For today, economy seems to have taken over the lead from politics and became the driving force in our societies. In the wake of the implosion of the global financial crisis, the once powerful political rhetoric, mostly designated to veil hard economic data on which real worldly power relies, sounds increasingly anachronistic. The dream-world of global capitalism suddenly appears as utopian as “existing” socialism aka communism proved to be in the end of the twentieth century. Surprisingly, this new transparency in the domain of finances and related power games has temporarily turned almost everyone into a more or less naive proto-Marxist, from the proverbial man on the street up to the American president.

It is this new awareness that Joy and Disaster sets out to address by presenting four different artistic positions from Hungary. What qualifies Hungary to be an ideal field of reference is the painful synergy of global and local economic factors that lead to a situation in which nihilism and euphoria triumphs over common sense. The deliberate populism of the title is itself a reflection of the alternating cynical, earnest and pathetic reactions by which the public opinion answered to the series of shocks the country has been recently going through. The artists, in despite of their different generations, careers and personal approaches, share an interest in relating their work to existing problems and phenomena shaping the public discourse.

The sculptor István Csákány creates ambivalent situations, whereby the production process of the artwork itself will raise questions of use, costs, and personal benefits, often playing with and slightly manipulating the requests of the institutions and curators. His approach is deliberately anti-intellectual which is also manifested topically, as he often deals with the issues of labour and the worker.
As an artist with a long term interest in the global questions of society, politics and economy and author of a series of socially engaged documentary projects, Miklós Erhardt chose to be rather cryptic in his comments to the theme of the exhibition. His two pieces, made especially for Joy and Disaster, address the practice of translation, reflecting on the inherent obscurity globalising approaches imply.
As if in preparation to the real crisis, the end of the world as we know it, Tamás Kaszás has been envisioning a series of “anti-utopias” and, accordingly, trying to reduce his personal needs to a minimum, finding his own resources. His is a rather “positive” criticism in that it is embodied in a way of life and action, which have close relation to nature, health and a balance between the outside and the inside worlds.
Csaba Nemes has been looking at political, social and economical life from the point of view of the distanced observer, successfully merging journalism with autonomous visual art techniques and often ironically conventional approaches. The starting point of his works is always a concrete fact, event or situation that he deems to be of iconic, historical importance – the list of economical, ideological, political, religious or ethnic tensions and cataclysms is regrettably long.
In its concept, Joy and Disaster relates to the concurrent exhibition in Műcsarnok / Kunsthalle Budapest, with the title Over the Counter – The Phenomena of Post-socialist Economy in Contemporary Art, curated by Eszter Lázár and Zsolt Petrányi.
 

Further information:

www.mucsarnok.hu

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