Page 23 - Studio International - March 1974

István Haraszty
Birdcage
intellectual messages. His figures, lapidified,
robbed of the gift of movement, convey the
tragic conflict between the intellectual
luxuriance of their intentions and physical
thraldom. An ambivalence can be found in his
non-figurative pieces, in his boxes made of wood
and plaster or in his environmentals. One of his
environmental projects has been set up in the
Museum of Essen, West Germany. At regular
intervals wooden billets were rested on plaster
pillows. These pillows rumpled deeper and
flatter as the line continued, to rise again
gradually. The middle of the line, judged by the
height of the parts observable on the surface,
must have, by the law of the prescribed order,
gone through the floor — however hard it may
have been — and a photograph, aimed to give
credit to the illusion, did actually show that the
middle piece 'penetrated through' the concrete
ceiling of the basement. Here the objective
`minimal' plastics conveyed something that
had a definite disturbing effect on common
sense. It transmutated from a Ding an sich
object to become a complex, which carries
other meanings as well.
Pauer's PSEUDO — mentioned at the
beginning — examines reality by putting it into a
different context. When he photographs a
broken shape on to a regular geometric shape,
the eye ceases to perceive the latter. The
largest piece executed by Pauer is a relief he
(Above) fixed on to the slopes of a disused stone
Gyula Gulyás quarry in 1971. Its description is the following:
Sewn up photograph, Size: 8 m x 2 m, rectangle shaped (16 mg).
1971
Materials: Stone (cliffside), aluminium
(Left) (sheet), enamel.
László Méhes
Tepid Water 1970 Technique: Chasing, spray gun, rolling.
Oil on canvas Date: Summer, 1971.
Idea: To copy the image of a small part of the
enormous rock wall of the Villány stone quarry,
at its best moment, to metal sheeting and fix
the completed copy next to the original. This
can achieve a correlation between the natural
and the man-made plastical vision at least once a
year, during one single hour of the day.
(Disregarding material mutations.)
Information: This duplicate was produced by
the special mechanical technology of the
pseudo-sculpture, the natural formation
therefore possesses truly three-dimensional
qualities while the man-made duplicate is no
more than two-dimensional, its stereoscoping

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