the city, and about the images that transform the social milieu.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The route-narrative of the sightseeing excursion often connects similar things found in the city, or as in our case, exactly to the contrary, casts light upon the fault lines\r\nand contrasts. Moszkva t\u00e9r (Moscow Square), the Chain Bridge, the National Theatre, Illatos \u00fat, N\u00e9pliget (People’s Park): these are not simply\r\nilluminated or darkened clich\u00e9s, postcard- and anti-postcard-landscapes, but each are mythical sites of Budapest, discussed again and again. These myths operate,\r\nhowever, in a way that is diametrically opposed: they each describe a different city; they tell the disparate stories of wealth, history, politics, as well as poverty and violence.\r\nThis multiple mesh full of contrasts is shocking, even if over the course of the route, the illusion of the “spurious coherence” of a continuous film drives us\r\ninto its trap.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Confronting the images of the outside world as beheld through the windows of the bus, sounds flow from the speakers: snatches of songs, noises, interviews recorded\r\nduring the preceding weeks, or citations \u2013 from texts read in English, French and Hungarian. The relation of the sounds, however, is not unambiguous to the view\r\nconnected with it, i.e., to the image of the part of the city in which the bus is just passing. It is not clear-cut, what we are hearing: is it film-music that intensifies the image\r\nbefore us, or is it rather acoustic elements that strive to dismantle that image? There are sounds that transform the images of the social reality before us into video- clips,\r\nwhile others topple us from our calm contemplation of the view: instead of providing its corresponding equivalent, its counterpoint is generated: modulating,\r\nmetamorphosing, displacing, decomposing the view.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The bus-trip truly presents the city as a film. Before the lights are dimmed, we are asked to switch off our mobile phones and to behave as if we were in a cinema. The\r\nfilm-effect already begins to work in the first seconds of our departure, as we merge into the film, and our withdrawal from the world we are affiliated with is rendered\r\nalmost flawless. The notorious slums nestling between abandoned factories, Illatos \u00fat, the distant isle of “chaos”, comes into view before us as a\r\nconcentrated symbol of poverty and danger, as an “Elsewhere” that serves the myth of urban diversity. Our tour is an educational safari, in which we can\r\nexamine the exoticised-aestheticised objects of our desire from the secure distance creating the illusion of filmic-sensation through the window. The prostitutes lined up at\r\nthe petrol station, the thugs from chaos flexing their muscles in their landrovers, the patrolling policemen searching along the railway tracks with floodlights \u2013 they are all\r\nthe characters of a “live” action film, the extras of a scene realised for the benefit of the gaze of the tour-passengers: the localised, innoculated stimulants of\r\nthe pleasantly thrilling sensation of danger we feel in our backbones. “Finalement aucune aventure ne se constitue directement pour nous (Finally, no adventure\r\nproceeds directly for us)<\/i>”\u2013 sounds from the speakers.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

And into this idyllic, here and there idyllically shocking sightseeing, is interwoven that critical voice, which attacks not only the practice of transforming the world into\r\nits image, but also denounces the self-deprecating gesture of social critique as formulated in naïve pictures. Methods for this are dislocation, the establishment of\r\ndistance, or if you like, alienating effects, be they intentional or inadvertent. But when the prostitutes standing alongside the petrol station unexpectedly wave back, or the\r\nsearchlight of the cops on patrol along the railway tracks hits upon the ceiling of the bus, and the gaze of the gangsters lolling about on their enormous SUV’s meets\r\nwith that of the tourists: the decors come to life! For a few moments, we too are present \u2013 they also see us: we <\/i>are the performance. Neither the dissolution into\r\nimages, nor the dislocation is constant. Neither the illusion, nor criticism is perfect. In this sense, the e-Xplo bus-trip advances in the fissure between merging into and\r\nestrangement: it dances between the homogeneous cityscape that obscures the contrasts and the meaningful area rich in detail, working on the mapping of the distance\r\nbetween the language treated as homogeneous background noise and recognised in its elements, and that which provides the opportunity for critique.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The recorded texts <\/b>also play a part in the game of the approaching\/distancing movement of the images. Extracts of a conversation with young rappers, jabber\r\nas invented English. French as invented jabberwocky. The momentary position, amalgamation or reservation, we have assumed in relation to the images depends upon what\r\nexactly we are watching, and what we have taken notice of. Do we see conflict there, where we are being shown homogeneity? Do we recognise the language in the uniform\r\nmass that envelops us?<\/p>\r\n\r\n

