Pathos Management, No. 3.
Conversation series about the past and the present of topoi in Hungarian art
Time: June 11, 2019, 6 pm to 8 pm
Venue: Vasas Szakszervezeti Szövetség Székháza [Vasas Federation of Metalworkers' Union], Magdolna u. 5-7., Budapest 1086
# 3 Kitti Gosztola: The Depths of Extraction, 2017, steel cast, 70 x 50 cm, Dunaferr-Art Dunaújváros Foundation. Photo by Alex Martin
Pathos management is a non-existent concept created from the fusion of “pathos formula” and anger management. Thus, one of the sources of this ephemeral concept goes back to psychology and social psychology, and the other to art history, specifically to Aby Warburg’s work. Warburg, in one of his letters, described himself as a psycho-historian of culture, who examines how visual topoi expressing strong emotions, passions and sufferings, the ecstatic and the tragic migrated from one historical-cultural era to another. As a modernization and updating of the iconological method, pathos management looks at how Hungarian visual culture has dealt with Hungarian regime changes over the past hundred years, how it related to the ideas and feelings these changes brought up, and how it has re-interpreted its own topoi and pathos formulas. On the one hand, the series examines which topoi, symbols, and allegories of Hungarian art have become once again current, and what happened to these topoi over the course of independent Hungary’s first century.
The participating artists are invited to discuss one of their artworks selected for this occasion. The conversations series evokes a TV program of the 1980s in Hungarian state television, the so-called “Artwork of the Week,” as well as other similar art events that were organized by artists Little Warsaw and Miklós Erhardt in the early 2000s.
Concept and host: Sándor Hornyik, art historian
Kitti Gosztola: The Depths of Extraction, 2017
The Depths of the Extraction (2017) was one of the three sculptures that Gosztola made at the Steel Sculpture Workshop in Dunaújváros – a steel sculpture workshop that was established in socialist era Hungary in 1974, which then came to a halt in the 1990s, and was again re-opened in 2017. Gosztola’s three sculptures flesh out different aspects of metallic minerals extraction from the earth's crust, from antiquity to the turn of the century. The Depths of the Extraction depict the shapes as well as the ways to approach the ore-bodies in the ground, based on a technical illustration of a century-old adit system. The abstract work is also the impression of the underground landscape, and thus it can also be related to bioromantics or the possibility of total abstraction.
Regime Changes
Over the course of 2019-2020, tranzit.hu launches the events series entitled Regime Changes, which, in the form of lectures, exhibitions, research presentations, thematic magazine issues, examines what real and symbolic changes arise from political turning points in a given era. How do views and narratives live on underneath the surface so as to emerge in a re-interpreted form as the dominant discourse of another regime? Case studies commissioned or adapted for the series present the shifting, often politically appropriated and contradictory interpretations of political, social and cultural events of the past hundred years.
