The fact that a statue makes music is not all that surprising. Even the Greeks recorded that the Egyptian statue of Memnon began to “sing” in a metallic tone at the first rays of the desert sun. The mortal son of the goddess of Dawn thus sang verses to his mother. Scientists have also found a more rational explanation: droplets of dew evaporating from the cracked statue induced vibrations, which were amplified by the wind. Karl Salzman (1979) is the master of musical sculptures. Carefully arranged systems of cables, rubber tubes, and wires fill the space with music, filling the room with minimalist repetitions; digitized sine waves and pulse detectors signal the physical regularities of movement, the pulse of inanimate matter. Whether this pulse becomes visible or remains merely intuited, it suggests a living, vibrant organism, creating an illusion of purposefulness, while the factor of domain uncertainty is also present: the volume is fixed, yet the construction remains elusively unstable; though matter is present, the work is also built from the spaces of defined absence. Light/Water/Sound – Pattern (2013) is based on the physics of vibrating Chladni plates, but here, instead of sand or chalk dust, water has been placed on the metal plates. On Chladni plates, sand accumulates where the vibrating plates do not move, and the resulting nodal lines form various patterns in the sand at certain frequencies. Salzman, the artist, plays with the patterns on the surface of the ink-stained water, which also function as shifting mirrors. The easiest way to set a Chladni plate into vibration is by running a violin bow along its edge; accompanied by an exceptionally irritating sound, this produces astonishing dust patterns. On Salzman’s “table,” the vibrations generated by a 47 Hz sine wave create new visual structures. It is as if it were the “background noise” of a Tan Dun composition.
I wrote these lines in 2014 as a diary entry about one of the first exhibitions at the Kunsthalle in Bratislava. 2014-2024. These dates - its “birth” and “death” - mark the lifespan of the Kunsthalle in Bratislava (+ A Window), which was closed for political reasons and has remained closed ever since. I was surprised myself when, while organizing my notes, I realized that I had seen every single exhibition over those ten years. Right now, I’m editing my new book The Gothic of Transience, one chapter of which is about those ten years. A gallop across the cosmic prairie. There will also be a “castle diary,” as well as numerous reflections on Hungarian and Slovak visual culture - primarily in Bratislava - and a subjective exhibition diary, along with a series of portraits of my favorite Hungarian and Slovak visual artists (e.g., Erika Szőke, Andrej Dúbravský, Anna Daučíková, Béla Ferdics, Robert Gábris, and János Vámos), to name just a few.
“The clamor of propaganda and the stridency of the press are transformed into a false voice with such force under the influence of art that the viewer comes to see history as a sort of assemblage or collage, and glimpses, deep within the discourses of power, the demons of skepticism regarding human existence - the hidden, and at times outright exclusionary, aggression of faith, hope, or love - or the failure of intellectual compensations following the collapse of totalitarianism” - I wrote this in 2020 about Anna Daučíková’s exhibition, but I still feel it is relevant today, and this cultural practice will be one of the book’s central themes.
And in the process, I’m revitalizing the ancient genre of the epigram! After the proliferation of haiku and limericks, it’s time for this classical genre to find its contemporary voice! I organize the series into hecatombs, and these hecatombs are a kind of poetic offering at the imagined altars of particularly important ancient gods.