Art in Hungarian, or művészet magyarul
(m+m=N+1)

lecture events and background exhibition in Artpool P60

Hommage à Charles Tamko Sirato

as part of the programme of the Budapest Spring Festival: “Hungarian art, Hungarian artists”

6 p.m. on 21, 23, 28, 30 March and 4, 6 April 2007

magyar

Dimensionist evenings

21 March András Petőcz | 23 March György Galántai
28 March Michel Giroud | 30 March Bálint Szombathy
4 April Gábor Tóth | 6 April Tibor Papp

Displayed at the exhibition are Károly Tamkó Sirató’s Dimensionist works and documents, Gábor Tóth’s Dimensionist works and a selection from Artpool’s collection of Hungarian experimental poetry from the 60s and 70s.

“The dimensionist development-movement of the arts is expressed by the formula ‘N+1’, whose relevance to the arts we discovered in Planism and then generalised it so that we would be able to retrace the seemingly chaotic, unsystematic and inexplicable artistic phenomena of our age to a single common law in the simplest possible way. […] This is the most concise summary of the essence of Dimensionism. Deductive with respect to the past. Inductive with respect to the future. Alive in the present.” (Charles Tamko Sirato)

The title “művészet magyarul” i.e. art in Hungarian, can be understood through two Dimensionist approaches: Let us first regard the concept of art (művészet) and then that of Hungarian (magyar) as the past, or “N”, and in both cases the other concept will denote “+1”, i.e. the future. It follows from this that art is only seen as Dimensionist by Hungarians if it is +magyar and “magyar” is only Dimensionist if it is +művészet. The result we expect to get – m+m, which is an adoption of the formula “N+1” to our situation – is the self-identical, alive present. (György Galántai)

We thank the help of Olivér Botár, Éva Forgács, Károly László, László L. Simon, György Makky, Gábor Pataki, Bálint Szombathy, Gábor Tóth, the Kieselbach Archive and the Research Institute of Art History at the Academy of Sciences in Hungary.