“Tempo, tempo, tempo<\/i>”, sounds the repetitive passage from L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Moholy-Nagy’s Film Sketch (Filmv\u00e1z)<\/i>\r\nthrough the loudspeaker. The tempo, the rhythm, gives the modern city its dynamic; a secret organising force of a higher order, in which individual will ceases to stand\r\nautonomously. In the moving maelstrom of the crowd, people appear as mere staffage,<\/i> as extras who have been divested of their names, simply geometric elements\r\non the filmstrip. Disengagement, in both the mechanical and the visual sense. “Vicious circle. Very fast. The people thudding to the ground wobble unsteadily to\r\ntheir feet, only to board a train<\/i>.” Machines revived to independent life. “On the roller-coaster, at the moment of the great dive, nearly everyone shuts\r\ntheir eyes. The camera, never. (…) This way of seeing is entirely new<\/i>.” Images roused to independent life. “Tempo, tempo, tempo<\/i> ”, sound\r\nthe speakers, but the urban landscape beyond the windows is at variance with this: the street is mute, immobile, numbed in a trance, the only perceptible motion in it the\r\nslow swaying of the bus.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The recited scripts of Guy Debord, L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Moholy-Nagy and Angelo Quattrocchi are texts that became autonomous without visual correspondents,\r\nwithout filmic development: “they did not lend themselves” to the process of becoming image. It is no wonder, then, if the film arbitrarily edited from the given\r\nelements of the city contradicts and disputes the images that present the city as a pure vision. The relationship established in this way between the text and image may be\r\ndefined by the expression of “d\u00e9tournement”<\/i> (aversion, deflection), which, as one of the fundamental concepts of the Situationists, primarily of\r\nthe erudite social criticism of the 1950s and 60s, motivated its evocation in connection with Guy Debord’s text. The technique of d\u00e9 tournement<\/i>\r\ncombines already existing elements into new ensembles, modified, “deflected” with the meaning of the individual elements. The Situationists often employed\r\nd\u00e9tournement<\/i> in the context of film: the commentary subsequently appended to the film turns the meaning of the images inside-out; the layer of irony is\r\nbrought to the surface of the images; the viewer is placed at a critical distance from them: the lies of the images are exposed, fashion and spectacle are dismantled to their\r\nelements, but even the representative stockpiles of fake revolution.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

What we hear on the bus is Debord’s 1961 script, Critique de la s\u00e9paration,<\/i> his writing that battles against “institution”, the\r\ntranspositions that render impossible encounter or direct experience. The history moulded to the urban space’s own model, the documentary film defining the city,\r\nthe legend classifying the experiences, official information \u2013 they are all participants in the apparatus that impedes and alienates immediacy, intervention, adventure. All\r\ncoherence truly is linked to the conclusiveness of the past, condemned to inactivity. Similarly to the work of memory and history, “the function of cinema is to\r\npresent a false, isolated coherence<\/i>” [1]<\/b><\/sup><\/a>. The\r\nessence of Debord’s point of view is anti-representation. His texts demand the denunciation of the world concealed from images; the inversion, substitution of\r\nappearance, “fictitious life” by real life. “Everything that was direct experience has now withdrawn in a representation”<\/i> [2]<\/b><\/sup><\/a> \u2013 thus forewarns the diagnosis, the first thesis of Debord’s\r\nmasterwork, Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 du spectacle (Society of Spectacle)<\/i>.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Separation, disengagement, appears on two levels: on the one hand, in the estrangement, the alienation between individual people, in the potential for existence in the\r\nunfamiliar quarters of the city in our direct vicinity. On the other hand, however, precisely in the exoticism of this critique, in the non-intervention, the ultimate alienation\r\nfrom the social world altered into images, replaced by representations.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

It seems that e-Xplo, though it obviously draws inspiration from the Situationists, does not identify with them. In the context of the bus-trip, the Debord-texts invert\r\nand deviate in just the same way as the illuminated cityscapes. Questions arise: Does unmediated reality exist? Is the pre-image, essentially immediate position accessible? It\r\nis by no means a certainty that the recognition of correlations automatically renders possible the occupation of an external, critical viewpoint. Is it possible \u2013 and is it\r\nnecessary \u2013 to demolish the memory of art, the conventions of communication? Is it possible to bridge the distance dividing us from direct experience?<\/p>\r\n\r\n

It is possible. Whether or not it is an ironic gesture, in any case, the break for a rest in the N\u00e9pliget (People’s Park) is a welcome reprise. Nearly everyone\r\nalights from the bus. Those who have slept through the entire journey finally awaken now, stretching their limbs in the light drizzle. We step down from the screen with light\r\nmovements: the outside world ceases to be a film. The fact that this return, this arrival back to the ground occurs in a “wood” situated in the centre of a city is\r\nnot by chance, and is also interpretable as the sardonic, inverted answer to the question of proximity\/distance. We have returned to reality, but we are further than ever. What\r\nsucceeds after this is merely discharge, the stupefied way home through the narrow streets of the “Nyolcker” (Nyolcker is the shortened name for the notorious\r\n8th district of Budapest, with a strong presence of Roma population. A favourite target for the exotist gaze of urban explorers, more accessible than the ’Dzsumbuj\r\n’.).<\/p>\r\n\r\n

The quoted passages derive from the scripts of: Guy Debord: “Critique de la separation” (In: Oeuvres cin\u00e9matographiques compl\u00e9tes, <\/i\r\n> Paris, 1994) and L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Moholy-Nagy: Filmv\u00e1z. Egy nagyv\u00e1ros dinamik\u00e1ja<\/i> (Film Sketch: The Dynamic of a City; http:\/\/www.c3.hu\/~bbsa\/catalog\/moholy\/dinamik<\/b><\/a>). For additional information on <\/p>\r\n\r\n

e-Xplo, and their previous and planned exploratory trips, see: http:\/\/www.e-xplo.org<\/b><\/a><\/p>\r\n\r\n

Translated by: Adèle Eisenstein<\/i><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

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1<\/b><\/a> La fonction du cin\u00e9ma est de pr\u00e9senter une fausse coh\u00e9rence isol\u00e9e.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

2<\/b><\/a> “Tout ce qui \u00e9tait directement v\u00e9cu s’est \u00e9 loign\u00e9 dans une repr\u00e9sentation.”<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  It is not every day that a festival manages to accommodate the art of the contemporary community that functions primarily in the urban context and has a strain of critical impulse \u2013 without dulling its encompassing critical scene. It seems that the organisers of the renewed Budapest Autumn Festival counted on just such a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":630262,"parent":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-400264","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\/400264","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=400264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400264\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/630262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}